Elon Musk is wrong about a lot of things. I'm not sure why people keep asking him questions outside his area of expertise...
"Outside of his area of expertise" is giving him too much credit when he's been peddling conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#32Elon Musk is wrong about a lot of things. I'm not sure why people keep asking him questions outside his area of expertise...
What is his actual area of expertise ?
His expertise is in lying, pompousness, fraud, and exemplifying the Dunning-Kruger effect. He's world-class at appearing to be intelligent.
He's also resoundingly good at being a nepo-baby who got everything handed to him.
I can assure you he's not a good engineer or honest businessman.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#33While I can't say that Musk is right, I also can't say he is completely wrong here.
The private sector can also spend on dumb and inefficient things and we are fine in counting it in the GDP metric, the difference between private sector and the government is the source of revenue. The private sector has to produce something for the economy before spending (it may be done indirectly through debt, but it's not important here), while the latter forces the economy to share it's productive capacity (using violence if necessary) while not producing anything itself (well, technically it does, but it's usually a tiny amount of the total revenue). It's still fine, since it's just a form of re-distribution from one private entities to others. It can be grossly inefficient, but so can be the private spending.
The problem is when a significant portion of the government revenue is fueled by debt which can not be paid by the future economy growth. The government quickly engineers negative real interest rates either by forcing commercial banks and pension funds to buy it with regulations, or by outright money printing, which is easy to do in a fiat system. Such debt-fueled GDP growth is not a sign of strength, but instead a sign of weakness, and ideally it should be heavily discounted.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#34I've talked to a few economists about this and non agree with Elon on this. The biggest issue one person raised is how do you separate out government spending form GDP? If a US town has a big military base, does that mean the entire towns' GDP is just government spending so ignore it? The government essentially pays for everyone's salary in the town. Where do you draw the line at what is government spending and priva…
Maybe the problem is that it's called Gross Domestic Product but we're talking about spending. Spending isn't producing. Sometimes spending promotes production, but may times it doesn't, and a lot of the stuff that gets counted as GDP is just moving dollars from one entity to another.
That's just a historical artifact of when the concept was created [0]. The thing can be measured by income, production (including intermediary products) and expenditure. The government component comes in the expenditure method. Economists don't differentiate between them as they are just looking at the same data with another perspective, we just don't care.
[0]: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/12/21/p...
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#35I don't have any sympathy for Elon's view, but I don't think this article really does anything to explain why it's wrong. No surprise, it appears to be an op-ed, which is not a format that usually teaches you much.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#36Elon Musk is wrong about a lot of things. I'm not sure why people keep asking him questions outside his area of expertise...
What is his actual area of expertise ?
Making himself richer by overpromising the idea of him (personally, of course) building a great future to tech- and finance bros
Dude would live a better life and leave a better legacy if he would focus more on chilling, empathy, and building rockets to get humanity to the stars
He's the richest person in the world and wastes his time with political bullshit, while he is one of the very few and privileged who have the resources at their disposal to actually attempt and support grand experiments
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#37Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#38Elon Musk is wrong about a lot of things. I'm not sure why people keep asking him questions outside his area of expertise...
What is his actual area of expertise ?
Well, he is quite capable in overselling and creating a hype and a fanbase and pushing people around.
Without him his companies wouldn't have gotten the attention they got and the vision of self driving cars and colonizing Mars certainly got to motivation of engineers working there.
So there is some expertise.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#39I don't think this post really understands what Elon Musk was saying in the context he was saying it. He was responding to a graph showing the Altanta Fed predicting a recession. There was nothing more to his tweet than "I guess this a plausible reason this obviously bad thing is actually good". It comes from the same vintage as Kathy Wood's "Our massive losses are actually a good thing because we can offset our future taxable gains". Like... obviously this is just self-serving bollocks, why engage with it other than to laugh.
Re: Elon Musk is wrong about GDP
#40> "elon is wrong about {X}" People are (very) slowly waking up. The number of X-es is large to say the least.
As one of Elon's ex-fan's (or at least had a generally positive opinion of him) like I suspect many of us here once were, it is astonishing how consistently wrong and ignorant he has been, and it has gotten worse year over year. I think there is a legitimate possibility he fried/is frying his brain on Ketamine.
Yet his net worth and political power keep growing (yes, I know about the TSLA stock price). I wish I had a fried brain like his...