The Storm Brewing Inside Elon Musk's Mind Gets Out | Hacker News Reader

The Storm Brewing Inside Elon Musk's Mind Gets Out

wsj.com

4 pointsbookofjoe17 comments

He continues to behave like a cashed-up brat.

He can't figure out how to make Twitter financially viable without the advertisers. Which is very ironic because all of his other companies are financially very stable without having to deal with advertisers and their requirements for political speech.

> financially very stable

very charitable view

Money is just a token based game and Elon operates above it. I wasn't being charitable but simply stating the obvious. In a multi-planetary civilization, which is his stated goal, every one of his companies is a necessary piece of the puzzle. People need to move around, materials need to be refined and transported, and there needs to be a communication network that can potentially make autonomous decisions (AI).

I have no reason to believe he doesn't know what he's doing because everything he has done up to now indicates he understands the mechanics of what it means to build a multi-planetary civilization.

> a multi-planetary civilization

is where I stopped taking you seriously

Really? You got that far?

Coming to think of it, Money is just a token based game and Elon operates above it should've already stopped me, you're right

Boring Co. took billions of funding to solve transportation and it built a 2 mile test tunnel in Las Vegas and spent the rest of its money on God knows what.

NeuraLink has made 0 revenue, it's all investor cash.

xAI is tied to X and relies on investors' cash including Musk's own, as well.

SpaceX survives on huge NASA contracts, which it occasionally bombs (literally), such as the Starship, which should've been operational by now.

Tesla has cut prices like a dozen times this year to maintain demand, and all their profit last quarter was FROM SELLING CRYPTO. Their revenue crucially depends on overinflated self-reported EPA range (carbon credits) and subsidies from the govt.

So yeah, what is this "financial stability" you see, I don't know. He doesn't have a single company that has a normal, stable business model. It's all hype, memes, and subsidies. The man built the biggest house of cards the world has seen.

The reason he can't handle X is because big advertisers are smarter than retail investors who eat up anything he says, like he'd have billions of robotaxies and trillions of Optimus bots covering the Milky Way, or whatever is the latest grift.

The SpaceX and Telsa comparisons need to be made against the competition/alternatives, rather than in a vacuum.

It's hard to compare SpaceX to competitors, because despite it has competitors, they're all structured wildly differently, and overlap between products and services is partial.

Tesla however... doesn't look good. And I know you'll start listing EV carmakers but that's not who Tesla is competing with. It's competing with carmakers in general. Even then BYD is eating its lunch in China and increasingly Europe. And because demand for EVs is cooling in general, hence the price cuts, and Tesla is completely unprepared for backlash to EVs as it has no other products, if people stop buying EVs, Tesla is dead in the water. While the likes of Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Ford etc. and will be just fine.

Tesla is valued at 10x comparable car makers. When that ends it will be a bigger loss than burning Twitter to the ground. Without Starship Starlink will never grow beyond being a niche player in satellite telecom, and Starlink is the basis for most of Spacex's valuation. These things are not visibly shakier than Twitter, but the whole thing is a house of cards.

> Without Starship Starlink will never grow beyond being a niche player in satellite telecom

Niche? SpaceX is the primary mover [1][2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/29410/number-of-worldwide-roc....

[2] 2023, 31 launches outside of starlink. https://spaceexplored.com/2023/12/03/spacex-launches-2023/

Elon: “We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” he said sometime last year, or the year before maybe?

Sure this is management through fear, but Falcon 9 is OK for v1 and v1.5 Starlink satellites and a constellation of 4-5000. But Starlink needs 20X the subscribers, and that needs big, complex, high capacity satellites that don't need ground stations in direct view.

Sorry, I misread. I thought you meant launches, but you clearly said telecom. You're correct.

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