Boggles the mind that they invested that much in RobinHood at all, but especially that late in the game. Maybe part of a broader scheme to access their capital as well?
Billionaires in general aren't playing 4D chess, why would they? 4D chess is hard, requires sacrifice and valuing something bigger than oneself and one's bank account. Much easier to jump on popular hype trains. If it works you look like a genius and have a million stans to stroke you off, and money number go up so you can flex on other billionaires. If it fails nothing really happens to you personally.
SBF wasn't actually at that level, but he had enough paper wealth that he clearly thought he was. We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars.
Which is a work of fiction. Such a thing probably happened no more than a few times. The only reason it gets parroted back is because it serves as a nice bit of propaganda to gin up fear and get people to fall in line.
Anyone who's spent time browsing r/HermanCainAward, or knows nurses who've been on the COVID front lines, can assure you that it's not. People die horrible deaths, often clawing harder than ever to the conspiracy theories they've been fed.
If I showed you a homeless person dead from a heroin overdose, would you fear heroin? No, because it's entirely within your control whether you use it or not. I think you need to learn how propaganda works.
Elon is facing a $25B write-down of Twitter the moment, that's also a 'consequence'.
They are definitely playing 2D++ chess, and a bit of cheating, making us think they are playing 3D sometimes, but they are not stupid. Most of their glib stuff is calculated and it works to great effect.
Musk will probably pull through and still be one of the richest dudes ever with Tesla and Space X still floating, even if the rest burns, that's still way ahead.
Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).
This all sounds like very silly Elon bashing to me.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...
This was unusual to the point of getting criticism from a judge when Twitter sued to force him to follow through on the deal (which bought them at a significant premium over market):
https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-calls-elon-musk-legal-...
> Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).
This is vaguely true but in this case the big question is how he'll make it massively more profitable than it's ever been. Twitter was marginally profitable for the last few years but the massive debt load Musk saddled the company with means they need to increase profits by whole number multiples simply to catch up to where they were in 2019-2021. It's not enough to get advertisers back, they have to significantly increase their spending.
It absolutely makes sense to re-established a valuation if there are 'material events' and there have been - notably, major layoffs, operational problems, customers have left in drives. Most poignantly, the CEO has indicated 'there is a very material chance' that Twitter could go bankrupt.
What do you think 'we could go bankrupt' means? I means that, and, it was not the case prior to his arrival.
Finally, there has been a major market correction which has affected the price of all tech companies. Were Twitter to be a public company probably it'd be worth 1/2 as much - essentially P/E ratios have changed, even if the business did not.
Twitter is worth 1/4 what it was before - Musk bought at the peak and even if he did nothing it'd be worth a lot less, but his actions have caused the business harm with no predictable positive outcome (the changes mostly don't seem to align with some kind of plan to profitability).
That seems to be even more true of the customers that pay the bills, that is, advertisers.
? Yes, and ?
You can say and do (and should) a ton of things when you are rich, that you should not / cannot when you are not rich.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-calls-report-s...
So Elon must not have liked how that went since he was publicly encouraging others to roll over.
My speculation of course.
The strategy would start with getting intertwined with crypto, then move into crypto-tangential like Robinhood, eventually hoping to claw his way into Washington and Wall Street. The FTX / Farmington State Bank investment comes to mind.
John Ray definitely has his work cut out for him trying to unravel this mess. I think he'll be able to cleanly claw back anything in TradFi (it's a great test of the TradFi system). Good luck trying to clawback any of the crypto. Not like it matters though, anything he can claw back there is worthless. "Hey, here's your XYZ coin back, you've been made whole."
This is just so fun to watch.
Deliberately becoming "too big to fail", eh?
(Which was more accurately termed "too big to be permitted to fail". Which then raises the question of who is doing the permitting, and why we would trust their judgment; but that would give the game away.)
The "who" is just greedy connected people, who are everywhere. Including government and finance.
Thankfully we have laws and regulations, which at least serve as some checks and balances to prevent these people from causing too much damage.
The genius of checks and balances government as that it doesn't rely on ensuring "bad" people never get into positions of power. You will never be able to stamp out 100% of bad actors. Instead it sets things up such that the damage bad actors can do is minimized and/or identified quickly. Less collateral damage, and a chance for justice afterwards.
"No regulations" in crypto should be a warning flag to people.
Meanwhile, I'm really really interested if any crimes were committed on the "regulated" side of things. Those people need to be put in jail. Will be fun to watch this unravel.