Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

$19B ?! I think they forgot the comma here. And even that would be generous.

All advertisers are gone - it seems like most advertising is some absolute crap. No way it brings any real money. Linda Yaccarino was recently caught lying (or rather, presenting the state of affairs in Elon's way) - suggesting and even naming some big brands that are supposedly back, while they are not (or spend 0.1% of their previous spending).

Creators revenue sharing seems to be a 'fake it till you make it' attempt - with first payouts an order of magnitude higher than the last ones. And of course, it's completely opaque - nobody has any idea what the payouts are really based on. But hey, Twitter open sourced 'the algorithm' ! Even Elon fans appear to complain and realize that they may have been mislead.

We are definitely witnessing history in the making. A guy, that 4 years ago had a legitimate shot at becoming an absolute legend, decided to push his 'optimism' way too far (for which, I believe, he will end up in prison) and then on a whim, to buy Twitter for $44B, only to burn it to the ground.

There's absolutely no case to be made that it's worth anything close to $19B. I think we're seeing a reluctance to address the truth, Musk turned a slowly declining asset into a worthless one in a year.

> push his 'optimism' way too far (for which, I believe, he will end up in prison)

Eh, care to elaborate?

Sure.

Musk was always very 'optimistic' about Tesla goals and timeline estimates. That's fine (I guess) when you're a small company trying to achieve a major breakthrough. And they did actually deliver and started to mass produce EV cars - absolutely impressive result.

But in the process, Musk also started to promise more and more impossible things, on a bigger and bigger scale - FSD (almost 10 years ?), Robotaxis (!), Tesla's cars as 'appreciating assets', Boring Company, recently Optimus, AI, Tesla Semi, Cybertruck. Infinite demand that he claimed on investors earning call (he knew the real numbers) ?

The scale of optimism varies of course here. Tesla Semi for example ? Announced 6 years ago, officially started deliveries 1 year ago. In reality, those are prototype trucks, with specs and price being kept secret.

Another interesting one is the deal with Hertz - in October 2021, they announced a deal with Tesla, in which they supposedly bought 100k Teslas. Tesla stock skyrocketed (something like +50% in 3 weeks), to hit its all time high share price beginning of November 2021. It turns out (as announced by Hertz last week) that they only bought 35k Tesla's so far.

It's fine to say with huge optimism you're tackling a big problem when you're a 50 persons startup. It's another thing to say that you are in the process of building and close to delivering them as a huge public company, whose valuation is higher than 10 next competitors combined (when said competitors are doing >x10 sales).

And it's an entirely different thing, when the main character of the story, sells almost $40B of stock (!!!) at the peak of the hype he created. To give some perspective, $40B is the entire valuation of Ford, or GM. And he sold with excellent timing too. Remember this Hertz story - October 2021, then shares hit 400$ (all time high) beginning November 2021. Elon Musk starts selling on 8 November 2021.

As much as I would love to see Musk imprisoned, I don't see how those things would lead to jail time. Are you saying he might be accused of defrauding investors? I think that would be a pretty hard sell in court.

Exactly - defrauding investors, see my answer below.

It's a hard sell for now, that's for sure. Once the stock inevitably crashes, it will be a different story.

I should have been more specific.

I’m not asking about his optimism, but why he should be imprisoned.

You didn’t mention anything criminal, so I’m going to assume FUD.

I did not say he should, I'm saying that I just think he will.

Well, all this optimism (and I omitted several other important misrepresentation of Tesla business, made by Musk) is looking like that - just too much optimism. Keep in mind, their current valuation is based solely on those promises (or shall I say misrepresentation of reality) - they're not making that much money, their margin are contracting quickly, and they are a rather small carmaker as compared to others.

However, I'm betting that fast forward 3 years, Tesla share price tanks 90% from now (that would still leave it bigger than Ford !!!) and Tesla won't deliver any meaningful progress on all those 'optimistic' predictions, people's feeling about this period will be much different.

Edit: For what it's worth, Sam Antar (former CFO of the Crazy Eddie - a huge securities fraud. He's now working for the government) is also regularly picking on Musk - he's seeing a lot of red flags.

Also, for what it's worth, it's CFO was recently fired. Without any comments as for why.

He didn't pay 44 billion for Twitter.

He paid 44 billion to restore free speech.

I think his cause is more noble than sheer capitalism

Edit: down vote and hate all you want... mark my words .. Elon is going to go down in history as a visionary, a hero and a champion of free speech.

a bunch of angry ex-twitter employees on hacker news is not an accurate representation of reality

TIL free speech was dead in 2022.

lol, you can't be serious ...

I think they are, which really speaks to the information asymmetry people face in their various circles.

Weird that in the process of "restoring free speech", Musk permabanned dozens of journalists who had ever been critical of his companies.

I hope this is sarcasm. In the case that it is not: Musk's entire complaint was about Twitter acquiescing to government's content moderation requests. Since he took over, Twitter has complied with more government content moderation requests than before his arrival.

On top of that, he's very clearly just picking and choosing which accounts to treat with "FREE SPEECH!" (these tend to be far-right wing figures), and who to ban (these tend to be journalists who cover Musk)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

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