It's pretty colorful language, but my mind immediately jumps to "financial terrorist". He's using his enormous amount of wealth and influence as a weapon to bludgeon anyone and anything in his way.
Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.
The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gonzales-elon-musk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces_oat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Uniformed_Servic...
Also, Tesla stopped selling the Model S here.
In 2024, Tesla reported a 17% drop in Australia despite EV market growing.
Did you have any actual statistics to back up your assertion?
Vehicle Model | Total Units | Fire Fatalities |Fatality Rate (per 100k)
Tesla Cybertruck| 34,438 | 5 | 14.52
Ford Pinto | 3,173,491 | 27 | 0.85
A meaningful comparison would say that the Pinto could catch fire as a result of a low speed collision and the cybertruck apparently does not.
Of course, a gas can with a spear pointed at it isn't a great design. But the rest of the cars were also dangerous as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
I know that neither you nor the other commenters nor the person who made that website needs anyone to explain to you why this comparison is invalid. It is such a facile comparison that to describe it is to explain why it's invalid.
So, again, I'm confused as to the point of your comment.
I'm confused as to the level of your incompetence.
There is enough to criticize in his actions.
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2025-01/elon-musk-hitler-salute-i...
I mean, that was a link to a German newspaper and the headline is:
> A German Eye On Elon Musk's Hitler Salute (Yes, That's A Hitler Salute)
But I have just tried "Musk Geste" on google.de news tab (I don't know how Google is personalising either my search results or your results, but FWIW I'm in Berlin), and of the first page, 6/10 links explicitly call the gesture a "Hitlergruß" in the summary, and the other four call it that (or note that some people have called it that) in the body.
We shouldn’t let that argument distract from the impact it has had on Tesla demand in Europe. For me personally it was the final straw and I won’t be buying one as I had hoped to.
Along with other actions certain to hit sales, and the lack of an apology (which would have been wise, even if you didn’t mean it as a nazi salute) suggests that Musk doesn’t care about Tesla car sales.
I suspect he knows the writing is on the wall for Tesla, so he’s betting on robotics as an escape hatch. I wonder if he’s also hoping tariffs against china will help vs their EVs. Either way, I don’t see much hope for Tesla right now.
You might not know him for that, but people who pay attention do.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/elon-musk-reveals-hi...
[To people who think he's a Nazi: yes, I've read all the arguments, no, I don't care - giving him the benefit of the doubt still makes him a gigantic shitlord who think its funny to do Nazi salutes.]
If you own a social media platform and have this amount of reach you can never be “just a troll edgelord”.
Musk has been going to far right rallies and jew hating for some time now.
eg: https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/01/...
The goalpost does not need to be moved to "if he's not literally operating a gas chamber, he's fine".
The best interpretation is that he doesn't care how it looks to others when he does a Nazi salute. Like others said, he's more 90s edgelord than actual jew-hating Nazi.
And the car markets in Europe are showing him what they think of people who do Nazi salutes publicly.
Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication
The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
But the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation founded to combat antisemitism, did not agree.
"It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute," it posted on X.
Double jeopardy would stop the state from continuing with the prosecution, and the pardon means no consequences.
I hate that I consider this an actually possibly.
Maybe he also takes a page from Putin’s playbook and puts him on trial in a very public and humiliating way, sending a clear message to all the other oligarchs.
I know a lot of people don't like Cohen. I have my own friends I've had for 15+ years and I know them well, just as much as Cohen knows Trump, so I feel there might be some validity to his thoughts.
Do you think Trump of 8 years ago would have allowed Musk to usurp the news cycle? Or even allowed the merest notion that he's not controlling _everything_?
Remember, Trump actually underwent a colonoscopy without sedation to avoid relinquishing the control of the nuclear weapons to Pence. This dude is a control freak.
Even endoscopies are possible without sedation, but most people don't have the ability to not squirm or gag for that one. You can even see youtube videos of people doing that one without sedation.
Trump is basically immune from scandal. The people that vote for him either don't care, are low-information voters that somehow don't even hear about it, don't believe the news reporting on the scandals, or even worse, actively support him because of the scandals.
After which, he will look very tired, and suddenly stop being "turbulent", as per the meaning several judges have recently noted in Trump trials was once infamously said by a king of a priest.
Then I will be sad, because I would have liked to have gone to Mars.
I too would have liked to see Musk go to Mars.
I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but I can't think of any major state actors or criminal organizations he'd currently be antagonizing.
Eg. Starlink connections in Ukraine are geofenced. Which would piss off both sides in various ways. Pisses off ukraine because they have legitimate targets outside the fence and pisses off russia because they have legitimate targets inside the fence. That’s walking a fine line.
This was debunked. Starlink was never active in Crimea because Crimea was sanctioned by the US. He said if the US government asked him to activate it he would. They did not.
What happened to Rockefeller, Carnegie and JP Morgan? It wasn't the plebs and their jabbering (see muckrakers) that directly took them down, though that jabbering did help give an unusual dude from the NY aristocracy named Teddy(who couldn't stand the muckrakers) political cover to move against them.
Also worth reading about the 2 elections preceding Teddy's fascinating rise to power, where the oligarchy bought the Presidency.
of the UK, for calling for a government minister's arrest and for his "civil war" tweet: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ydddy3qzgo and https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/elon-musk-need... and https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-called-uk-ministers-not-a...
of Germany, as "Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is investigating whether Musk's support for the AfD on the platform where he has 210 million followers could constitute an illegal party donation": https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/elon-musk-investigated-...
(also note that the party he's supporting, AfD, is getting investigated for being hostile to the constitution: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-69003733)
of Italy, where he has been warned by "Italian President Sergio Mattarella to stop interfering in the country’s affairs after a controversial tweet on his page asked for judges to be dismissed": https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/01/04/germany-accused-mus...
of Canada, because of what he's doing in so many other places: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/musk-angus-trudeau-poilievr...
My guess is that this robotaxi launch will make or break the company. If the product looks like any other first-gen driverless service, Tesla is screwed.
The price to upgrade all those older Teslas is gonna be gigantic and the company is already heavily scrutinized for their lackadaisical approach to QA and safety.
Downvote if you must, but the man knows how to protect his moats while branding it "ending wasteful government spending".
The stock seems to be waking up to the problem. Sales are down 12% in Europe in Jan. Down 60% in Germany. Apparently German electric car drivers are not fans of Nazis. Who knew?
can't be further from the truth. if you drive tesla and then drive all of the competitors tesla is faaar superior car. cars are great. the core issue here are margins - before competition tesla's could retain the huge margins on their vehicles. feels like in order to compete now they will have to drop the prices and hence their margins and with the forward p/e ratio of 1,000,129 that won't go well for the company's financials. and of course elon being a tool isn't going to be helping with this :)
The robo-taxi attempt is fraught and Musk's mind seems elsewhere -- swinging a wrecking ball on government, turning Twitter into his microphone (with great damage to its value and creating a real opening for competitors), posting videogame results reminiscent of the old North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung-style, where the newspaper would report on his games of golf in which he swung 18 hole-in-ones.
By hitching his wagon to political movements most despised by the consumers of EVs he's alienated Tesla's audience. By his further actions he's shocked and disgusted them so that driving a Tesla is becoming an embarrassment. The brand is kaput.
There's maybe a separate China story but it's no better. Tesla taxis in China, really?
[1] Global electric vehicle sales up 25% in record 2024 - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...
Companies simply do not survive this in the long run unless very specific inelastic demand (I'm thinking bp oil spill as the only example) exists, and even then BP wasn't as international or charged or so ... Nazi.
Tesla is musk. Musk is a Nazi. Musk was a progressive environmental future in the previous media construction.
That radical shift means no brand, no customers. How many people want to drive a car that basically has a swastika on it? 4% of the population?
On top of this, musks absent leadership since the model Y, in addition to Tesla's general problems getting new designs out the door, and his marketing ignorance in the good days, means Tesla has no badge diversification a luxury marque, no extensive model diversity for all the markets of the world, no cabin options for their extreme design, no trims and body style variations.
It's just the 3 and Y basically.
Tesla should have bought another car company to gain engineer, design, oem relationships, and manufacturing capacity.
Too late. Tesla is now a pump and dump scheme, musk wants his 60 billion that Delaware is holding up and then he'll sell off just like the board is doing now.
China will seize teskas assets on a whim from a trade war or a hot war with Taiwan.
The energy sector is not one I look forward to, Tesla doesn't have any advantage in battery packaging or battery technology("battery day" is now officially a dud), and lfp lmfp and sodium ion chemistries are far more suited to grid storage and home storage.
We all know AI driving at Q4 isnt happening under musk. It's a long slog and musk fires software teams too quickly, because he treats them like hardware. That's basically all the hype.
For your hypothesis to make sense, first you would have to establish that Musk's antics have no negative impact on Musk's public opinion or public image.
In the meantime, you've started to see a global wave of both Tesla stores and Tesla cars being vandalized in protest over Musk's public support for Nazism. In some cases such as Germany you even had public protests against the neonazi party that Musk supports and promotes.
So you establish the fact that throughout the world people started protesting Musk due to his public actions. Do you think this change in public sentiment brings with it a neutral impact on sales?
Tesla sales are static or shrinking
Take January YoY in the UK, EV sales rose 24%, Tesla's sales dropped 8% ish
In the best of times Musk's leadership brought us stuff like "Joe Mode" just because he saw someone complain on Twitter.
Now he's completely unhinged and we can't trust him even as much as before. He might just decide something crazy and force the factories to change it just because.
Tesla's sales are spread over a few models, VW's EV sales are spread over ten or so models
Imagine if pretending to be your friend was basically a fortune 500 size industry.
No, he is greedy, this is greed. He is greedy for power and money.
As Terry Pratchett alludes to many of his books, the problems start when you treat other people as "things". And this is rife at the moment. So mental breakdown doesn't really cover it.
Come on, you cannot have missed this.
We started seeing signs of it when he called that diver rescuer a pedophile. Most recently its been him caught lying about him being the greatest gamer in the world and being one of his biggest fans (Adrian Dittman).
And then high on ketamine doing that salute on the inaguration
Nazi salute (two actually) on national television? Destroy government extra legally with presidential pardon immunity? Bust on minorities etc with social impunity?
He doesn't just have eff you money, he has eff you status. No longer being restricted to the milquetoast middle ground CEO trap. Unrestricted treatment of low money people as subhumans. nothing like rights or laws to get in the way.
Thing is, his stock is very very tied to perception, which is a synonym for "hype".
You can see this emerging unrestraint coming from virtually all of silicon valley "leadership". Allin podcast. Zuck the MMA wannabe. Larry Ellison (the archetype) in orbit with trump. Gleeful twitters about eliminating all jobs with AI.
And yet we are entering an era of geopolitical uncertainty, war, reonshoring of manufacturing. To fight looming conflicts with China and Russia, what is needed is functioning institutional democracy, not venal banal oligarchical corruption.
The other historical danger is that the rich poor gap is indicative of a forthcoming rebellion of the lower class. Trump is himself a symptom of this, and while the poor continue to divide themselves between the two parties, Trump shows that wild unpredictable swings in voter sentiment can bring unexpected candidates to the fore.
All it takes is one charismatic candidate to pledge to cull the rich and being universal healthcare...
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though?
- Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html
- Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17
- Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html
- This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html
I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0].
[0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side.
A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it…
You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years.
$30Bn he could give every American $90.
An important thing to note is that it takes time to spend money and money makes money. Even a very modest interest rate yields an incredible amount of money. The money is so large, it works differently than money does for us normal people. For example, say you have $30bn a year and are getting a modest 5% interest yearly, that's: $1.5bn a year, $4.11m/day, $171.2k/hr, or $2854/min. As you can imagine, this has a big effect. If you're trying to buy a McLaren F1, well, you can wait 5 days. Which it'll probably take that long to make this transaction happen anyways. So there would be no net loss of money. So, supposing you wanted to make your $15bn (I know, but we're approximating anyways and they're similar anyways) tunnel, you somehow got permission to do it, and you are doing it all out of your pocket, you have to realize that this does not equate to taking out $15bn from your net worth. Because... it takes time to build such a tunnel. Let's approximate again, saying it takes 5 years (very aggressive) and you pay at the end of the year, then the net decrease of your wealth is $7.5bn, not $15bn. At 10 years, you have no net change, and any longer you've had no effective loss. (To be clear, I'm not saying there's no cost, I'm saying that it doesn't change your net worth)
The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
I should also clarify an assumption that I guess is not obvious. I'm saying it is essentially impossible to spend these amounts of money on things that personally benefit you. You can't buy enough houses, personal jets, yachts, and so on. We agree. But mega projects take a lot of time, as well as philanthropic endeavors. If you want a real world example, see MacKenzie Scott. She has given away 50% of her wealth, yet her net worth is identical to that in 2020, when Forbes started tracking her (divorce was in 2019). She is worth $36bn and has given over $17bn away, and in those 4 years (I'm sure some of this money is pledged and not yet in peoples' hands but that's standard philanthropy, right?). So yeah, she could have built that bridge for no change in her net worth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But in your favor, I guess Elon did buy Twitter and with his great negotiating skills offered a 27% premium (and not in a one-time lump sum). But also, this has seemed to have no real effect on his net worth due to how his wealth is actually held and showing the nativity of our approximations, as most billionaires are getting much more than 5% interest on their money.
This bit changes my reply, I have to agree with that. The rest though - yes the normal way to build a tunnel would be to make sure it will be financially profitable and get investors, but what I'm saying is that a UK-Ireland tunnel would not be profitable. One estimate said it would cost double the UK-France tunnel but get 20% of the use. Nobody would "invest", it would have to be funded personal money as a passion project just because they want to see it exist in the world.
> The problem is, your money makes money too fast. For most things, faster than you can spend it. Every second you aren't spending it, it grows.
Nice problem to have, lol. Seems like it would be possible to invent as many megaprojects as one wanted in order to get rid of enough money, but maybe it isn't. Maybe the limit is how much attention one person can have. Maybe the balance of trying to start enough to use all your money without bankrupting yourself if one overruns costs and then never finishing them all, would be too hard.
New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
But to your point, as the child of someone who parrot's right wing talking points, I am looking forward to see whether their remarks on EV's change over the next few years or not.
Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last.
Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...
They enact laws guaranteeing free speech and human rights, then execute their critics and sell their organs.
Even as a less than serious rhetorical argument, what you said is insane. Get a grip.
And maybe Jack Ma should also have advocated for Taiwan's submission to China like Musk did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/08/elon-musk...
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
This is why tariffs, divestment from China, and divestment of Chinese ownership in American companies or land is important. I also think it is reasonable to treat such pledges made by American residents to a foreign government as treasonous.
In fact, I am worried about whether that influence from China extends further. How else do you explain Trump delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban? If anything he should be going a lot harder against China.
He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.
> How else do you explain Trump delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban
Because he wanted people to watch his inauguration on TikTok. Plus the intention was always that TikTok would be bought by a US company, not to shut it down entirely given the extensive number of people who rely it on both for income and for entertainment. The issue was that the Supreme Court ruled on the takedown being legal just 2 days before the ban deadline, giving no time for an acquisition. Even Joe Biden refused to enforce the ban on TikTok on the last day of his presidency.
> If anything he should be going a lot harder against China
Tariffs on China just kicked in.
> He literally posted an AI generated video of Xi in Winnie the Pooh garb.
I don’t think there’s any reasonable evidence of this, given he has sued media matters for publishing factual information, and even encouraged AGs to open criminal investigations.
Musk has absolutely no respect for free speech. He regularly uses the power of the government to punish anyone that dares criticize him. He makes a mockery of free speech.
Sorry to come back to this a week later, but Elon Musk just tweeted:
> 60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election.
> They deserve a long prison sentence.
I just don't think it's even remotely credible to claim that he values free speech.
I think I see what you mean, but it’s dangerous to casually say such a hostile and powerful state’s corruption could ever be vindicated.
My intuition here is that ANY private citizen acting without authority derived from a due process, or the necessary clearance, is breaking the law and needs to be arrested. Full stop. It bewilders me that Musk wasn't apprehended before he was given special permission to do what he was doing. This was blatant evasion of democracy and potentially harmful to hundreds of millions of people, and harmful to democracy itself. It sets an incredible precedent.
The check or balance that appears to be missing, I suppose, is the one where people feel they have the agency or ability at all to identify this type of nefarious behaviour and report it to an entity which can act to rectify it, independently of the president. Trump has enabled this every step of the way, and ultimately, any attempt to fix this likely would have been defused by him as well.
I'm not sure what citizens can do, or how exactly the institution should protect itself in the future. But there are many historical parallels to what's happening here, and inaction on citizens' parts is certainly a large component. Too many people are failing to stand in the way. Part of the solution is making it possible to do so. They step aside because the consequences, especially in the USA (with leaders who blatantly seek to purge their opposition), are far too great for an individual to absorb.
As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
Or if not damage, just trolling. For instance, writing X on the moon or something like that.
It would be insane, an apocalyptic fantasy that few could afford outside of (hopefully somewhat) accountable or at least pragmatic governments. But a very rich person could afford it.
And as much as information warfare is terrifying, biological warfare is much worse. I get your "it's already here" point, but lets really take the question at face value and run with it.
edit: Consider that a group MUCH less wealthy than Elon Musk was able to experiment with nuclear weapons, and managed to carry out a sarin attack.
> Engineer a plague, or a series of plagues targeting food crops, livestock, and humans.
I think you missed a constraint there.
Hypothetically, would it be legal to fund a president whose policy was "let's nuke everyone"?
Run a government. No single person has ever been responsible for more death, suffering and harm as a person wielding a monopoly on violence. Even the Church only managed its bloody conquests, cultural genocides and colonialism because it had the power of imperialist states behind it. If not for Constantine, Christianity would have remained a weird apocalypse cult in the Levant.
TEL, though, yeeeeah... that was a bad move.
We seem to be watching this in real time. Musk bought influence over the US president, gained access to critical US systems, and is about to benefit from the EO pausing of enforcement of law banning bribes to foriegn nationals.
He bought power. He is buying more power. We are watching a supervillian rise.
I dunno maybe that asteroid is coming and we need his rockets and mass distraction.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...
Way more billionaires supported Kamala vs. Trump (83 vs 52).
But yes, there was also simply a lack of energy in the D voter base in 2024. No amount of spending can recover disengaged voters who simply dismissed everyone as "equally bad".
Ian Fleming explored that idea rather effectively with Hugo Drax in the original Moonraker novel (which doesn't have much besides the name in common with the movie.)
The way things are playing out, Drax must have been Musk's childhood hero.
https://www.inverse.com/article/32100-elon-musk-favorite-jam...
The person who asked 7 years ago never forgot that and made the same connection as you:
https://www.threads.net/@pixelastronaut/post/DFFJF9GxE7D?xmt...
> Their first child, Elon Reeve Musk, was born in 1971, named after Maye's grandfather J. Elon Haldeman, with the name Reeve after her maternal grandmother's maiden name.
A person such as Musk (or Trump, or Biden, or...or...) live in a completely different reality when compared to yours or mine, as their input differs vastly from ours. This is inevitable given the flaws of being human.
It's like training two AIs on completely different sets of input. The bigger the difference in training data ...
He's making an offer to buy something at twice the price of the other offer on the table.
I'm not sure it'd be a good deal for Musk but it looks like a good deal for the seller.
I've listened to a history podcast about the robber barons and how following the backlash and dismantlement of the Standard oil, industrialist started buying articles, sometime even newspapers to sell their stories, and in the US, it worked wonderfully. You still have the brand "Quaker" that was born at the time, and probably a dozen other, where they manipulated their own famillial history to build an image, and hide the fact that children died in their mine or that they just had 20 redneck strikers killed. It's not as bad today, but building a personal brand by buying puff articles, fondations. Buying goodwill and influence was always present since at least that time (Honestly, Berkshire Hathaway made at least some of its money on WB reputation, so tech billionaires are not the only kind of CEO who do it)
Not as much as he has now: he was famously frustrated by the California state government's Covid lockdown mandates, and was pretty powerless against them. That frustration is probably what led him to buy influence in the Trump campaign,and later administration. Money can take you so far, political power will take you further for imposing your will on others.
The "Shock-and-awe"/blitzkrieg strategy is another force-multiplier. By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
Switching to a side of fellow billionaire politicians was simply a way to be among his own people, with similar levels of empathy for the working class.
>By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
I think long term someone is going to shut down his shenanigans for good. Maybe even Trump himself will throw him under the bus. But I do wonder how deep he can get and what his consequences are. Like, could he simply leak government data to Russia/China and only get away with a fine? He's not military, but Court Mashals have given the death sentence over much more mild causes.
This is a risky strategy if it is later determined that Musk broke laws with DOGE and is arrested and convicted.
Besides that, he’s pissed off the demographics most likely to buy Teslas. It’s not like most Trump voters are buying EVs
The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
> the other manufacturers are catching up
Re-read what you wrote, and consider how preposterous it is that automakers founded more than a century ago are now "catching up" to a company that sold its first car in 2008.
But, using pricing fundamentals, can you really justify Tesla’s value anymore than OpenAIs?
to justify this “vapor worth” Tesla would have to sell about 89 billion cars :)
…automakers founded more than century ago…
look-up when BYD was founded…
"Tesla stock price is too high imo"
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
The South Sea Company was also stupendously valuable until it wasn't.
Tesla is not as profitable as Toyota, GM or Volkswagen and their profit is trending down. There is nothing justifying their market cap based on their profit or even 5 year expected profit.
Tesla has made a lot of promises that they haven’t come close to fulfilling and Musk right now is the definition of regulatory capture
There is this weird revisionist history now that Musk is hated to dismiss all Tesla's accomplishments as meaningless. The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. That is both impressive and huge net positive for humanity in a way that is an extremely rare achievement for any startup.
This isn't clear to me. Maybe in the US? but in Europe, there should be no new CO2-emitting cars by 2035. There's a global trend to move to EV due to climate change that has little to do with Tesla.
And “disruption” doesn’t mean whet you think it means. Were any of the existing car manufacturers ever threatened by Tesla as far as market share and revenue like what happened to RIM and Nokia in the smart phone space?
Yes, that is why almost all of them started heavily investing in EVs after Tesla proved they were a viable product. You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/03/13/ev-euphoria-is-dead-auto...
> You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
That’s not at all what “disruption” means according to “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
https://duartem.medium.com/summary-of-the-innovators-dilemma...
Also look at “low end disruption” a “sustaining innovation”, “over serving the market”.
Most people who talk about disruption have never read Clay’s books.
> France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced.
> The Netherlands has mooted a 2025 ban for diesel and petrol cars, and some federal states in Germany are keen on a 2030 phase-out.
> India, where scores of cities are blighted by dangerous air pollution, is mulling the idea of no longer selling petrol or diesel cars by 2030, and said it wants to introduce electric cars in “a very big way”.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-...
[2] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-europe-sales-figures/
>Of Elon Musk’s Tesla, whose ‘mass market’ Model 3 is expected to roll off the production line later this week, Samuelsson [Volvo's chief executive] said: “It’s a tough competitor. But with this decision we are really becoming the second premium car maker in the world which will also be all-electrified.”
The EU followed France. France followed Volvo. Volvo followed Tesla. Tesla was the spark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_F...
I think your narrative is correct in the US, but not in the rest of the world.
I can't say I'm an expert on French automotive sales. It is possible they have always had a small market for EVs going back years, but there clearly was an inflection point that occurred after Tesla had proved there was widespread demand for EVs with 2020 being the first year that EVs made up more than 2% of new car sales in France.[1]
[1] - https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/france-keeping-p...
EVs have been around since the 90s but there was a collective effort to restrict their growth and production.
I am all for it, he took advantage of a program specifically created to be taken advantage of. But I am not sure if it wasn't for the the tax related benefits, carbon emission credits, and the damn HOV lane access Tesla would be here.
But again, amazing! The goal was achieved.
But that doesn’t justify Teslas value. In the words of the AI industry - “there is no moat” around EVs
It is just as meaningless now on HN as it was then on comp.sys.mac.advocacy back then
Unless you have some sort of way to investigate alternate timelines, there is zero evidence of this claim, including the absurd "never" claim. Many of the innovations that made EVs possible -- for instance rapid advances in battery tech along with the computational improvements to go with them -- came from outside the auto industry. And for that matter the automotive industry had been iterating on EV tech for decades before Elon started dumping money to buy himself credibility. The first lithium-ion EV came out in 1998.
The auto industry was getting there. The blip of Tesla had little impact on the overall timeline, and it certainly isn't a "huge net positive" for humanity. It's a barely noticeable nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Elon, in his absolutely desperate need to constantly be The Subject, has a brilliance in choose the inflection point for buying into something. If it's the emerging hot new thing, Elon will appear with big bags of cash demanding that he be acknolwedged as the leader that made it all happen.
Contrast that with Apple, outside of the US and a few other high income countries that is market share may be neglible. But at least it’s taking most of the profit and by far is the most profitable phone maker
The issue isnt that Tesla did stuff. Its that its all historical stuff that doesnt justify its current market price.
If I was to invest in a car company I would want them shipping millions of cars, not a "net positive for humanity" and a couple hundred thousand janky cars.
Tesla shipped 1.2 million of the Model Y alone in 2023, making it the best selling car worldwide. They sell about half as many cars as Ford, at 9x the profit margin.
I wouldn't touch Tesla stock with a 10 foot pole.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-placed-bottom-consumer-repor...
> Consumer Reports‘ annual reliability rankings have been released, and with data from 24 brands and over 300,000 vehicles, Tesla fell near the bottom (19/24) along with Mercedes-Benz, Jeep, Volkswagen, GMC, and Chevrolet. Electric vehicles overall also placed poorly, being the second least reliable category of vehicles. Hybrids/plugin hybrids, especially those from Toyota, were found to be the most reliable.
Also the idea of the “best selling car” is meaningless. That’s like when Apple has “the best selling phone” when other manufacturers like Samsung sell a dozen types of phones.
MacOS was still something like 5% or so of the overall market.
Nissan sold 3.4 million cars in 2023.
Tesla sold 1.81 million that year.
China, who are the big fish in the EV pond, sold 30 million cars in 2023. 4.9 million went overseas.
The Chinese plan? Build your existing car for cheaper and with an EV option.
SAIC\GWM sold 4.6 million cars in 2023. And their EV Ute is shockingly awesome compared to the Cybertruck.
And to make it explicit, I dislike Musk as much as the next guy and I absolutely would not invest in Tesla at this point, but we shouldn't let that bias our view of history.
>Tesla has been objectively a hugely successful investment in terms of performance
But the only thing he cant dance out of is that he is an absolutely impressive showman. I mean even in the emails OpenAI released, he very talked his way into a controlling interest in OpenAI.
I just feel like, heaps of Tesla investors are going to be left holding the bags when the shine wears off.
That said, if I saw a story about Musk wising up a little bit and hiring someone to rejuvenate his PR I would probably spread some money amongst all of his businesses.
The amount of people who try and discredit the insane things he's managed to pull off is fascinating.
I can fully understand peoples hatred of him, but to write off the literal things he has accomplished is such completely revisionist and post truth. Noone in here will like this but he probably qualifies as schumpeters definition of entrepreneur of our century unless he destroys everything in the next time period which isnt zero but a low probability.
You don’t see in the auto industry the type of “disruption” you saw from Apple and the iPhone where everyone jumped on the bandwagon, abandoned their old phones and most of the previous smart phone makers went out of business. While Apple’s market share worldwide isn’t that great, they take most of the profits. Tesla is doing neither.
Presumably the two impressive companies are SpaceX and OpenAI? Or maybe the Boring Company?
Tesla is far from the most profitable automaker and doesn’t even have the largest margins.
Compare thier place in the automaker to say Apple’s place in the phone market
It’s about products coming into the market at the low end that are “good enough” when the current leaders “over serve” the market - “low end disruption”. Examples are PCs -> mainframes, Linux x86 servers -> Unix boxes, digital cameras/phones -> regular cameras and even smart phones to PCs
Surprisingly enough, another facet of the Innovator’s dilemma is that low end disruption partially happens because the companies involved are not vertically integrated like Tesla and each part of the supply chain focuses on optimizing their components and have scale efficiencies because the low end market has more volume.
We see that now with Chinese ODMs in the EV space. We saw that before with x86 PCs vs Macs and to an extent with smart phones. Apple is kind of unique as a vertically integrated company. But even they don’t make their own processors or manufacturer their own devices
>... big event showcasing its autonomous driving tech on Feb. 10, rolling out driver assist features to EVs as low as $10,000.
They also have a funky supercar while the Tesla one we still await: https://youtu.be/6M3QdN43yqI
I’d give him SpaceX, but it definitely did better when he was paying less attention to it.
If he buys OpenAI he will be 100% of the reason I don't use it.
I wouldn't call him a founder precisely because of this, but at the same time they produced, I forget the exact number, but less than 200 individual vehicles before he took over.
The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.
(Although, given he's ranted about the difficulties of being a public company and having to listen to shareholders, I'm not sure how much this happened because of him rather than despite him).
Pretty much mainly on government money - without it, it would've gone bust long ago. Specifically the policies of Obama and those pesk environmentalists he seems to dislike so much.
(The price of batteries is also why, at the time he went for batteries, the zeitgeist was hydrogen).
He took over 5 years in when they already had the Roadster in production and the model S design was largely finalized with the goal of ever cheaper and more mass market cars over time.
The cyber truck’s look and buying solar city were definitely under his leadership, other moves are less clear.
The reports I've seen say Musk took an active role within the company starting in 2004 (Eberhard was asked to leave in 2007), including overseeing Roadster product design from the beginning (but I've not seen citations for this), and was behind the idea of using the sports car to fund the development of mainstream vehicles.
As I understand it, the first Roadster to be delivered was to Musk and in Feb 2008? So between Eberhard and Musk as CEO.
The best I can do for citations is this, but this is Musk writing on Tesla's blog — I would like to say crucially the date stamp is before Eberhard was pushed out in 2007… but the oldest archive copy is 2010 not 2006 when the blog post claims to have been written, and when the guy himself has a trust deficit I think it's worth being open about this discrepancy: https://web.archive.org/web/20100802142703/http://www.teslam...
(I also found this, which doesn't add much, but does show that Musk overpromising and people calling BS is a constant over time: https://web.archive.org/web/20111125032325/http://gigaom.com...)
“In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for slander and libel. As per NBC Bay Area, the lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the settlement, Musk and two other Tesla executives, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, are now allowed to call themselves co-founders, in addition to Eberhard and Tarpenning.”
He had zero involvement for ~1 year, invested some money and then five years later he’s CEO. That’s hardly the definition of founding anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.
So what is it that you saw in him that you liked him?
Twitter wrecked his mind. I'm not talking about buying it, I'm talking about being such a heavy user of it.
The average person on the street is smarter than him.
I'm happy with it.
As so often, it's how they treat the women around them that tells you a lot about men.
- hypocrite: free speech only for topics I approve of
- bully: and a school yard style bully at that. Calling people crude names etc. Remember "pedo guy"?
- liar: "full self driving early next year" for how many years in a row?
- reckless: doesn't seem to really care about all the tesla crashes while on auto pilot, giant safety (for others) hazard that is the cybertruck
And this is all before the current political drama.
I do because the Earth would be rid of him and we could maybe have at least 1 slow news day.
7 years ago he called Vernon Unsworth a pedophile. That was enough for me.
>I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
then you don't know much about him
memetics
I view Musk's decision here as a good thing that will benefit the world.
If he wants to, he could apply legal mechanisms. The fact he's resorting to public pandering to sycophants to back him in his righteous cause suggests that he has exhausted those legal means.
This is false, but it what he tries to portray to save face. It has been shown numerous times that he was in agreement with keeping it AI private when it was assumed he would be in control of it. And specifically for safety reasons. And the only reason OpenAI took microsoft money was because Musk pulled his already pledged and budgeted funding for the company.
Why did he pull funding? Because he insisted OpenAI was light-years behind Google (he was very wrong) and insisted the way to save it was to give him full control of the company (also wrong). They told him he was wrong so he got made and pulled his already pledged funding.
Pledging funds for a non-profit then afterwards getting upset that they won't just give you the non-profit entity is pretty absurd.
Here are some recent headlines:
* "Google" group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI.
* Teen on "Google's" DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'.
* "Google's demolition crew.
* Google's DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts
Then ask yourself, if you would write the same comment, calling "Sundar Pichai", a terrorists? Why or why not?
PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.
Using your "enormous amount of wealth" as a weapon means you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly. Especially since others will be inclined to take the other side of the bet as soon as they catch on to it happening.
/s
Musk’s vulnerability is Tesla. He has personally levered those shares in a way that makes him vulnerable to political retribution. (Banning cameras-only self-driving being one option. Politicising recalls being the nuclear one.)
I genuinely think that a political recall over his language and promises regarding self-driving are the most likely downfall of this man. (Outside maybe from his drug use and rapid political agenda as a target). I think he’s get political green-light from Trump admin to roll out nationwide self-driving and it’ll be a deadly mess, and that will be the unwinding of Tesla and Musk. The rapid recall and mess that will result will tank them in the market, and start a crisis.
Precisely, states will react to the self driving vehicles, allowing consequences outside the control of the federal government, who will happily protect him.
> Using your "enormous amount of wealth" as a weapon means you'll be frittering away that wealth very quickly.
That has not been the case throughout history. To the contrary, using "your 'enormous amount of wealth' as a weapon" has been effectively employed by those possessing same for as long as there has been an agreed upon definition of "wealth."
See any reasonable definition of power.
Musk is bad, but he's only really one example amongst thousands. And there aren't many examples of where this has ever been a good thing.
It's made worse by the fact that isolation makes them literally detached from reality. COVID completely broke some billionaire brains as it was adding to their loneliness.
How long before they start forming their own armies to cause geopolitical havoc?
I see a post on X with receipts showing millions of dollars of pretty obvious waste and/or corruption, many involving news outlet grants and subscriptions, including names, amounts, etc. Then I see some tearjerker story about families of USAID workers on one of the beneficiary news outlets. And in the comments, people lamenting that Elon Musk's success is only due to luck and his estranged father's defunct gem mine. Or worrying Elon will use their SSN (which is already available on the dark web) to open a credit card.
You're pretty smart people. Do we really think auditing government spending by a super-competent outsider is a bad thing? The last time it was done was by Clinton, btw, who managed to create a surplus (granted, the debt situation was nothing compared to today). And before that, Truman, back before hyper-partisan politics. I can't imagine the level of grift back then was anywhere close to today in our bloated budget. I'm optimistic, and I think y'all need to relax.
They recommended a review of leases and to tighten up their employee expense reporting requirements.
You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
No, no one is against “a more efficient government.” Obviously. No one is “pro-fraud.” Obviously.
Please post specific examples of fraud that DOGE has surfaced, not just “things that were congressionally approved but I don’t like.”
You say that like it’s a good thing…
This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”
That's part of living in a society. As a child, you may have run into situations where you had to accept something you didn't think was perfect in order to get something you really wanted. This is like the big kid version of that! It's so complicated and so important to do at scale that we actually create these very elaborate systems called "governments" to manage the process. What we found over time was that these big systems could be captured by people who didn't want to compromise, so we invented "Constitutions" that constrain the system, regardless of who is currently operating it.
Right now, you're saying that your personal assessment of what's pork and what's not justifies weakening the system that keeps all of us safe from our government.
lol @ civilized people in 2025 falling for the “authoritarianism in exchange for quality of life promises” trick.
I imagine it will be thousands and thousands of examples of "small time corruption" with a few million here and a few tens of millions here that in no sane world should be spent. And for some reason, people prefer to hate billionaires that create wealth when instructed by multimillionaires who siphon wealth from taxpayers but happen to own newspapers.
> You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
You could say the last two about anyone, but to deny that Elon is competent, especially coming from an anonymous internet commenter... okay.
Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.
The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!
Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...
In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...
> to deny that Elon is competent
Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
> Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program. I'm seeing a lot of appeals to authority and credentialism, and assumptions that people who are hired by bureaucrats and politicians to audit themselves have better aligned incentives than a wildcard entrepreneur. If we can't agree on the fundamental axioms, I don't see this conversation going anywhere.
US "defense" spending is so absurdly overflowing with bloat and waste, it would be like a kid in a candy store.
But instead DOGE started with a tiny department controlling ~1% of spending, one which has routinely passed independent audits and also happened to have opened an investigation into one of Musk's companies.
And the action taken? Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
I imagine that's the goal, but we're literally just a few weeks in and a large amount of the DoD is extremely secretive and difficult to access by the elected government (which is concerning enough as it is). From what I understand they are already moving to downsize the FBI, and the more secretive three letter agencies will hopefully follow.
> Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
This is really your strongest point, but if you look at the US track record abroad, most of that aid is damage control for wars/coups/etc. started directly or indirectly by the US. Most of those people, and certainly US taxpayers, would be better off with no US influence in the long run. Whether that will actually happen under this administration remains to be seen.
Pretending like anything Elon Musk is doing is legitimate auditing is absurd. Do you recall when he/DOGE gutted NIH and research funding on a whim, and he didn't even know? (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888575713629925769)
> super-competent outsider
I'd disagree about him being particularly competent at anything other than venture capital, and auditing ≠ venture capital. Regardless, why would I trust the richest man in the world to decide what the citizens of the country need and/or want from the government?
Honestly, I can keep going if you'd like, but I think this is enough to demonstrate that Elon Musk should not have illegal access to the government through his immense wealth and power (if that was not already self-evident.)
This is simply factually wrong. The twitter-engagement-bait driven nonsense like the OP in the tweet you linked is just so bad. I only got flagged about this when talking with an acquaintance working on medical research under NIH grants in the US. (I'm not from the US)
What has actually happened is adjustment of what they call the "indirect cost rate". This refers to the portion of funding you're allowed to chalk down to administrative overhead as opposed to direct research expenses.
For example in 2023, of the 35billion in NIH grants, 9billion went to administrative overhead (25%).
The new rule is them capping this to 15%. By the way this rate is around the standard in all private grant foundations.
Here is the primary source of information:
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
Now, I'm not sure if all the DEI stuff the new government doesn't like comes under "administrative overhead". If it did, it would explain the timing of the announcement. But adjusting indirect cost rates is in general a very normal thing to do, and 25% is very high, even for a prosperous grant system like the NIH.
Here [2] is a university mentioning their negotiated indirect cost rate of 56%(!!!)
For comparison, the NSF from 2010 to 2016 varied their rate only between 16% and 24% [3]. The NIH rates are absurdly high.
News articles such as [1], that directly quote the above primary source and still misconstrue it, deserve jail time.
Also, it is really disingenous to say "cutting funds for cancer research" as if it's directly targeted at cancer research.
Engagement driven media like Twitter, news websites, etc, are truly the devil of the world. And the incentives are rotten, so no matter what Musk says X isn't fixing it in any way.
</rant>
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/08/nih-cuts-bi...
[2] https://research.umich.edu/update-on-nih-indirect-cost-rate-...
In addition, Elon isn't even that rich, when compared to other entities, which aren't a singular person. As an example, BlackRock manages over $10 trillion of assets (that's 30x compared to Elon), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asset_management_firms
Elon is not the richest entity in the world, and he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything, like none of these large companies have, unless they do some weird market manipulation tricks (which should be illegal anyway).
And you're seriously arguing that that's not a pretty important difference?
> he doesn't have any special powers to bludgeon anything
I've seen him described in all kinds of ways, but "without special powers" is a first.
You are confusing "assets under management" (AUM) with actual net worth. Blackrock's net worth is $43 billion, compared to $11 trillion in AUM, because 99.6% of the top-line number you chose is actually just client money. Musk, meanwhile, is around $400 billion, so you have the numbers backwards; Musk has about 10x the net worth of the nation's largest fund manager.
And the argument is moot anyway - he wasted tens of billions on Twitter. If he was doing good things (true scotsman) he would’ve built schools.
https://truthout.org/articles/musk-pledged-6b-to-solve-world...
They didn't come up with a plan, because it's obviously impossible to solve world hunger with $6 billion. If it was possible, why USAID $40 billion annually couldn't do it.
CNN maybe wrote a bad headline? Doesn't really seem like the sort of thing to pretend to offer and then deny 42M people food aid over, but then I'm not a trillionaire. I don't think he bothered to actually read the story, instead just tweeted after reading a screenshot of a headline. He got mad about something the WFP didn't even say, and then people decided they must have said that because he got mad about it. They didn't!
If he really wanted to know what $6B could do, he could have donated it and found out. It was cheap enough for him to donate $6B to sit in the "foundation" that he personally controls, so it's not like he was hard up for cash.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/26/economy/musk-world-hunger-wfp...
> Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN’s food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.
To put this in perspective, the net assets of Google are around $300 billion, and their total assets are around $450 billion. Musk's net worth is roughly $400 billion.
Or bad things.
This is straight up wrong. Musk built Zip2 with his father's money, but everything beyond that has been built off of investing money he received from Zip2's sale to Compaq and any wealth accumulated since then. He's funding ideas, but don't lie to yourself and say that he's building them himself.
Blackrock doesn't control how the vast majority of that money is spent...
Elon's wealth is mostly in acquisitions. Even PayPal, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was an acquisition by X.com (the bank), at which point Elon was already ousted as CEO. He came back briefly, trying to convert PayPal infra over to Microsoft much to Thiel's chagrin, but then ousted again in favour of Thiel, who renamed the merged company to PayPal.
So PayPal, an acquisition (not made by Elon). Tesla, another acquisition. And like SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, they are built by actual domain experts, with wealth bootstrapped from Elon dad's wealth (who funded Zip2), and Thiel. Thiel successfully built and administered PayPal, along with Amazon one of the few companies to make it unscathed through the dotcom bubble by providing actual business value, and gave a massive boost to Elon's net worth, and it was Thiel that enabled him to acquire Tesla. And it's Tesla's absurd valuation, that's enabled him to buy all the other things he fancies, including a seat at the government.
Capital should be allowed to accumulate to those, who find the best use for the capital and use it in the most efficient way for the service of the world. That's the idea of capitalism.
Now, if he makes bad capital allocation decisions (like what this news is about), then he loses the capital to someone smarter than him, to someone who finds better use for that capital. That's also capitalism. Doing irrational or "bad" things isn't possible, without it resulting in losing that capital.
> each of which make groundbreaking products and services
It's like you didn't read a word I said.
But to respond to your claim, which I've heard many times before – including from Paul Graham. Maybe he's some genius at allocating capital in your eyes or something, but I don't think his investment decisions were even that radical, but they are within the conservative circles of people who usually have that capital behind them. If, in some fantasy land, you could give more people the same level of wealth (i.e. real purchasing power) that Elon had in the 2000s, I'm certain a lot of people would have put that money into electric vehicles and batteries. They were exciting at the time, and had demonstrably great potential for returns, but they required enormous capex. Conservative old money wasn't interested in making that kind of all-in investment, but that's just because the kind of person that hoards wealth, isn't the kind that makes those kinds of bets. Elon had the luck of being wealthy enough, and also being an outsider with an aspirational mindset. That isn't so special, beyond the dumb luck of riding the coat tails of Peter Thiel's company.
Definitely not what I was arguing, but I'll leave you to figure out how we got here.