701–710 of 1001 posts
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Considering the threat of his wealth and the ability to fund primary challengers against sitting senators is being used to whip their votes, I wouldn't restrict the it to just "financial" terrorist.
Not disagreeing with you, but just want to point out that billionaires and political lobbying groups have used funding (or the threat of funding) primary opponents to coerce congress for a long time.
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Which number is bigger isn't the only calculation to make. Elon has shown himself to be a capricious and distracted steward of the companies he assumes control of. He has a lot of debt and is already over-leveraged on multiple companies as well as his new roles in government. X has plunged in value, Tesla sales are plummeting worldwide, Elon's scorched earth political agenda invites unending controversy that OpenAI a…
X plunging in value is outdated information. EBITDA is double what it was when it was public ($682m to $1.25bn). Revenue is down, but profit is up substantially, due to aggressive cost management. XAI is valued at another $40bn as well.
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> "financial terrorist" As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally. Or if not damage, just trolling. For instance, writing X on the moon or something like that.
Easy: buy media companies to sow political division and pollute the discourse, buy political influence to restrict access to open and unbiased education to ensure the populace cannot engage in critical thinking, then poison the environment in myriad ways until people in their 20s require a dozen rounds of IVF to have kids (or more likely, just giving up because of the ruinious state of inflation compared to incomes).
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I disagree. Wealth accumulation is absolutely a good thing. Elon does good things. EVs, rockets, Starlink, Neuralink etc. This is stuff that people want. More capital is allocated to good things when the same person can manage more capital. Elon's wealth is mostly in the things he has built himself. In addition, Elon isn't even that rich, when compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person. As an example,…
> Elon's wealth is mostly in the things he has built himself. Elon's wealth is mostly in acquisitions. Even PayPal, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was an acquisition by X.com (the bank), at which point Elon was already ousted as CEO. He came back briefly, trying to convert PayPal infra over to Microsoft much to Thiel's chagrin, but then ousted again in favour of Thiel, who renamed the merged company to PayPal. So PayPal,…
Capital should be allowed to accumulate to those, who find the best use for the capital and use it in the most efficient way for the service of the world. That's the idea of capitalism.
Now, if he makes bad capital allocation decisions (like what this news is about), then he loses the capital to someone smarter than him, to someone who finds better use for that capital. That's also capitalism. Doing irrational or "bad" things isn't possible, without it resulting in losing that capital.
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He said “partly” — seems reasonable that throwing nazi salutes around might have a partial impact on declining sales?
sales were trending down significantly in Europe even before the salute though.
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To me it seems to have very little to do with his antics. Surely inflation, market saturation, and increased competition is more probable?
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 wa…
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Except there’s a line of cases basically saying you can’t do something unlawful and then quickly stop in order to make the legal controversy go away.
You act as if Trump will obey a court order.
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The stock seems to be unaware though
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".
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was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake
My hope is that he'll eventually make some big mistakes that will send him to jail. Or does presidential grace give him total immunity?