p.s) For those misinformed about state of Neuralink. Currently in beta with quadriplegic patients.
We can agree that he is an asshole and also acknowledge the fact that he has a statistically significant success rate for big engineering tasks.
b) SolarCity has been unquestionably a failure.
c) America PAC which handles most of the field operations for the Trump campaign has been in the news for how poorly it has been managed.
Then (a) perhaps keep your mouth shut until you can deliver it, and (b) don't take people's money for something that you say is "only X years away" when it's actually X+3/4/5.
When people can buy your product, tell them that they can buy it.
If you don't have a product that people can buy, keep your mouth shut.
A complete grifter.
Whenever you don't know which way to go, you consult someone more senior. Those people do the same with their seniors. And so on.
There are many stories from people who have worked with Elon scattered across books and interviews. He makes wild decisions, tells people to do it, and somehow the sum of these wild ideas works out.
Remember, the idea of landing a reusable rocket was abandoned long ago by many nations because it was deemed impossible or financially infeasible. Yet here we are with SpaceX dropping LOE launch prices per kg by 90-98%.
You can call Elon many things, but a grifter he is not.
It's almost like revisiting the wildest ideas turns into feasible ones thanks to steady progress all around (science, manufacturing, better pricing).
I guess what's key is being lucky to re-attempt something at the right time. Just look at how long things from the mother of all demos took to become successful products, hell, we are finally getting the hang of collaborative editing and video conferencing was awful still 40yrs after in 2008.
the man got into Stanford for Physics, and there are more than enough anecdotes from his biography done by Walter Isaacson that confirm his technical prowess.
So government bailouts followed by cultivating a breathless cult who throw money at making your stock the most overvalued asset in history?
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is by shorting TESLA if you feel like it's so overvalued. and get crushed like everyone that did just that along the way.
As a smart man once said: "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
https://www.quora.com/Was-Tesla-bailed-out-by-the-US-governm...
No, Tesla did not receive any funds under the 2009 auto industry bailout.[1] The $80.7 billion went to Chrysler and GM.
Tesla did receive a government loan of $465 million under the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program, a program signed into law by Bush in 2008. Tesla subsequently repaid that loan.
Selling put options on TSLA has been one of my more profitable plays for a long while, so maybe not.
Long positions have a completely different risk profile than a short position. One has unlimited upside and a capped downside. One has unlimited downside and a capped upside.
Saying "put your money where your mouth is and short" is asinine because they have completely different risk profiles.
Did that help?
> Can you stop and think for a minute?
Depends who you ask tbh.
> Selling puts and profiting from TSLA is not a vindication of your view that the company is trash.
Selling puts is a long position -- a bullish position -- not a short position. You would only sell puts if you were optimistic about the company. The fact that you don't know that tells me you're not ready to trade options and vindicates my statement that you don't fundamentally understand stock trading. So maybe stop going around and telling people to "put their money where their mouth is by shorting."
I just said I use selling puts as a bullish strategy, do you lack basic reading comprehension skills?
Many people don't know this but the vast majority of the money that was spent in 2008 was actually given out as loans, and those loans have been repaid with interest, netting the Treasury over $100B in profit, with billions more in quarterly dividends continuing to this day from Fannie and Freddie.
Do you think the 2008 TARP package was "not a bailout" also, because it was repaid with interest?
https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
Or would you define it more by business outlook if they hadn’t received the funds in the first place?
The elephant in the room is that this was all done during ZIRP. There was an incredible amount of money sloshing around, and due to Elon's great ability to market, it ended up at Tesla.
> the man got into Stanford for Physics, and there are more than enough anecdotes from his biography done by Walter Isaacson that confirm his technical prowess.
This is Elon sympathetic. Where someone got into school has nothing to do with their business acumen. There are many people who actually went to Stanford for Physics with no business acumen. There also plenty of people who didn't go to school at all who have built great companies.
There are also many critiques of the accuracy of the Walter Isaacson biography. A definitive tome, it is not.
He is a grifter, and I believe he's going to prison for fraud soon.
But it's also true that he's / was incredible at attracting top talent, pushing seemingly impossible projects and delivering.