How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.
Tesla sales are collapsing globally partly due to Musk's mental breakdown and are not likely to recover much, especially since Tesla no longer really has a CEO.
No, he is greedy, this is greed. He is greedy for power and money.
As Terry Pratchett alludes to many of his books, the problems start when you treat other people as "things". And this is rife at the moment. So mental breakdown doesn't really cover it.
We started seeing signs of it when he called that diver rescuer a pedophile.
Most recently its been him caught lying about him being the greatest gamer in the world and being one of his biggest fans (Adrian Dittman).
And then high on ketamine doing that salute on the inaguration
Musk is the living embodiment of the ultra rich wet dream.
Nazi salute (two actually) on national television? Destroy government extra legally with presidential pardon immunity? Bust on minorities etc with social impunity?
He doesn't just have eff you money, he has eff you status. No longer being restricted to the milquetoast middle ground CEO trap. Unrestricted treatment of low money people as subhumans. nothing like rights or laws to get in the way.
Thing is, his stock is very very tied to perception, which is a synonym for "hype".
You can see this emerging unrestraint coming from virtually all of silicon valley "leadership". Allin podcast. Zuck the MMA wannabe. Larry Ellison (the archetype) in orbit with trump. Gleeful twitters about eliminating all jobs with AI.
And yet we are entering an era of geopolitical uncertainty, war, reonshoring of manufacturing. To fight looming conflicts with China and Russia, what is needed is functioning institutional democracy, not venal banal oligarchical corruption.
The other historical danger is that the rich poor gap is indicative of a forthcoming rebellion of the lower class. Trump is himself a symptom of this, and while the poor continue to divide themselves between the two parties, Trump shows that wild unpredictable swings in voter sentiment can bring unexpected candidates to the fore.
All it takes is one charismatic candidate to pledge to cull the rich and being universal healthcare...
Tesla is a very very nice computer with a decent car attached to it.
In the best of times Musk's leadership brought us stuff like "Joe Mode" just because he saw someone complain on Twitter.
Now he's completely unhinged and we can't trust him even as much as before. He might just decide something crazy and force the factories to change it just because.
That doesn’t mean Musk’s gesture didn’t accelerate the downward trend. But I agree with the general sentiment. Overall Teslas can’t compete with other EV makers because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche. Musk appears to have lost his magic, or perhaps his mind too. Dude looks quite disheveled these days..
because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche.
can't be further from the truth. if you drive tesla and then drive all of the competitors tesla is faaar superior car. cars are great. the core issue here are margins - before competition tesla's could retain the huge margins on their vehicles. feels like in order to compete now they will have to drop the prices and hence their margins and with the forward p/e ratio of 1,000,129 that won't go well for the company's financials. and of course elon being a tool isn't going to be helping with this :)
perhaps but I was not commenting on elon or his politics and repercussions from him going full-on insane, I was specifically commenting on because as soon as there’s a real market Tesla isn’t that attractive anymore outside of a brand loyal niche.
they'd be just fine if they sell all the cars they currently have capacity to make with their current margins... not to satisfy the insane evaluation but in general :)
Have a model Y.
Had a vw ID.5 before (leased), his assessment is correct. Tesla is a decent car with a NICE infotainment system.
VW's Android system is not wow'ing anyone, but the car is quieter, handles better, turns on a dime, suspension is way more comfy etc - Volkswagen Group knows how to make a car.
(And yea, as a European, this will be my last US oligarch/Nazi car)
Oh no, it's in great part due to his antics. Owning a Tesla used to be about a positive future, the transition to sustainability, and with great engineering and making it sexy. Now owning a Tesla seems to be about kneeling to Moloch, paying for plutocracy, gleefully cutting basic food aid for the world's poorest starving children, undermining democracy around the world, and yes even doing a fascist salute. So, you want that as your brand? And yes, there's now much better competition, but unlike what one might gather from certain "conservative" news sources, the EV market has grown and continues to grow. [1] My guess is Tesla sales will continue to collapse.
The robo-taxi attempt is fraught and Musk's mind seems elsewhere -- swinging a wrecking ball on government, turning Twitter into his microphone (with great damage to its value and creating a real opening for competitors), posting videogame results reminiscent of the old North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung-style, where the newspaper would report on his games of golf in which he swung 18 hole-in-ones.
By hitching his wagon to political movements most despised by the consumers of EVs he's alienated Tesla's audience. By his further actions he's shocked and disgusted them so that driving a Tesla is becoming an embarrassment. The brand is kaput.
There's maybe a separate China story but it's no better. Tesla taxis in China, really?
I'm actually shocked in such a media and marketing driven society that absolutely, nobody brings up the fact that the Tesla brand has been completely destroyed in the US and EU.
Companies simply do not survive this in the long run unless very specific inelastic demand (I'm thinking bp oil spill as the only example) exists, and even then BP wasn't as international or charged or so ... Nazi.
Tesla is musk. Musk is a Nazi. Musk was a progressive environmental future in the previous media construction.
That radical shift means no brand, no customers. How many people want to drive a car that basically has a swastika on it? 4% of the population?
On top of this, musks absent leadership since the model Y, in addition to Tesla's general problems getting new designs out the door, and his marketing ignorance in the good days, means Tesla has no badge diversification a luxury marque, no extensive model diversity for all the markets of the world, no cabin options for their extreme design, no trims and body style variations.
It's just the 3 and Y basically.
Tesla should have bought another car company to gain engineer, design, oem relationships, and manufacturing capacity.
Too late. Tesla is now a pump and dump scheme, musk wants his 60 billion that Delaware is holding up and then he'll sell off just like the board is doing now.
China will seize teskas assets on a whim from a trade war or a hot war with Taiwan.
The energy sector is not one I look forward to, Tesla doesn't have any advantage in battery packaging or battery technology("battery day" is now officially a dud), and lfp lmfp and sodium ion chemistries are far more suited to grid storage and home storage.
We all know AI driving at Q4 isnt happening under musk. It's a long slog and musk fires software teams too quickly, because he treats them like hardware. That's basically all the hype.
> To me it seems to have very little to do with his antics.
For your hypothesis to make sense, first you would have to establish that Musk's antics have no negative impact on Musk's public opinion or public image.
In the meantime, you've started to see a global wave of both Tesla stores and Tesla cars being vandalized in protest over Musk's public support for Nazism. In some cases such as Germany you even had public protests against the neonazi party that Musk supports and promotes.
So you establish the fact that throughout the world people started protesting Musk due to his public actions. Do you think this change in public sentiment brings with it a neutral impact on sales?
This is not true. Tesla recently released new Model Y [0], and there's a gap in sales because of that transition. The old Model Y was the best selling car of any kind in 2024 globally.
It's either "a new car" or the same model that accounts for nearly all Tesla sales making it "best selling" compared to makers with newer cars and a wider selection. So... which?
The stock has certainly responded, although only time will tell if it'll return to a more sensible valuation.
My guess is that this robotaxi launch will make or break the company. If the product looks like any other first-gen driverless service, Tesla is screwed.
The price to upgrade all those older Teslas is gonna be gigantic and the company is already heavily scrutinized for their lackadaisical approach to QA and safety.
Stock is betting on VP Musk continuing to pull up the ladder for all the EV competitors. Tesla CEO Musk got his fed grants to build out his charger network, now it's time to make sure no one else does so his remains on top.
Downvote if you must, but the man knows how to protect his moats while branding it "ending wasteful government spending".
He may know some things, he got pretty far. But he seems to make some of the dumbest moves. While his 180 turn in politics may have got him closer to his power goals he alientated too many people who used to buy into his vision. Republicans don’t care about EVs or whatever Musk wants to sell them so it seems poorly though out…
But competitors are already here and as others have stated Tesla sales are free falling outside the US, at best that’ll only work for the US. Even in that best case I don’t think that market alone justify the stock valuation. But even in the US I don’t get what will be the Tesla mass demographics anymore.
The stock seems to be waking up to the problem. Sales are down 12% in Europe in Jan. Down 60% in Germany. Apparently German electric car drivers are not fans of Nazis. Who knew?
Recent price declines have just knocked the froth off the top of what is still an extremely frothy stock. About 20X industry PE ratios. I could imagine 5X to be sustainable, but...
I remember when we thought we could just pay Trump 1-2 billion to go away. That would've been a good deal and is cheap in retrospect. And maybe Biden should have pardoned him immediately to kick the can down the road on SCOTUS deciding to allow Presidential immunity.. It probably would've happened anyway but it would've given the project2025 and Thiel libertarians less time to organize.
Yes a superseding indictment would be all it takes. Charge him with something at the state level that doesn't have a federal equivalent. He reincorporated in Texas because of it's corruption friendliness, so that's unlikely.
More likely: Trump lets him slash and burn, then turns on him and throws him under the bus to the American public. Very typical Trump playbook.
Maybe he also takes a page from Putin’s playbook and puts him on trial in a very public and humiliating way, sending a clear message to all the other oligarchs.
I listen to Cohen on his podcast and on YT. He was once Trump's right hand man, they were buddies for 15+ years. Even he says Trump will cast Elon aside when he is no longer useful.
I know a lot of people don't like Cohen. I have my own friends I've had for 15+ years and I know them well, just as much as Cohen knows Trump, so I feel there might be some validity to his thoughts.
By my measure, Cohen is the only person from Trump world who has redeemed himself. He’s still a slimey hot head, but he sees Trump for what he is, and he’s committed himself to making things right. Of course he’s trying to profit as much as possible, but he serves as an example that even the biggest sycophants can make it out of the cult.
As if anything Trump's done in secret becoming public would harm his reputation.
Trump is basically immune from scandal. The people that vote for him either don't care, are low-information voters that somehow don't even hear about it, don't believe the news reporting on the scandals, or even worse, actively support him because of the scandals.
This assumes that Trump is actually able to make decisions. He's clearly showing signs of dementia, and so he's easily controllable. His handlers just make sure he forgets anything they don't want him to remember.
Do you think Trump of 8 years ago would have allowed Musk to usurp the news cycle? Or even allowed the merest notion that he's not controlling _everything_?
Remember, Trump actually underwent a colonoscopy without sedation to avoid relinquishing the control of the nuclear weapons to Pence. This dude is a control freak.
Colonoscopies are not that bad; many countries do it without sedation. The sedation part is annoying in multiple ways; it prevents you from doing a bunch of stuff the rest of the day, while without sedation, you can continue as if not much has happened afterward.
Even endoscopies are possible without sedation, but most people don't have the ability to not squirm or gag for that one. You can even see youtube videos of people doing that one without sedation.
I kinda like to think that Jeff Bezos is whispering in Trump's ear, hoping for this inevitable outcome, and waiting to pick up the pieces with Blue Origin.
Given Musk is currently pissing off foreign governments, there is a real danger that one of those governments will just send in a nice looking person with some tea to have a quiet chat with him.
After which, he will look very tired, and suddenly stop being "turbulent", as per the meaning several judges have recently noted in Trump trials was once infamously said by a king of a priest.
Then I will be sad, because I would have liked to have gone to Mars.
I have thought the same thing. Musk can protect himself from the average nutjob but he is working very hard to make the kinds of enemies he will NOT be able to protect himself from.
He’s pushed boundaries on the Ukraine war. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians would be willing and capable of assassination if it helped war goals but I think he just hasn’t quite crossed a line to either side where he’s better off dead.
Eg. Starlink connections in Ukraine are geofenced. Which would piss off both sides in various ways. Pisses off ukraine because they have legitimate targets outside the fence and pisses off russia because they have legitimate targets inside the fence. That’s walking a fine line.
This was debunked. Starlink was never active in Crimea because Crimea was sanctioned by the US. He said if the US government asked him to activate it he would. They did not.
What happened to Rockefeller, Carnegie and JP Morgan? It wasn't the plebs and their jabbering (see muckrakers) that directly took them down, though that jabbering did help give an unusual dude from the NY aristocracy named Teddy(who couldn't stand the muckrakers) political cover to move against them.
Also worth reading about the 2 elections preceding Teddy's fascinating rise to power, where the oligarchy bought the Presidency.
of Germany, as "Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is investigating whether Musk's support for the AfD on the platform where he has 210 million followers could constitute an illegal party donation": https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/elon-musk-investigated-...
of Italy, where he has been warned by "Italian President Sergio Mattarella to stop interfering in the country’s affairs after a controversial tweet on his page asked for judges to be dismissed": https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/01/04/germany-accused-mus...
I've thought that too (you articulated it well). I mean, there are other uber rich in the world that, you know, are president of a different country — and might feel threatened by Musk's wealth.
Nothing specific to Australia, there are no RHD versions of the new S/X anywhere in the world. But S/X sales were a rounding error compared to 3/Y anyway.
I'm pretty sympathetic on protecting the country from CCP subsidized market capture, but at this point we need to let BYD sell here. It would lower vehicle prices and knock off tesla. Both of which need to happen.
Trump and Musk may not pay attention to the constitution, but I understand that the US armed forces swear allegiance to the constitution — while they must obey lawful orders of the president, unconstituional orders must be refused even if from the president.
The history of the border between the DDR and FRG is quite nuanced and interesting. The Iron Curtain was more of a cooperative effort, especially early on, and especially outside of Berlin.
Misinformation? There are multiple videos of Elon doing a Nazi salute.
The goalpost does not need to be moved to "if he's not literally operating a gas chamber, he's fine".
The best interpretation is that he doesn't care how it looks to others when he does a Nazi salute. Like others said, he's more 90s edgelord than actual jew-hating Nazi.
And the car markets in Europe are showing him what they think of people who do Nazi salutes publicly.
How is it misinformation? It's obvious what it was. Doesn't mean he's a Nazi, maybe he's "just" a '90s era trolling edgelord. Come to think of it, considering his X shitposts he boosts to hundreds of millions of people every day, that's a good description of him.
[To people who think he's a Nazi: yes, I've read all the arguments, no, I don't care - giving him the benefit of the doubt still makes him a gigantic shitlord who think its funny to do Nazi salutes.]
Reach matters. If you’re a nobody with three followers and tell someone on the internet to kill themselves, you’re a troll and can be ignored. If you have millions of followers, that one comment will get the other person doxxed, threatened by your followers, and may end up in physical harm to them and their family.
If you own a social media platform and have this amount of reach you can never be “just a troll edgelord”.
I don’t think we need to lie or be disingenuous about this gesture, Elon is not known for his hate of Jewish people. I think this obviously fake take helps him.
German media has been extremely coy calling Elon out about it. You would think that they'd be all over this, but them phrasing it as questions and digging out the "roman salute" (that no one here has heard of before) has been an eye-opening experience.
It's an opinion piece, and exceptions confirm the rule. Just search for German news articles on Google.de. See how many legit news outlets mention "Musk Hitlergruß" and how many more opt to beat around the bush when you search for "Musk Geste".
Do you even get a count of search results? They no longer include that number in my search results.
But I have just tried "Musk Geste" on google.de news tab (I don't know how Google is personalising either my search results or your results, but FWIW I'm in Berlin), and of the first page, 6/10 links explicitly call the gesture a "Hitlergruß" in the summary, and the other four call it that (or note that some people have called it that) in the body.
Either you've been living under a rock or you're trolling. In the very least, beyond the very public way he repeatedly did the Nazi salute and was very unapologetic about it, you can't ignore away how Musk went way out of his way to support a neoNazi party from Germany.
On the other hand, neonazis and their enablers are united in the inevitable cry for proof and "truth", and then looking the other way when it's delivered. Obviously this is a very efficient tactic, and I agree with you it's why the left lost.
Hey, I agree that he probably would never identify as a neo-Nazi. I think he thought he was being really cool and edgy throwing out the salute that was co-opted/adjusted by the Nazi party. The company he keeps still informs us on what he's willing to tolerate, and as I've laid out in your parent comment, he's chosen time and time again to endorse some pretty problematic ideas.
Here's an example of Elon Musk agreeing with a man who repeated an antisemitic belief that the Jewish community is inviting immigrants to further racism against the white population (also alluding to the Great Replacement theory - and if you want to claim that it isn't explicitly being stated, implicit nods are inherent to most political statements)[0].
Elon Musk also endorsed and spoke at an AfD event[1], which comprises members that are 7.5X more likely to participate in Holocaust denialism: believing that the Holocaust is Allied propaganda[2]. Multiple former leaders (including a co-founder) of the AfD describe the party as extremely far-right and authoritarian[3][4]. Elected members of the AfD have been found on a Facebook group sharing memes about baking Anne Frank in a pizza oven and insulting interracial couples[5]. Maybe you could claim that these are past events, but the frequency of these issues are alarming. Even so, we have a more recent example: in 2024, a leading member of the AfD was fined for using a slogan that was used by the Nazi military[6].
At best, you could call Elon Musk an absolutely bone-headed moron who has no idea who he chooses to support or where he chooses to attend. With Occam's razor it seems like he has embraced a lot of hateful ideology.
Obviously this is room for a flame war, but I don’t think the poster was being deliberately malicious, rather it is perfectly reasonable to interpret the gesture as a nazi salute. You may disagree that it was.
We shouldn’t let that argument distract from the impact it has had on Tesla demand in Europe. For me personally it was the final straw and I won’t be buying one as I had hoped to.
Along with other actions certain to hit sales, and the lack of an apology (which would have been wise, even if you didn’t mean it as a nazi salute) suggests that Musk doesn’t care about Tesla car sales.
I suspect he knows the writing is on the wall for Tesla, so he’s betting on robotics as an escape hatch. I wonder if he’s also hoping tariffs against china will help vs their EVs. Either way, I don’t see much hope for Tesla right now.
Might not be enough data for good statistical significance yet, but IIRC the "die in a fire" probability in a Tesla Refrigerator is something like 17x the Ford Pinto based on current numbers.
That list is garbage: it includes Tesla Megapacks (energy storage, not car), multi-car crashes where any car catches fire, a car carrier carrying Teslas catching fire, etc.
Did you have any actual statistics to back up your assertion?
Like the parent comment says, this is garbage. For the cybertruck it includes all fatalities (3 in a high speed crash that caught on fire, 1 in a different crash, 1 in the recent car bomb outside Trump's tower). For the pinto they only count the 27 deaths the NHTSA identified as being caused by the design flaw that led to catching fire from low speed collisions.
A meaningful comparison would say that the Pinto could catch fire as a result of a low speed collision and the cybertruck apparently does not.
The people involved are clearly trying hard to make the cybertruck look bad. If there was real data, I assume they'd present it. The fact they choose to produce these crude distortions instead implies to me there is not real data that makes the cybertruck look bad.
I'm not sure what your point is - as I've already mentioned this comparison is between all cybertruck deaths, none of which were low speed collisions resulting in a fire, and the deaths that the NHTSA review identified as caused by fires from low speed collisions caused by the design flaw in the Pinto.
I know that neither you nor the other commenters nor the person who made that website needs anyone to explain to you why this comparison is invalid. It is such a facile comparison that to describe it is to explain why it's invalid.
So, again, I'm confused as to the point of your comment.
If it was standalone event you could perhaps argue it was accidental. But the fact that he is supporting Afd who had done similar things in the past where they run a campaign, and make nazi symbolism in such a way that it would be barely legal, but at the same time obvious to everyone what they are referring to, it is pretty damning.
I'm curious if you know what a Nazi salute looks like? Make a comparison by looking it up, he does the salute twice.
Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication
The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
I’m pretty sure this was a financial take. Musk and his companies didn’t become immune to criticism when he started meddling in US politics. And by any measure, Tesla stock is crazy overvalued.
There's an entertaining conspiracy theory that Musk isn't actually pro Dem or Repub; instead he simply realized that everyone who would buy an EV on the left already did, and so now by pandering to the right he can tap into a new market.
But to your point, as the child of someone who parrot's right wing talking points, I am looking forward to see whether their remarks on EV's change over the next few years or not.
It has started long ago with the Cybertruck release delayed by two years and then not many wanted to buy it. The new roadster was originally announced for 2020, might come this year. The groundbreaking of Gigafactory Mexico has been delayed and I doubt the recent tariff madness helps. Level 5 FSD has been promised to be achieved in three years, that was 2013. With sales tanking, I do wonder if the $1 billion expected revenue in CO2-pooling[1] (from EU competition alone) will be at risk or if the EU can come up with some tariff in response to Trump's new attempt of tariffs on EU products. Also, after two failed attempts to get this massive compensation package as CEO approved by a court, will he try and fail again? Now that he's a squatter in some D.C. government building?
Musk owns 42% of the $350B SpaceX, so he would still be the 6th richest person in the world(tied with Sergey bring) if TSLA and all his other investments went to $0.
you think it's bad now... Wait till tesla starts selling optimus at scale and SpaceX starts controlling strategically valuable resources in LEO by space mining. Elon's not the one you need to worry about, it's his son X.
criminally overvalued is an interesting term to explore. I wonder when after all this shakes out in the courts, how much of his oligarchal access to government will be seen as illegal, therefore undermining any stock premium Tesla has from that access to government.
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
I don't know that, but I can say that he has an absurd amount liquidated.
- Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html
- Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17
- Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
- This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
So I would assume he has north of $30bn outside Tesla. Which that alone would make him near top 60 on Forbes's Billionaire list.
I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0].
[0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
> “Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money.”
I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side.
A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it…
You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years.
I don't feel this is a great response tbh. While you're comparing money, you're not differentiating how government money is different than corporate money, which are both different from personal money. Even if a person wants to build a tunnel of that magnitude, absolutely no way are they going to do it out of their pocket, at worst it would be through corporate funds. Its not like these guys are spending their own money on those things you're talking about. Even Elon still gets others to invest in his companies.
An important thing to note is that it takes time to spend money and money makes money. Even a very modest interest rate yields an incredible amount of money. The money is so large, it works differently than money does for us normal people. For example, say you have $30bn a year and are getting a modest 5% interest yearly, that's: $1.5bn a year, $4.11m/day, $171.2k/hr, or $2854/min. As you can imagine, this has a big effect. If you're trying to buy a McLaren F1, well, you can wait 5 days. Which it'll probably take that long to make this transaction happen anyways. So there would be no net loss of money. So, supposing you wanted to make your $15bn (I know, but we're approximating anyways and they're similar anyways) tunnel, you somehow got permission to do it, and you are doing it all out of your pocket, you have to realize that this does not equate to taking out $15bn from your net worth. Because... it takes time to build such a tunnel. Let's approximate again, saying it takes 5 years (very aggressive) and you pay at the end of the year, then the net decrease of your wealth is $7.5bn, not $15bn. At 10 years, you have no net change, and any longer you've had no effective loss. (To be clear, I'm not saying there's no cost, I'm saying that it doesn't change your net worth)
The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
I should also clarify an assumption that I guess is not obvious. I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you. You can't buy enough houses, personal jets, yachts, and so on. We agree. But mega projects take a lot of time, as well as philanthropic endeavors. If you want a real world example, see MacKenzie Scott. She has given away 50% of her wealth, yet her net worth is identical to that in 2020, when Forbes started tracking her (divorce was in 2019). She is worth $36bn and has given over $17bn away, and in those 4 years (I'm sure some of this money is pledged and not yet in peoples' hands but that's standard philanthropy, right?). So yeah, she could have built that bridge for no change in her net worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But in your favor, I guess Elon did buy Twitter and with his great negotiating skills offered a 27% premium (and not in a one-time lump sum). But also, this has seemed to have no real effect on his net worth due to how his wealth is actually held and showing the nativity of our approximations, as most billionaires are getting much more than 5% interest on their money.
> I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you
This bit changes my reply, I have to agree with that. The rest though - yes the normal way to build a tunnel would be to make sure it will be financially profitable and get investors, but what I'm saying is that a UK-Ireland tunnel would not be profitable. One estimate said it would cost double the UK-France tunnel but get 20% of the use. Nobody would "invest", it would have to be funded personal money as a passion project just because they want to see it exist in the world.
> The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
Nice problem to have, lol. Seems like it would be possible to invent as many megaprojects as one wanted in order to get rid of enough money, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the limit is how much attention one person can have. Maybe the balance of trying to start enough to use all your money without bankrupting yourself if one overruns costs and then never finishing them all, would be too hard.
I reckon Musk is so over extended that the only reason he’s doing what he’s doing is to basically rob what he can to cover it before a bigger fish comes along and he falls off a yacht like Madoff.
How do you mean? There were major loans to buy Twitter, but AFAIK Musk brought on a bunch of other people so that's not entirely on him. Other than that what is he extended into?
His companies are supporting each other in weird ways like xAi intercepting Tesla's GPUs, xAi being separate from X which is where it's used, Boring building one of its few tunnels in a Tesla factory for ???, the employees from one working at another, etc. there's probably a lot of shenanigans going on to make each company look OK at the right times.
The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
Nobody likes the guy, but I think a lot of people let their distaste for a person blind them to their strategy. Since Musk’s early days co-founding PayPal, his MO has been to start with a small fortune, bet it on a fortune 10x that, and repeat, abandoning each project after it serves its purpose. It’s clear at this point that his next step has been political power since at least the Twitter purchase, and that step just had its Tesla takeoff moment. I think there’s basically no chance he fails to leverage that into an even greater fortune than everything that came before, even while letting Tesla and the rest run on autopilot.
Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last.
Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.