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Comment by pcmoney | Hacker News Reader

Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly. Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations.

Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69 because he is a clown?

Twitter replies to counter claims: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitt...

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Do you mean he only recently got overconfident? Just a reminder that he already got fined $40 million for his "going private at 420" joke.

The private at 420 thing was absolutely worth $40 million. It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one.

> It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one

Zoom out! Everybody loved GagnamStyle and Baby Shark too, but they are not getting on radio and people would be indifferent to the disappearence of the artist who made those songs.

MarketCap is a flawed measure for tons of reasons (in my opinion FCF is king) but if you want to use such flawed measure then time spent in the S&P500 would be a meaningful way to go about it.

Tesla has been in the SP500 for how long? 1.5 years?

If JPMorgan went bankrupt tomorrow you'd see people literally in the streets crying (for a whole bunch of reasons both at the macro and micro level) much like when Michael Jackson died. If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow it would be like if PSY of GagnamStyle fame died, a bunch of hardcore devote followers would mourn but the world would move on pretty quickly.

Well musk has already sold a bunch of Tesla shares and made a lot of money off the tweet. Way more than $40 million

Sounds like twtr is worth $800B then? ;)

Just to put this in perspective: if your net worth is $100,000, this is the equivalent of being fined $14.

(Based on Elon's net worth of $278 billion, according to Google)

Still not a great example of a supposedly superior intellect.

And that court case is scheduled the week after this one. Musk has 3 major trials in October.

I have understood the same. This is Delaware, meaning they aren't going to give special treatment if they want to keep companies there. Deal is a deal. And Musk will pay, now how much might vary, but it will not be 1 billion cheap.

By the downvotes it Looks like musk fan boys cant handle their lord and savior being called out for making a series of dumb decisions.

Where was there ever evidence Musk is a smart guy? His only skills appear to be self-aggrandizement and being born rich. Musk is proof that our economic system rewards being already rich, not creating value.

He did not found Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, or anything else that's been successful with his name attached. He did not contribute any tech to those efforts. At best he's contributed publicity, but it's only ever with a flavor of celebrating how great he is.

He's an example of an utter failure of capitalism. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that he's celebrated for it. Everyone wants to fail like him. But most people skipped the step where they're born rich, and it's just too hard to recover from that miss.

Even most people being born richer than him and why happen to have a better relationship with the family wealth don't become billionaires not to speak of the richest person on the planet.

So he definitely has some skills in leading businesses through hard times and making them succeed in the end (I've no idea how or what he does so).

Founding a company doesn't matter as much as making it grow and succeed.

Ray Kroc didn't found McDonald's (he didn't even join early) but he turned it into the massive company it is today, so it doesn't really matters who once initially signed the incorporation form.

I think that’s a little much. Definitely was estranged from his dad and it seems for good reason. No evidence his alleged childhood wealth funded his adult businesses.

Founding doesnt matter as much as making them as viable as they are today. Seems to have a knack for something, either PR, hiring others, repeatedly betting the farm, slamming his head into a wall etc. whatever it is its on average working.

His companies create thousands of jobs and pay billions in taxes, capitalism seems to be doing its thing very well. (Yay global reduction in poverty!)

Friends who have worked with him say he is very sharp and extremely relentless and hard working. I don’t think he’s a pure confidence man. I do wonder if he has had a bit of a mental break in the past 5yrs or so.

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