171–180 of 313 posts
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Ah yes, Communism! So successful at delivering productive happy societies that they needed walls around their countries to keep people in. Great idea.
Sorry, was a 1/2 hearted attempt at a joke about his pamphlet titled "What is to be done?", similar to the wording used in parents comment. No need to alert the inquisition here just yet.
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>his ability to inspire his engineers and get things built is undeniable. I deny this. He provides money and hype, and hires the best engineers in the industry who then get results. In some cases things gets things built, but that doesn't mean Elon Musk was personally useful to any given project besides providing hype and money.
“All he does is organize everything and choose what he focuses on” sounds like you say this is easy and simple. I really don’t want to be a Musk defender so I’m gonna stop here.
His "choices on what to focus on" are at best extremely vague and at worst extremely wrong - when he insisted the Tesla Roadster be made out of carbon fibre, resulting in the car costing over $100k, that was the wrong thing to focus on. When he focused on "let's bore small underground tunnels for cars", that was still wrong. When he decided "let's build electric cars" (and then bought a preexisting electric car company, whose starters presumably were also focused on electric cars), that isn't all that impressive.
So in case it wasn't clear: I'm calling Musk a celebrity figurehead, whose personal talent is fully displayed in his management of X.com.
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This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.
Everyone incentivized by percentage of money changing hands ends up looting whatever asset they have access to, esp if the resource they are burning isn't on the books somewhere. PMs loot products by throwing in needless features to game some metric, or cutting features that users want but are "too expensive". Engineers loot by burning resilience and multi-dimensional reliability to eek out 5% more straight line spee…
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This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.
It's way worse than that: there's also deliberate cellar boxing (bankrupting) of companies on a large scale. Hedge funds working with consultant buddies (BCG) to take over the board/leadership of a victim company. The consultants then deliberately destroy the company from the inside while their hedge-fund buddies (naked) short it into literal bankruptcy. It's a very easy game, it's tax-free (because the short positio…
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It's way worse than that: there's also deliberate cellar boxing (bankrupting) of companies on a large scale. Hedge funds working with consultant buddies (BCG) to take over the board/leadership of a victim company. The consultants then deliberately destroy the company from the inside while their hedge-fund buddies (naked) short it into literal bankruptcy. It's a very easy game, it's tax-free (because the short positio…
Do you have an example (incl. evidence) of such coordinated and deliberate action between consultants and hedge funds?
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The Elon stans need to read up on his history. He claims to have significant engineering experience but in reality he does not, he mostly got lucky a couple times early on and hired well. There are millions of people much more capable than him but will never have their chance because they don't have the resources to make their ideas actionable.
Even reading up on his history is difficult given how credulous tech media is in general. With tech media basically turning the smoke machines on all around something, I can't blame people from assuming there is fire somewhere. I've often said that the most reliable way to get "rich rich" is to watch where money is flowing from point A to point B, stand in the middle and stick your hand out. Elon has certainly master…
Oh come on. If it were this simple, everyone would be doing it. Why aren't you "watching where the money is flowing and sticking your hand out"?
> Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.
Musk is vastly overhyped by some, but that's really selling him short. SpaceX and Tesla have real products providing real value, they aren't just leeching off money flows.
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I think that’s only half right… the financialization is driven via a priority of short term profits that are incentivized by the market to executives. They play the BS game to just get rich and then dip, company be damned in the long run.
This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.
Is the looting behavior just a response to US industrial policy? US policy has made US manufacturing tenuous for decades. Meanwhile US policy has also provided the means and mechanisms to ship manufacturing abroad. Given the above, isn’t the optimal strategy to maximize profit extraction in order to invest in new industries?
The US corporate right evangelised this culture as "freedom", and now it's being eaten from the inside out by it.
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This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.
It's way worse than that: there's also deliberate cellar boxing (bankrupting) of companies on a large scale. Hedge funds working with consultant buddies (BCG) to take over the board/leadership of a victim company. The consultants then deliberately destroy the company from the inside while their hedge-fund buddies (naked) short it into literal bankruptcy. It's a very easy game, it's tax-free (because the short positio…
Hard to imagine the delightful people involved leaving money on the table by missing an opportunity to profit from shorting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s only half right… the financialization is driven via a priority of short term profits that are incentivized by the market to executives. They play the BS game to just get rich and then dip, company be damned in the long run.
This is the closest thing to an answer. The economy has essentially been ruined by looting. People finding ways to strip out assets from companies. Variations on this include private equity racking up debt and bankrupting companies. Executives doing stock buybacks to boost their options while hollowing out the company's resources. Hedge fund management fees. It's everywhere.