xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B
twitter.com
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https://www.businessinsider.com/solarcity-tesla-energy-belea...
There were a few lawsuits from Tesla shareholders about the acquisition regarding self dealing but they didn’t succeed:
At least in Delaware. I have no idea what corporate law is like in Texas.
How'd that work out in the past with the previous owners?
Long history of not being profitable - 2018 and 2019 feel like more of an anomaly than a trend.
The problem people had understanding them was that they weren’t Facebook or Google. The expectations of a money-printing machine were unrealistic but they had a solid middle-tier business with a large number of solid customers.
https://www.teslarati.com/x-investors-winning-big-elon-musk-...
https://sherwood.news/tech/companies-hoarding-nvidia-gpu-chi...
If anyone makes it work (whatever that means) in software they could buy it?
That's a big if, and I think most people would be pretty skeptical of the possibility of that happening. The fact that outside investors seem to value it at under $10B suggests that's a common enough opinion.
I had an employer taken over by PE and shredded, for the crime of only managing 10% profit margin. Apparently, to some, if 20% of revenue doesn't go into someone's pocket, your business is a corpse. I think the world needs to chuck that attitude in the bin.
Businesses often use an opportunity cost of around 14%, so if the business is earning only 10%, then they are losing 4%.
For example, if you start a risky venture that earns 2%, when you could invest the money safely in bonds at 5%, it doesn't make sense to do the risky venture.
It's not an "attitude", it's maximizing the use of the money.
The US invented flat screen technology. The return on manufacturing didn't fit American business profit levels so they sold the technology off to overseas companies. Tariff's aren't going to fix that. They might artificially boost the return short term, but unless we are going permanent protected markets this sort of low return manufacturing isn't coming back, because of American management style, not 'Canada bad', not 'trade deals bad'. If anything a better cause statement would be to say 'American MBAs bad'.
You need some diversity in a system to remain able to change. Very homogenous populations are more likely to be wiped out in a crisis. Maximal efficiency is not maximal meta-efficiency.
Crush every competitor through regulation?
X is clearly worth a lot more than just it's revenue would indicate.
What is the most influential social media site worth? Perhaps all of the money in the world...
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:y5xyloy...
Where are the advertising dollars coming from on that horror show
Certainly not $45 BILLION of income over even a century
But you'd have to be on the side of fascists to believe that.
However, secondary markets for these megacorps are relatively liquid, so the valuations are not actually completely baseless.
Nobody does, really. Texas is relatively new to its 'corporate registration friendly' game, and at least on paper the statutory law is the same. Texas courts don't have to follow Delaware's case history, but it's also not a given that they will rule in a vastly more owner-friendly manner.
they know what they buying when elon promotes his lmao, elon twitter deal is backed by saudi. elon himself come to saudi asking for an investment from royal prince saudi
safe to say that if they want spent 40 billion for twitter, they would spent more with AI flavored company (they are saudi after all)
It breaks my heart because my rust belt hometown got a substantial investment from the state they had been chasing for a couple decades.
$700M of the Buffalo Billion went to a Solar City facility, Elon even said they were going to build the solar roofs there!
New York State didn't dare pick a fight with him as the factory set empty for years.
Full story via Bethany McLean, 2019:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-elon-musk-gamble...
I suspect most of the business is battery storage and the Powerwall was introduced by Tesla before the acquisition.
According to the company filings the solar assets Tesla acquired are still generating revenue at the rates projected during the acquisition.
But even if it's true I assume they are including their utility-scale solar and battery packs, which has nothing to do with Solar City: the panels are generic, the customer lists are not residential, they don't use the fancy shingles. Solar City did not help them in any way with these getting or fulfilling these contracts.
There's no substantiation of that either way.
I have a SolarCity install that came with the house.
The Power Purchase Agreement lease seemed shady at first, but ultimately I believe it's working out better for my family than for Tesla.
I'm paying just under 11 cents per kWh and it can only go up a maximum of 3% per year for the next ~15 years.
The result is that solar generally has a generation cost of ~$0.04/kWh (which includes the cost of the land) but meanwhile you have customers happy to be paying $0.11/kWh. The trade off is the one-time cost of installing it on individual roofs is more labor intensive than doing a large-scale installation in a field somewhere, but that just means it's competitive rather than having a massive advantage.
You can absolutely draw adverse inferences from Tesla's refusal to report certain straightforward, useful numbers. For example, their refusal to publish any real safety statistics, to the point where Elon Musk himself has to invoke rubbish numbers like the 'community tracker'.
If, after all the lawsuits and accusations of failure, and the reporting about the near-zero deliveries and idled factories, the Tesla Energy division is giving you no numbers on the solar roof, and is lumping them together with a totally different product like batteries, there is one thing and only one thing that that means: the numbers are awful.
I don't think that's the true at all. There's a vast and visible footprint we can see with batteries (pretty sure every major solar company in the U.S. that has a battery storage option does at least some Tesla) that has no equivalent with solar rooftops. The former are ubiquitous while the latter are so far as I can tell almost entirely non existent.
And if that's too light on data I'll put it this way, I'm reasonably confident I can find 10 solar companies that install Tesla batteries for every one that does Solar City roofs.
Even if its low for solar, it doesn't mean it was a bad deal. He acquired existing customers he could sell other products to.
If you have evidence that’s not the case, that would be interesting to share.
For what it's worth, I don't even know what the inverse position would be, SolarCity was a solar panel maker, and famously, the idea after they realized they couldn't come close to China's prices, was solar roof tiles. They would be a major breakthrough project that would make Solar City a breakout financial hit.
Do people think Tesla makes solar panels? Solar roofs?
I don't blame them, I guess, this carnival has been going on for years.
I'm somewhat surprised how dedicated you are to avoiding information and asking for someone, anyone, to give info. It's been 18 hours and 3 replies on your end, albeit without people taking the time to spell it out to you like this. Personally, I would have looked into it a bit myself.
> It's been 18 hours and 3 replies on your end
You appear nowhere in comments I replied to. Is this your alt account?
Its not like the courts are investment banks with an evaluation arm. They are just judging if anything reaches the point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.
The commenter you are responding to is explicitly intending to place more emphasis on the reason why the lawsuit failed. That is why they used the phrase “burying the lede” in their initial comment.
>They are just judging if anything reaches the point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.
This distinguishes the lawsuit failing from the idea that a fair price was paid. The competing contentions are (a) fair price vs (b) unfair but beneath threshold of legally punishable harm.
(d) a court has no idea what a fair price would look like but made a finding of fact based on expert testimony despite being poorly situated to evaluate it
Under Delaware law, there’s two standards for evaluating this kind of claim. When there is no conflict of interest, the court applies the “business judgment rule,” which is similar to what you seem to be thinking—it gives corporate officers wide latitude.
But when there is a conflict of interest, the court applies the “entire fairness” standard, which requires both fair dealing and a fair price. And a fair price means what it sounds like—it’s what an objective businessman would consider a fair price under the circumstances. It doesn’t need to be the best price, but it must be within the range of fair. And to establish a fair price, the court relies on evidence from financial valuation experts. It’s a rigorous standard that’s hard to meet.
I generally find expert testimony to be suspect. Anyone can be trotted forward as an expert, rattle off their credentials, and say whatever they feel like saying, depending on who is paying them to testify. And financial valuation is not a science; there is of course plenty of math involved that takes into account hard, objective numbers, but a good chunk of it is opinion, too, as no one an know the future.
Having said that, the Delaware Chancery Court of course has more experience in these matters than any other state's courts, so I am of the opinion that they're less likely to be duped by "experts", but sill... it can and does happen.
Ofc, that wouldn't help for software... because no licensure.
Of course, the license doesn’t mean anything if everyone falls under an industrial exemption. I’d be in favor of safety-critical software requiring a PE stamp.
I’d also point out that, in the legal industry, Delaware’s entire fairness standard is seen as a rigorous standard that typically results in victory for the plaintiff. The Chancery Court ruling resulted in various law firm updates using the case as an example of how the entire fairness standard isn’t always a death sentence for defendants.
I have two feelings on this. One of which is alarm because it is a sentiment like this which is the backbone of misinformation believers and spreaders and we're in the worst era of misinformation I think that we've been in in a long time. Certainly the worst since the dawn of the digital age. Experts are right about vaccines. Right about building your savings with a 401k. They're right about using sunscreen. They're right about not ingesting too much sugar. They're right about reading to your kids from an early age and right about the impacts of tariffs on the economy. They're right about climate change. They're right about the Higgs Boson, etc. etc. In almost every case, the people going against the experts on these things are cranks, frauds, or confused conspiracy theorists.
But my other feeling is one of agreement in a very qualified sense. I believe that within the U.S. legal system, people who are presented as experts in certain forms of science, are able to invoke an unearned professional authority and legitimacy that has nothing in common with genuine expertise. When we talk about pseudoscience in the modern age, a lot of the time it's about new age crystals or evolution denial, but I think expert witnesses presented as authoritative in courtrooms have been responsible for generations upon generations of pseudoscience of various types. Everything from penmanship analysis to bite mark analysis to body language experts to, rather remarkably, supposed 911 phone call tonality analysis experts Who can include that wrongly timed emotional tremors or presence or absence of emotions prove the callers involvement in a crime.
And while it might be a gray area, I suspect there's at least a fair amount of crankery or motivated reasoning with hired gun economic experts summoned to Delaware courts to testify in favor of major corporate acquisitions.
So swap out "punishable" and instead say "legally actionable" (or other preferred synonym) and you nevertheless have an assessment that falls under what you noted is the entire fairness standard and the upshot is the same.
Also my understanding is that courts defer to the experts of the acquiring company. And if those experts are predisposed to have a favorable interpretation that favors the acquiring company, the valuation is in the less than optimal range of a range of values produced even by them, and they, by contrast to an actual market, might be much more lenient than a market would be in determining the price. So there's a convergence of variables that underscore the difference between fair as we conventionally understand the term (which is what we were all interested in here) and whatever it means to have survived legal scrutiny in Delaware.
Which again I would say means that this debate has real teeth and it's more than semantically equivalent differences in emphasis.
(As you know, but others may not - this is not always the standard vs the business judgment rule, but is the standard here)
I just wanna know where we can find these shareholders and evict them from earth because they're destroying everything.
I have no holdings in armaments or instruments of torture, apparently. But that's about the most constraint I can apply, short of self-managing.
Unfortunately the private sector has dominated the zeitgeist for decades; a kind of meta-regulatory-capture, if you will.
I can't trust that there will be a state pension waiting for me. So I'm in the private sector. Got some bonds in my mix, at least.
and
"paid a fair price"
are two entirely different things.
Was it actually fair as evaluated by any outsider on first principles? Probably not. Was it criminally unfair? No.
The court ruled:
> Even assuming (without deciding) that Elon was Tesla’s controlling stockholder, the Tesla Board was conflicted, and the vote of the majority Tesla’s minority stockholders approving the Acquisition did not trigger business judgment review, such that entire fairness is the standard of review, the persuasive evidence reveals that the Acquisition was entirely fair…
> Equally if not more important, the preponderance of the evidence reveals that Tesla paid a fair price—SolarCity was, at a minimum, worth what Tesla paid for it, and the Acquisition otherwise was highly beneficial to Tesla. Indeed, the Acquisition marked a vital step forward for a company that had for years made clear to the market and its stockholders that it intended to expand from an electric car manufacturer to an alternative energy company. The Court’s verdict, therefore, is for the defense.
"The trial court noted that these “process flaws flow[ed] principally from [Musk’s] apparent inability to acknowledge his clear conflict of interest and separate himself from Tesla’s consideration of the Acquisition."
"Upon recognizing these process flaws, the court then turned to what it identified as the strengths. It found six."
"Regarding fair dealing, the trial court noted that the road leading to the Acquisition was not entirely smooth. The court found, however,that the “Tesla Board meaningfully vetted the Acquisition” and Musk “did not impede the Tesla Board’s pursuit of a fair price.”Although Appellants assert that the court failed to make a finding of fair dealing, the court’s opinion can only reasonably be read and understood as concluding that the flaws did not overcome the findings of the process strengths and that the process, overall, was the product of fair dealing."
Read that as a ringing endorsement if you like.
> In instances where there are process infirmities, the Court is obliged to study fair price even more carefully. I have done that here. After careful consideration, I am persuaded Elon presented credible evidence that Tesla paid a fair price for SolarCity. Plaintiffs answered by proffering incredible testimony that SolarCity was insolvent, and then provided some “also ran” theories on value that their experts did not ultimately endorse, or at least not persuasively so. Given this, I have no credible basis in the evidence to conclude that a “fairer price” was available, and therefore, no basis to conclude that the price paid was not entirely fair. Indeed, the price was, in my view, not “near the low end of a range of fairness,” but “entirely” fair in the truest sense of the word.
When the same people are making the ask as making the buy, you literally cannot decouple the decision-making in a way that objectively eliminates cooperation.
A market cannot exist when the entities involved abandon adversarial decision-making and cooperate. One's priority is always suborned by one or the other.
That is, the standard the defendants have to meet (not the plaintiffs, the burden is actually on tesla here despite having been sued) is that the transaction was entirely fair to the corporation and shareholders- the process was a fair one, the price was a fair one, etc.
I have trouble thinking of a case where you can prove all this[1] but the market would have come up with something different. Almost by definition, if the market would have decided to pay a lower price, either the price or the process was probably not fair.
[1] Which again, you have to do affirmatively. You aren't just rebutting plaintiff evidence, the burden is on you to show the fairness
Not sure the court was capable of that judgement.
It’s like everyone just forgets Musk’s announcements that never get delivered on.
"""“I feel very confident predicting autonomous robo taxis for Tesla by next year. Not in all jurisdictions, because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere. But we will have regulatory approval at least at some point next year,” Musk said toward the end of the presentation. “From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a year in three months, but next year for sure, we will have over a million robo taxis on the road.”""" - Musk, April 2019
But later today I’ll be heading out in a Waymo robotaxi which will actually be here.
GP is referring to Tesla's promise to build electric semi trucks, not the pickup truck that Cybertruck is.
> And FSD is basically here which means robotaxis are basically here. Now there are just regulatory hurdles and the long tail.
AIUI, Tesla FSD is at best Level 3 automation (probably more like Level 2), which means it requires constant driver supervision to keep the car from committing suicide. That's pretty far from being "basically here", especially since Tesla seems extremely loth to accept any responsibility for FSD-related crashes.
https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/news...
The private moon mission is off because the costumer pulled out. But Starship is still in development and is contract with NASA for a moon mission.
Of course Robotaxi isn't close to existing.
Musk announced in January that it was to launch in June, in Austin.
The semi factory will be finished late this year.
FSD gets better each month. Obviously there is massive debate if it will be “done” in 1, 2, 5, 10 or never years
Robotaxis were announced recently, the plan as announced is for them to be sold in 2026. That has not changed.
Looks like they’ll have some kind of driverless taxi service running this year with remote operators like Waymo.
Private moon mission was canned.
I think it’s pretty strange to say Musks promises never get delivered on when Tesla sells the most popular car on the planet two years running, spacex launches more to orbit than the rest of the world combined and a ton of other stuff.
Obviously he’s utterly nuts, and doesn’t deliver everything he talks about, and is very late on many things. But you have to be blind to say he never delivers anything.
He takes risks very few others are willing to do, but he is not nuts by any reasonable definition.
> No disrespect.
But you disrespected me anyway :-)
He is batshit. He is also smart and has accomplished some impressive things. The two are not incompatible.
That's common human behavior.
> False accusations of pedophilia against people he doesn’t know?
Against a single person who had just called him "insane" on TV. Not nuts at all.
> Free speech absolutist who gleefully bans speech?
Not all speech is free speech - you cannot advocate for hits on people, for example. Besides, it's perfectly legal to censor speech on his platform. Not nuts at all. Musk has made no attempt to suppress speech on Bluesky, Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok, etc.
> Corporate acquirer who accidentally fires key people
That's not how it worked. Twitter was losing money at an astonishing rate, and he had to cut expenses immediately. It is the fastest way to determine who was actually needed and who wasn't. Then hire back the ones who were actually needed.
> makes the exact same mistake as a coup leader?
It's the only way to do it when time is critical. It's also the only way when the agencies are doing everything possible to not cooperate with DOGE.
There's been no coup. Trump was lawfully elected.
Do you ever stop and think it’s an amazing coincidence that every criticism of Musk is totally unfair?
For example, where was the disgust at the person who publicly called Musk insane first? A fair criticism would have included that. A fair person would also be aware that there is not a single person on the planet who has not called someone else a nasty name.
This is false if "etc." includes Wikipedia, on which Musk has attempted to suppress speech critical of him [1].
[1]: https://theweek.com/media/elon-musk-wikipedia-controversy
He did denounce Wikipedia, and called for people to not support it. That's not an attack on free speech.
Actually it just came out yesterday he did try to suppress free speech on Reddit.
At one point with Tesla he was within hours of business and personal bankruptcy, before making a deal with an investor. The investor wasn't the government.
The taxpayer never assumed a risk there.
> but not profits) to the taxpayer
He pays taxes on profits like anyone else.
Musk said himself SpaceX would’ve gone bankrupt without NASA contracts. He needed those contracts because Spacex was too high of a risk at the time for private business. NASA is self-insured. This is the the way the government supports high-risk nascent industries, because they are the only institution capable of shouldering that risk.
It’s well-established that the solvency of his companies are tightly coupled, just like TFA. Further, Tesla is made competitive by subsidies for EVs and manufacturing. Not necessarily bad, but the success isn’t occurring in a free-market vacuum. When companies accepting subsidies go under, the govt doesn’t typically get that money back, at least not in full. (See the faux Solyndra “scandal”)
I know that doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of the mythical free-market iconoclast succeeding in spite of the govt, but that’s reality.
On the profit side, I should have said he gets a disproportionate amount of profit and the taxpayer gets a disproportionate amount of risk.
And he wasn't paid until he delivered, like any contract with a business. The taxpayers were never at risk. It was not a subsidy.
Yes, Tesla benefited from EV subsidies, like all the electric car makers. He'd be stupid not to take the subsidy.
> You may want to familiarize yourself with counter examples from Musk biographers, like Seth Abramson.
I read "Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance.
I’d implore you to research more about how the CCP is administered. There are payments before any astronaut gets a ride. Meaning if the company goes out of business beforehand, the taxpayers lost that money without receiving the actual service intended. That’s also why NASA selected two CCP contractors, it distributes the risk. Maybe you think socializing risk to the taxpayer makes him a smart businessman, I just wish people would comes to terms with the fact that his wealth is inextricably linked to taxpayers. Like I said before, it’s not even necessarily a bad thing but call it what it is. I personally think the hybrid public-private arrangement works well when it’s not being abused.
Regardless of all that, the point was that Musk is not a paragon of free-market capitalism. Nothing you’ve pointed out negates that point, yet people still cling to that narrative for…reasons. I suspect it has more to do with cognitive biases than reality.
When I had the roof replaced, I had to pay half up front.
And so on. This is normal business practice.
There is nothing not free market about progress payments.
(Besides, if NASA was fronting all the money, SpaceX wouldn't have gone bankrupt if the rocket blew up. But what I've read was Musk bet the company on it not blowing up.)
I decided to check one detail. The EV subsidy came in the form of a tax credit to the buyer, it is not paid to the car manufacturer. Musk had nothing to do with it.
> I suspect it has more to do with cognitive biases than reality.
Imagining oneself as dealing in reality rather than cognitive bias is yet another cognitive bias. Everything written about Musk is subject to cognitive bias one way or another.
Businesses can leverage POs to fund operations. That’s why the NASA contract matters.
Yes, the EV subsidy goes to the buyer. The point was it makes the product more competitive at its price point. That point still stands. Besides, Tesla also benefited from multiple other taxpayer benefits. For example, they get hundreds of millions in tax incentives for their factories. Again, their profitability is propped up by taxpayers.
I’ve never claimed to be completely unbiased. However, we do have the benefit of testing out narratives with facts. The mental gymnastics needed to deny that these ventures/profits are somehow not related to taxpayers is, in a word, “nuts”
It's utterly inappropriate. First, your card is submitted and approved prior to you getting the ride. The uber is going to get that payment, you have no choice. Second, I wouldn't be surprised if the amount is put on hold with the credit card company before the ride begins - I know gas stations do this. Third, it's a trivial amount of money compared with buying a house. Fourth, the uber driver cannot operate if he hasn't already bought the car and the gas.
> That point still stands.
Musk had no control over it. The tax credit was given to the consumer. It also was for all EVs, it was not targeted at Musk.
> they get hundreds of millions in tax incentives for their factories. Again, their profitability is propped up by taxpayers.
A tax abatement is not a subsidy. A subsidy is a payment. Tax abatement is not "propped up" by other taxpayers, they did not get their taxes raised by it, and the company was not previously paying taxes for that location.
I'm curious why you (apparently) think that anyone could have done what Musk did? Why didn't you (or anyone else) get those subsidies and tax credits and contracts and create Tesla and SpaceX? I've read that Musk is an imbecile who somehow failed into being the richest entrepreneuer on Earth?
Tesla + SpaceX is worth about $1.2 trillion dollars. If the government started it with a billion dollars, consider all the taxes Tesla + SpaceX + Musk + employees + investors has paid since. Wow what a return on investment! And as a bonus, NASA gets to shoot off rockets that cost only 10% of NASA-built rockets.
C'mon, this is bordering on a disingenuous argument. You can't acknowledge the different between a service and a product. That's literally the novelty of the CCP. In general practice, you don't pay for a service until after its rendered. But not the case in the NASA contract. If your Uber doesn't show up, you'll get reimbursed whatever small hold they put on. You're only out the service. If SpaceX went belly-up, NASA isn't getting milestone payments back and they don't get their ride. They're out payment and service.
>Musk had no control over it.
Are you claiming that subsidies don't get factored into a business plan? Again, the point is government action makes the business more competitive/profitable. Subsidies to the consumer absolutely impact that. Tesla's own filing acknowledge this point. E.g., they mention regulatory credits add $2.7B to their revenue. They also mention how consumer subsidies impact consumer demand for their cars, and how tax abatements are fundamental to projected operating expenses and financial obligations. Their own statements run afoul of the narrative you're defending.
>they did not get their taxes raised by it, and the company was not previously paying taxes for that location.
Correct. We agree the taxpayers are losing an income stream. If your house was built in a location, do you think you could claim "well there was nothing here before, so not paying income taxes is of no consequence"? It's a weird take if you think the public isn't offering something of value with beneficial tax breaks. If they are offering something of value, they are helping the business. I also agree the taxpayers can benefit from it, I don’t think they have to be in conflict, just acknowledged.
>I'm curious why you (apparently) think that anyone could have done what Musk did?
I've never claimed that, you seem to border on fanboy admiration of him. I think Musk is a once in a generation entrepreneur. I also think his business MO is heavily reliant on government contracts and special treatment. Those two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But the latter is contradictory to free-market ideals. That's the point that you're constantly side-stepping. Worship him if you want, but also acknowledge his success is tightly coupled to governmental help.
SpaceX has done amazing things. Buit I'm going to venture we have different opinions why. IMO, t's because they get to operate under different rules. I think the main advantage that NASA is buying is a plausible way to skirt a lot of the rules (political and technical) they must abide by. CCP does not, and that's largely why they can do things differently. That's not a guarantee of success (see: Boeing) but it sets the table.
You may not realize it, but we've had this same tired discussion a while ago. At that time, I said we will see Musk's business acumen with what he does with Twitter. Apropos of TFA, that doesn't currently put him in good light. 6 months ago it was valued at $9B, and then shortly later valued at $45B so that he could essentially sell it to himself at that valuation. At the very least, that indicates a lot of uncertainty. That is a suspect valuation, but to be generous there are some differential outcomes: 1) xAI becomes profitable largely due to the synergies from the sale of Twitter/X, 2) xAI is profitable in spite of the purchase, 3) xAI does not become profitable. It will be interesting to see, and I will be interested to see if we'll ever get insight into the private company to find out. It will also be interesting to see if future success is still coupled to government/political help; I suspect that's a drug hard to break from.
He sells rockets to the government at 10% of what it would cost the government to buy them elsewhere. It's clearly Musk helping the government. Besides, Musk did not get subsidies for SpaceX nor special treatment.
> Are you claiming that subsidies don't get factored into a business plan?
No, I claimed that Musk had no control over the EV subsidy, which was given to buyers of electric cars from any company.
> acknowledge his success is tightly coupled to governmental help
Making a better, cheaper rocket is helping the government save tens of billions of dollars.
> contradictory to free-market ideals
The government keeps taking our economy farther and farther from the free market. Government taxes, subsidizes, and regulates. It isn't really possible to run a free market business in the US.
I know it's cool these days to dump on Musk and denigrate his achievements with "you didn't build that" (as if anyone else could have done it), but history will show him to be the greatest entrepreneuer the world has ever seen.
The government has subsidized other companies. None of them succeeded like Musk did. Not remotely. The idea that the government created Musk is just nonsense.
I don’t know the specifics of these contracts, but I very much doubt it based on my experience. That’s not how any Government development contract I’ve ever worked on has worked… There are startup payments, payments for milestones (including many at the start for various design stages before anything was built), payments at varying levels of build, etc… - often more than half (sometimes more than three quarters) of the contract value was paid before the final product was delivered.
We did some pretty cool things too (this was in defence satellite communications) but various Government customers took like 80% of the risk on the development most of our big products (obviously we had already proven our design abilities with smaller components but much smaller scale), which we would then sell to them and other Governments.
What you're describing is Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell Collins, etc. SpaceX is the opposite--it provided NASA a service that was necessary for NASA to operate, at a fraction of the cost of competitors: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093.
The fact that NASA makes interim payments on the contracts doesn't turn a purchase of services into a subsidy. "Free market" does not mean "off the shelf." It's extremely common in B2B settings for buyers to shoulder some up-front costs to develop products or services that aren't available in the market. For example, Apple made a large up-front payment to a supplier to speed up development of sapphire glass: https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/iphone-sapphire-glas....
Buyers take-on some risk when they do that, but that doesn't make it a subsidy. In Apple's case, they take on the risk in return for the bet that a supplier can provide them with huge volumes at a low price. In NASA's case, it took on some development risk because SpaceX promised a large reduction in launch costs.
You’re muddling points. I’m not saying the NASA contract was a subsidy. Tesla is a better example of subsidies.
No private capital was willing to contract to SpaceX until the risk was lowered. They’ve succeeded in doing so and deserve credit. However, they would have never gotten to that point without taxpayer dollars. Governments were the only institutions capable and willing of taking on that high initial risk. That point still stands. It’s odd that your stance denies that when Musk himself has admitted it.
The payoff for government was getting rockets at 10% of the cost of other rockets.
The government pays spacex to complete contracts. They pay tens of thousands of companies the same way - defence, bridges, trains, roads, etc. in fact, every government does this. It’s also worth pointing out spacex have completed those contracts much cheaper than competitors who have not delivered (ie star liner). As far as the gov giving out contracts for space stuff, spacex are literally the best option, and directly save taxpayers money.
Tesla gets subsided because the government wants to encourage EVs. Oil extraction and refining, corn, education, healthcare, defence and literally thousands of other sectors are also heavily subsidized. Again, every government in the world does this for sectors they want to encourage.
You are so hell bent on your “Musk bad” line you didn’t realize it has nothing to do with him or his companies. You are angry at how governments around the world pay for and subsidizes sectors every single day.
We agree the government supports sectors they want to encourage. See my previous comments about supporting high-risk nascent industries. That’s a different point than the one I was making, which is that support is a large part why those industries can exist during their initial high risk phase. My point is he is not a paragon of free-market capitalism because they rely on government support during high-risk stages. Both points can coexist. It also doesn’t imply I think he is “bad”.
You are trying to shoehorn a different discussion. I’ve never said Musk is bad. In fact, I’ve said he’s a once in a generation entrepreneur and that his companies have delivered wonderful things to the taxpayer. My claim is that his success is not the free-market ideal because it relies on government largesse. In your head, you appear to view it through a completely different lens because you seem to want to construct this “good vs bad” false narrative. The fact that you are bypassing the points reiterated multiple times isn’t conducive to a curious, nuanced, and thoughtful discussion
It is exactly the same for SoaceX and Boeing, other than Boeing getting way more money for the same job.
Free-market capitalism is like the Easter bunny - a nice bedtime story for children. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know why it’s difficult to actually read and critique the point being made, rather than constant digressions into others, but it makes for boring conversation. If you have a point that SpaceX didn’t need government contracts early, then make it. I’d be curious to hear it, but I don’t think the data supports it.
You’re making out like SpaceX are doing something unique or morally wrong, when what they are doing is perfectly common, and the government couldn’t function without companies doing what spacex are doing.
Your message makes no sense. This is everyday stuff across the entire economy.
The only story Is that spacex saved the government (taxpayers) billions compared to paying Boeing who can’t even deliver.
Also show me when I say SpaceX was doing something unique or morally wrong. Was it when I said other contractors do the same? Was it when I pointed out Boeing’s shortcomings? How any when I said SpaceX has done wonderful things for the taxpayer? Or how the public-private partnership works well?
Why do you insist on ignoring all the things we seem to agree on to fabricate an argument? Is it because you are incapable of admitting sometimes the government does good things? You are tilting at windmills, my friend.
Keep it concise and to the point. Make it worthwhile.
His high-risk bets have largely been buoyed by government contracts
SpaceX wouldn’t have survived without govt intervention. I think the same can be said of Tesla to a lesser extent. That’s not bad, it’s the way things work with high-risk nascent industries.
Since you seem to champion him a lot, I'd really like to hear your take on his Nazi salute.
He’s also never criticized (while busy criticizing European democracies) Russia or Putin, which are obviously nazi at this point.
His point is that Elon may promise more than he delivers, but he has still delivered on quite a lot.
I'm required to supervise my car while it drives me to work, but it is by definition fully self driving, controlling all aspects of the vehicle while I sit with hands off the wheel watching
Per https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
[2017] The sensor hardware and compute power required for at least level 4 to level 5 autonomy has been in every Tesla produced since October of last year.
[2017] I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a Tesla] is about two years
[2018] Probably technically be able to [self deliver Teslas to customers doors] in about a year then its up to the regulators
[2019] We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year.
[2020] Robotaxis release/deployment... Functionality still looking good for this year. Regulatory approval is the big unknown
[2020] I am extremely confident that level five or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think, will happen very quickly, I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level five autonomy. I think—I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year, There are no fundamental challenges remaining.
[2020] I'm extremely confident that Tesla will have level five next year, extremely confident, 100%
[2021] FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021
The project was unilaterally cancelled by the client, Yusaku Maezawa, in May 2024. Starship development had fallen significantly behind the original SpaceX aspirational date for the flight in 2023, and Maezawa's net worth had also halved since venture was announced in 2018.
And then there's the ones he did deliver on, like spectacular re-usable rockets, Starlink, Neuralink, etc.
Marques Brownlee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJeSWbR6W04
They are expensive though, but nice looking.
> And Tesla trucks?
https://www.dhl.com/global-en/delivered/responsibility/dhl-t...
Tesla is currently building a dedicated factory in Nevada for the Semi Truck. Production is starting end of this year and ramping up in 2027.
They issued a 127 page supporting decision on why they found it was a fair process that generated a fair price.
Want to say which part you take issue with that shows it was not capable of the judgement?
FWIW - I actually hate tesla, i just also hate the sort of drive by shitting on other fields that HN seems to do sometimes. If there are concrete reasons to believe they aren't capable, let's have that discussion. Otherwise, there's no need to denigrate others capabilities without evidence based on our feelings :)
edit: oh it's not copyleft, but specifically quid pro quo so tesla gives you their patents if you give them yours
Quid pro quo is well adjusted for the context.
> They issued a 127 page
I am sure they wrote a lot of words. But it kinda seems like they were wrong given the evidence.
Solar city shut down. The evidence shows that it was a poor acquisition.
I can just point to that huge failure that we can see right now.
Companies eventually failing does not mean they were bad deals at the time (or even a bad deal later). Not everything succeeds. The question is not "did anyone successfully predict the future" or even "was it a good thing to buy" but instead "was it a fair price and a fair deal at the time they bought it". So i have no idea why you keep bringing up what happened later as it it's relevant at all, and won't tell anyone why you think it's relevant to the past.
Given you refuse to read and cite a single thing that the judge actually got wrong and keep citing the end of solar city as if this somehow changes the past about whether it was fair deal for a fair price at the time, it's hard to believe you are really doing this in good faith, so i'm out.
(FWIW - i was the first solarcity customer in maryland, and given my experience i certainly have no love for them, but you aren't presenting any coherent argument here)
Grandparent is not correct, you can’t just assign “whatever” value in self-dealing transactions.
The SEC and IRS weren’t born yesterday. It reminds me of people who come up with basic self-dealing transactions with some tax benefit and act like the idea wasn’t around 100 years ago and that regulations aren’t already in place.
Where are the solar roof tiles? What’s happened to the tax payer funded factory in NY?
If I were an investor in xAI I would be furious about this. They're almost certainly overpaying for Twitter and there's definitely going to be litigation.
Edit: It sounds like the combined entity is taking on Twitter's $12 billion of debt from when it originally went private. As of last December xAI had raised "more than $12 billion" in total [1], so the deal attaches Twitter's debt to that ~12 billion pot of VC money. Unless I'm really misunderstanding something this deal looks like a bailout of Twitter and a huge new liability for xAI.
It's definitely possible my hot take is wrong and the xAI investors support the transaction. I hope so because if not there's going to be some brutal lawsuits over this.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/technology/elon-musk-xai-...
The valuation of those 2 companies combined should be < $10 billions if we are very very generous.
X is heavily in debt, diminishing user base, and bleeding money. 0 profits
xAI is yet to make any actual revenues outside of ... X. Also bleeding money
Although I would admit, that these companies are not valued based by their economics, but rather on political power they provide to the owner.
All while the same CEO claims that the public company is the leader in the field ?
Even by Tesla & Musk lawlessness standard that would be too wild.
> Even by Tesla & Musk lawlessness standard that would be too wild.
Not to be overly snarky here, but, uh: what standard? They have proven over and over that they could not give less of a shit about either societal norms or the laws of the nation.
Which they spend 3 years or so building and which seem completely useless. The only big unknown would be how much Tesla did Boring Company for that.
So yeah...
IMO this is going to be meteoric in nature. As in the meteor hits the ground.
If the world wasn't perceptibly irrational, I'd short.
Given his political involvement, I would assume that the maximum end date for this house of cards is the date when Trump is no longer in power - which is less than 4 years away. The real date is probably much sooner, but who knows when ?
Every six months is a 50% chance of ejection.
In those cases, it usually revolved around Tesla releasing either the Model 3 or Y, and they were betting against Musk's execution in general. What wasn't really up for debate (in my mind) was the technological lead or the demand in the marketplace for the car.
Essentially, Tesla was primed in both situations for a huge market they had to themselves: electrified transport.
Now?
- demand is tanking, and the brand is permanently damaged, well, as long as Musk is at the helm.
- competitors are everywhere
- technological moat (with respect to EV drivetrain/construction) is gone. I could argue their cylindrical cells are legacy/semi-obsolete in fact, since IMO pouch cells are superior for LFP/sodium ion, and who knows what solid state will optimally package.
Anyway, things are VERY different in my opinion.
But it's not is it. Try looking at the trends long term, not just YTD. It's remarkably stable, trending upwards. Yes it gain a bunch of value from October to January/February, which is has lost. Investors seems to have traded on the "First Buddy" effect, that didn't actually do anything for Tesla, so that value has now been removed and we're back on the original trend line.
How the hell drop in sales and lose of brand value hasn't caused to stock to absolutely tank is beyond me. Is someone artificially keeping the price stable? Do investors see something I don't, or they do just not care?
BTW: find it: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2024/11/
https://electrek.co/2023/06/21/tesla-dojo-supercomputer-is-f...
Definitely on the FSD timeline right now - they are maybe at 1% of what they announced they would be today. But hey, it's Optimus now !
Edit: I misread, Musk said it's an all-stock deal, so you're right, it's all funny money. I think that means the combined entity is taking on that debt. It's still great for Twitter and bad for xAI investors because the combined entity now has both the $12 billion debt and all the VC xAI raised.
This is a terrible and inefficient use of money. It’s inevitable that this paper house will fall over
It's still wildly overvalued, and at it's unclear how long the market will stay irrational.
Obviously you then have to actually do those things before the value crashes, so whether it works or not depends on whether investors continue to expect you to.
The current value fluctuations have more to do with politics than the company. The media is writing a lot of negative stories right now, but they also have the attention span of a goldfish and ultimately some new Current Thing will replace the existing one.
The guy is an eccentric with autism, not an angel or the devil. He's not always right. But everything is so polarized right now that people are barely willing to concede that it's possible for someone to be right some of the time.
Teslas have the positive characteristics that they don't run on petroleum and have good safety ratings. They have the negative characteristics that they have privacy issues and you can't get parts or documentation to fix them yourself. A strong heuristic to tell if someone is using motivated reasoning is if the thing they're complaining about is an unrelated political hot button well-known to produce outrage (e.g. allegations of somehow simultaneously secret and open fascist ideology) as opposed to a way they're actually screwing someone illegitimately but in a way that doesn't cause most people to experience an immediate visceral response (e.g. mass surveillance, right to repair).
You can also tell it's that when the target is actually doing a bad thing, but the people objecting only care about the target and not anyone else doing the same thing. This is extremely common with corruption allegations. All corruption is bad, you need systems in place to constrain government officials from bilking the taxpayer, but this is a process problem where you need stronger checks and balances to prevent the government from transferring money to cronies, not a "we need to somehow elect only infallible humans" problem where what people actually mean is that they just want their guy to get in so the money goes to their cronies instead.
I prefer cars that don't get recalled for glued on pieces falling off and CEOs that didn't pay a quarter billion dollars to buy a presidency.
Plenty of other electric cars being produced by the other manufacturers.
Remember, these megabillionaires are due to stock valuations, and live rich lifestyles on the basis of lending against the value of stock. If that value drops and a margin call forces actual selling, then Musk loses shares in Tesla.
I have to think this stunt is related to Musk needing some liquidity somehow, or being unable to cover private liquidity crunch with public assets.
TSLA is ludicrously overvalued. P/E is 150, based on Q4 earnings which were 1/3 "real" revenue, 1/3 mark-to-market-BTC (aka one shot), 1/3 CAFE/subsidies which Trump will nuke in 6 months.
But the "real" earnings that were already flat in Q4 are seeing a huge drop in EU/CN and who knows in the US. If "real" revenue drops 20%, the "real" earnings might drop 70% or more.
Anyway, that 150 p/e is ACTUALLY 450 in my mind, but after Q1 reports it will ACTUALLY be almost 1000 or worse.
The only thing keeping the stock afloat is AI hype, but 1000 p/e ratios are for people with market dominance and fundamental leads on competitors. Tesla is arguably middle of the road in both self driving and robots.
I was trying to stay apolitical but a CEO doing Nazi salute and not being fired is uncharted waters, at least in the last 80-85 years.
I keep going back to the horsemeat episodes on mad men, and the papa johns CEO getting booted. This is simply unprecedented in brand management. Brands take decades to build, and are especially important for car companies.
What surprises me is that the drop in sales numbers seems to have zero effect on the stock price, at least not yet.
He had a sizable chunk of collateralized borrowings against his Tesla shares even before the Twitter acquisition. There was the risk of a margin call during year following the acquisition, but AI became the latest hotness so he was able to spin up a company to cook up some more market bubble.
You could make the same “bleeding money” comment about many historical social media acquisitions – at least Twitter has advertising and subscription revenue. And it’s similarly suspect to argue that xAI is failing due to lack of revenue, without mentioning the astronomical valuations of its peers in the AI space, many of which are not only lacking revenue but also have no distribution channel comparable to the scale of Twitter/X.
xAI has one of the leading models in terms of investment and user base, and it’s rapidly improving on its evaluation metrics.
Twitter/X is one of the Top 10, if not Top 5, social media properties worldwide. It has hundreds of millions of monthly active users and maintains the lead in public consciousness as the “go to” place for 1-N broadcasting of information. While Bluesky shows promise, it won’t be dethroning Twitter any time soon. When has Bluesky been the source of breaking news?
And you cannot separate these two businesses. Twitter/X and X.ai are fundamentally coupled to one another. Twitter is not only a data source for X.ai but also a distribution and retention channel. There is an “ask Grok” button under every Tweet. And it’s not the only LLM that can be summoned via Tweet – with similar automations from companies like Perplexity proving there is value in the channel – but it is the only LLM with a native integration into the interface and first dibs on freshly-generated user content and breaking news.
Where are you getting this from? All numbers I see indicate the user base has been growing globally. https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
So I'd argue that the statement theat Twitter/X is bleeding users can't be conclusively decided, but it seems your statement that Twitter has been growing globally is incorrect at least for the last reported quarter.
xAI does have some pretty massive datacenters with 200K+ GPUs.
It is a fact that grok3 is a strong competitive model. Surely it had to be trained somewhere? They went from 0 to what they have now in 1 year
The levels of .. self-fertilizing transactions here boggles the mind. I guess that's the idea.
I'm certain we'll see a pile of public funds handed over the xAI in the future.
That's Trump for you. Populism up front, oligarchy in the back.
Oligarchy is generally how people who don't deserve wealth can get it. As pointed out by you, that doesn't exactly apply to the world's (already) richest man.
And who exactly would you look for to help the federal government build "a better mechanism for managing costs and outlays", if not someone who has built multiple successful businesses (managing costs and outlays at impressive scale) in very different industries?
No that's just one of it's outcomes. The proper definition would be "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."
> that doesn't exactly apply to the world's (already) richest man.
Given the appropriate definition and his involvement in owning not only a social media company but also having a role in federal government policy and now apparently investigations I am completely baffled by your assertion.
> And who exactly would you look for to help the federal government build
I figured someone would summon this fallacy. He has acquired wealth. This does not demonstrate any skill in spending tax payer money efficiently in a regulated environment. This is particularly true if you're willing to assume that oligarchy played some part in his acquisition in the first place.
> if not someone who has built multiple successful businesses
He likes to call himself a founder. Of business that already existed and he purchases a controlling share in. It's amazing that people accept this distortion of reality.
> managing costs and outlays at impressive scale
Presumably he has people on the payroll who do this. I imagine that the entire financial success of these companies is not down to a single person. How does he find time to do anything in a day?
I imagine the federal government could, you know, just do the same thing. Hire qualified professionals to do the job?
> Not sure that tracks.
Outside of the reality distortion field that some people willingly occupy it most certainly does.
> It's amazing that people accept this distortion of reality.
Indeed
In 2021, the last full year before Musk's acquisition, Twitter generated $5.08 billion in revenue.
Under Musk's ownership, X's revenue has declined significantly. In 2024, X reported $2.7 billion in revenue, which is nearly half of its pre-acquisition level. For 2025, global ad revenue is projected to grow to $2.26 billion, marking its first annual increase since the acquisition.
So yes on paper, X is more profitable than Twitter was before the acquisition. Its 2024 adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled Twitter’s best year, despite a much smaller revenue base. But whether that profitability is sustainable or comes at too high a cost—strategically, reputationally, and culturally—remains an open question.
Self dealing is also permissible with companies. Corporate officers and directors must still meet their fiduciary duties to shareholders. And the potential for conflict of interest changes how courts will evaluate the transaction if a shareholder complains about a breach of fiduciary duties. Ordinarily, in Delaware, operate transactions are protected by the “business judgment rule” that gives wide latitude to corporate officers and directors. https://plusblog.org/2023/11/28/the-business-judgement-rule-.... But if there is self dealing, courts will scrutinize the actual fairness of the transaction. But self dealing isn’t per se impermissible.
In most countries you absolutely can. The difference between market value and the sale price might be considered and taxed as a gift, but such a deal is generally not prohibited.
For example, I had a run-in with the property tax assessor. He assessed my house at an unreasonably high price. I filed a protest, and then had a conversation with him. I offered to sell him the house at a considerably lower price, and he could then flip it for what he assessed it at.
He refused.
I eventually did sell it, for considerably less than the assessed value.
As anyone following stocks knows, the fair market value of a company can vary dramatically minute by minute.
1. Musk owned an estimated 80% of X and an estimated 50% of xAI [1]. We don't know the specifics of the deal, but we do know it's an all-stock deal, so in theory this should help Musk own more of xAI, which sounds like better-performing and more promising company atm.
2. Tesla has been a big name in AI for a while now, but has been awfully MIA when it comes to generative AI. It's always focused most on vision, sure, but it's not hard to see how other types of AI could fit it's strategy.
Imagine a conversational virtual assistant in your car, or in their robots, or the possible manufacturing applications. In my opinion the device manufacturer + AI lab combo, especially for a device that sells on its promise of cutting-edge technology, makes more sense social network/LLM combo. Beyond the product applications Tesla would greatly benefit from the prestige and marketing of cutting-edge AI.
Nonetheless Musk owns only about 12% of Tesla [2]. It makes more sense for Musk's fortune to ride the wave of this new industry with a private venture he owns. This 12% ownership is down from 22% in 2018 btw [3], before the Twitter acquisition in 2022, which was largely funded by liquidating his Tesla stock [4]. Musk seems to be very much divesting from Tesla— both in effort and in money.
3. Where does this leave Musk, Tesla, and xAI?
- I think it leaves xAI in the position of being the most important company for Musk right now. Best-case, it becomes a "big tech" company. I'm sure we'll keep hearing much more about it, although I don't rule that Musk could try to sell it or merge it if it gives him control of a tech company with a solid business model or strategic importance.
- Musk I think is definitely in a better position than before, fortune and power-wise. He's been diversifying away from a company that's had an insane PE ratio for a while [5], but most importantly, he's been doing so in a pretty smart way. If he had just sold Tesla to buy government bonds, the share price would've crashed. Instead everyone buys into the "he's eccentric and went through a divorce" story. Social network ownership has given him plenty of political power— I don't doubt unbanning Donald Trump is how he got close to him the first place. And now he's converted imaginary wealth from unattainable hype at Tesla into ownership of private company riding the hot tech wave of the moment, concrete political power and self-regulation via his seat in government, and evergreen influence/relevance via his own social network— a tech baron's dream.
- Tesla is not doing great, and Tesla investors are the ones getting the short end of all this. I think Musk realized self-driving is too hard, be it due to tech or regulation. I think he realized he can't compete vs Chinese automakers. I think he's pumping and dumping. If he can get a good deal he might try to merge it with xAI in a way that offers him full control of the company (maybe even private ownership), but otherwise I think Musk is ready to let go of it. He's used its insane valuation to get himself better assets.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/xai-buys-x-musk-twitter-2e5...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052616/top-4-...
[3] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/how-elon-musk-con...
[4] https://abc7.com/post/elon-musk-accused-improperly-selling-7...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/pe-rati...
The acquisition is entirely in stock. Shareholders of X are receiving xAI stock in exchange for their X shares. They don't get any cash.
Musk says the new combined entity is worth $80B, but that's on paper. The company certainly doesn't have that much cash or liquid assets. The valuation is based on xAI's previous funding round + whatever number they decided to assign to the X assets + the magic of "synergy" produced by this deal. In other words, it's not based on anything real. (Accountants call this "goodwill.")
Musk’s xAI is in a similar place. It’s an also-ran in a crowded space and it’s not making any money while spending billions. But the founder certainly has great faith in it. Is $80B the right value to assign to that faith? Who knows.
Estimating "true market value" of companies whose valuation is almost entirely based on their potential long-term growth isn't particularly straightforward until you find a buyer willing to buy a significant or it does an IPO.
I fail to see how this is in any way whatsoever relevant. a unique car has a market value, and a non-unique car also has a market value. anything that can be sold has a market value. there's still no such thing as a "true market value"
Well not until you try to sell it and find a buyer.
I mean sure xAI does technically have a market value we just don't know what it is because there is no market that would allow us to determine it.
Of course the price paid by private investors do provide some estimate but a company .e.g. raising $5 billion at a valuation of $150 billions or something like doesn't necessarily have a market value which is that high.
just because you don't know the market value of something doesn't mean it doesn't have one
X is "clearly" worth only $10 billion less than what Musk paid for Twitter back 2022? Really? Despite its revenue being 50% lower than it was back then?
As for xAI, Anthropic has a valuation of ~$60 billion. So again not that "clear". Of course they don't have Musk's political connections which might end up mattering quite a bit (of course there's also the risk of Musk being prosecuted in 4 years as well...)
>quite clearly ... in the region of
second of all, I would suggest that twitter's value as a whole is very nebulously related to its actual revenue numbers, and is far more related to: - its potential revenue numbers, which are way higher in the hands of someone less controversial and - profit, which we don't really know about because its private anyway, but is likely much higher given the amount of cuts that have been made.
Most of what I've seen about Grok were the various memes about people trying to trick it into saying stuff about Musk (or trying to expose the filters stopping it from saying bad things about him).
> its potential revenue numbers
Maybe. But it wasn't even that successful financial even in the pre Musk days compared to its competitors. Destroying the brand and reputation also had a non-insignficant impact.
> but is likely much higher
Twitter was barely or not at all profitable before the acquisition so that's not unlikely. Companies that have high net income but stagnant or decreasing revenue generally don't do that well in the stock market, though.
(Or more, if you're a middle-out sort)
Wild.
And if you can get the right people to believe in the arbitrarily large numbers you invented out of thin air you can get away with just about anything because the wealthy don't have any real consequences.
The cope is alive and well.
"aaaany time now it will all fall apart"
He’s literally the richest person the earth has ever known. He’s never going to suffer financially. He has countless levers of power he can pull.
The same fantasy applies to any past or current president ever spending a day in jail. He literally commands the most powerful military apparatus the world has ever seen. Even a sliver of that capability and influence ensures nobody will ever dare to try and slap some cuffs on him
I feel like you used 'worth less' to imply 'worthless'. But this is far from the case, 13% would still be a gigantic pile of 'money'.
And that would make sense totally aside from punitive response: it is pretty dangerous to have such vital defense infrastructure controlled by such a mercurial personality.
Oh, and you may want to look up eminent domain. The government regularly seizes private property and even does so effectively on behalf of other private entities. If you’re actually consistent on your framing then you’d have to admit you’ve lived your whole life under what you consider a fascist government regardless of political affiliation. For example, here’s [2] Trump using the government’s eminent domain power (before he was president) to take property from another private entity. And here he is doing the same thing [3] as president.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the...
[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/donald-trumps-eminent-domain...
Eminent domain is a process where the private property is seized (with the government required to pay fair market value) in order to use that land for some public purpose that it is not currently being used for. This could potentially be done to property owned by Elon Musk, but not for the justification that he has too much power. And also it must be specifically land that is seized, not equity in a company.
If congress passed a law seizing his property, or the government initiated eminent domain against all of his company's properties, it would be obvious that it was Elon Musk being targeted and not any legitimate public need for a piece of land. This is a called a bill of attainder and is unconstitutional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversat...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-envoy-says-russia...
If this were the Cold War, we'd have already seen USG freak out and move to nationalize.
I think the more reasonable crux here is why there was no clearance revocation. The guy inserted himself into geopolitics in a manner that ran counter to DoD and USG foreign policy while operating critical defense infrastructure, temporarily (with limited scope) revoking an allied nation's access[0], and being privy to secrets involving said infrastructure.
If in the future we're putting SDI-like capabilities onto satellite constellations his company operates, why let someone with undeclared back-channel comms with a foremost strategic adversary be cleared on the design and operational details of something critical to US strategic defense and national security? The very adversaries that such programs are designed to counter and deter.
That's before you even consider instability from doing every drug under the sun, which normally would be sufficient grounds alone.
I've no doubt he believes himself to be a patriot and probably hasn't violated his oath. It's just that holding a clearance has traditionally been based on risk. Regardless, not like there's anything anyone can do about it now.
To put this in perspective, Canada's wondering lately if the US is going to attempt to annex them. Should that happen, it definitely seems like a foreign policy objective of an adversary of the US, rather than one in the interests of the US.
I'd like to think any reasonable person views this entire situation as nutty, regardless of what side of the aisle they're on.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/spacex-ukraine-starlink-russia-ai...
Declaring my company has plans to build a Dyson sphere doesn't make it suddenly worth infinity money, and even if you believe it does, that belief won't stop the US government from seizing it.
You: how would you even value SpaceX?
Me: Some multiple of their last funding round
You: You’re irrational. They made money last year.
What?
Do you think earning a profit makes your company uncountably valuable? Or earning a profit and adding some promises on top? Neither is true!
These aren’t real problems in any scenario and certainly not in the scenario of “hello the United States of America is seizing your company, here’s a check we think is fair.”
> Some multiple on the last funding round (perhaps a multiple <1)
The irrational part is that it could possibly be a fraction of their last round of funding. Do you agree it would have to be a multiple much greater than 1, since their last round of funding (750 million) was a small fraction of their profit last year, and they are on the path of exceeding their total accumulated funding for all rounds in another two years?
I've never seen a profiting company valued based on their last round of funding rather than current/future revenue/profits. Do you have any examples of this, in the real world?
Again, do you have an example of the current value of a company, with similar circumstances, being based on the last round of funding?
Musk can say he's going to colonize Mars or mine asteroids, but the markets are perfectly capable of deciding on how likely (or unlikely) it is that he'll succeed, and price accordingly.
Colonizing Mars is a money-loser. It could completely tank the company. What business model involves colonizing Mars and then making a profit off that?
Mining asteroids is something we're so far away from that it's not worth baking in at that point. With current technology, it's far, far, far cheaper just to mine on Earth, even for things that are relatively rare.
Of course, the question was about how to estimate the amount. It's a nonsensical answer that doesn't attempt to answer or help answer the question. If they were funded $1, their answer would still be correct: non zero multiple of a non-zero number (their last round of funding). It's an answer with unreasonable bounds, on both ends, especially the lower (fraction of last round of funding, even though current revenue is an order of magnitude more). It also has no precedence. The value of a company is never estimated based on rounds of funding from years ago (last was 2023 for SpaceX). It's based on both the present and projected performance.
It's not a rational answer, by definition, since it wasn't made with logic or reason.
It cost the Diablo cheater nothing to simply lie about this, they have no concrete plans on how to get to Mars or establish a colony, they still can't even get to the moon, with the deadlines being pushed back years at a time and getting increasingly more convoluted.
I'd be happy enough to be wrong, if we can get people on Mars in our lifetime that would be pretty cool, but Elon lies and embellishes nearly everything, and there's basically no consequence to lying or embellishing "plans" to colonize Mars.
I'm not sure I understand this. SpaceX would potentially profit from any transport services provided. Why would others paying for the missions reduce the worth of SpaceX? Or are you suggesting SpaceX would be the one funding it all?
It seems to me that Musk may very well spend the next 4 years cutting everything he can from NASA, NOAA, the Post Office, and other federal agencies. Those capabilities will still be needed, and it is clear from the stated goals of those steering this administration [1] that they intend to steer as much as possible into private enterprises. Many of those enterprises are owned by Musk himself.
I don't know about you, but I see a major conflict of interest with one person both guiding the privatization process and profiting from it. If we do see a case where he steers federal funds from government agencies into a private company - at the cost of the ability of our government to execute critical functions without enriching Musk himself - then I have absolutely no issue with reclaiming those capabilities.
[1] https://qz.com/donald-trump-privatize-us-government-project-...
Some of the cuts will just be cuts, and those services will be gone, in case where Trump's and Musk's cronies don't think they can build a profitable business around them. Others will just get pushed into private hands, and then when progressive administrations come into power, any attempt to bring those functions back into the federal government will get lobbied out of existence.
If lobbyists can do comparatively low-stakes stuff like keep the IRS from sending people pre-filled tax returns, you better believe lobbyists can keep NASA, NOAA, USPS, etc. privatized once they're dismantled.
No, the answer is to ensure any profit from corruption is reclaimed. The idea of "just let the corrupt keep what they stole" has led us right here to this moment.
EDIT:
I do want to be clear on what my concern is here, too - I don't have a problem with commercial space flight. I wouldn't have a problem with NASA using commercial vendors for a major of their missions. I would have mild concern but not a great deal if NASA dropped most of their launch capabilities, retaining only ones needed for specialized missions and unique orbits. But I wouldn't oppose it like this.
But I have a major issue with that process being run by the one person most likely to directly profit from it. That completely destroys all faith that the process is being done in a responsible way that will put the well-being our nation above the wealth of a single individual.
We do need a big powerful government full of Democrats to run things. US economy grew under democratic agenda, and Democrats have proven that they actually do give a fuck about the country, so they should have more power to unilaterally exact laws and legislation without trying to appeal to the Republican voter base.
Because if you want to make the argument that this will tank the economy as free market capitalism is reigned in, that also doesn't fly considering the economy is being tanked right now. The difference is, under Dems, once things stabilize, everyone will be better off.
> they should have more power to unilaterally exact laws and legislation without trying to appeal to the Republican voter base
> US has shown the citizens no longer deserve the freedom that they had,
Too bad all you're gonna get is a botched and broken nation and years of misery, but that shouldn't matter as long as you get "something for my money".
And you're sure you're gonna get "something for my money" with people that make no attempts to even veil their corruption and lawlessness. Right? Say, are you, by any chance, "rich"? I mean, rich enough to be considered rich by the oligarchs, that is.
Here is the thing though - nobody can predict the future. Statistically, going by historical examples and knowledge, everything that Musk and Trump are doing is wrong in regards to economy, but there is a chance that they are actually right and everyone else has the "woke mind virus".
The thing you need to understand is that if you vote Republican, you aren't aligned with actual reality. The problem is that you see things as black and white - anything that has a sign of the woke mind virus has to be gutted and restructured. This kind of thinking is a case of the classic human bias where you chose to pay attention to the information that fits your narrative, while ignoring the information that does.
This in turn makes makes you less likely to predict the outcome of politics, much less prepare for it.
So if you want to place your bets on Republicans, just know that you can lose very hard, while people like me who are in tune with reality end up being better of.
Honestly, next election (if we even have one) Ill ironically be voting Republican as well, for the reason that I believe in accelerating US downfall. EU seems to be the better system going forward, and they need a nudge in the right direction to pick up the slack, and also institute more stringent society policing to prevent the same from happening to their countries.
If we had perfect knowledge of what goes on in US politics, we would not be having this discussion. Instead, we are forced to parse information from different sources, and figure out what the reality most likely is in our head.
If you are unable to be unbiased (and you, and every other Republican are clearly not), towards information, the chances of you being able to predict reality accurately go way down.
It could very well be that US economy tanks so hard that we enter a pretty harsh recession, with lots of job loss, lack of social services we rely on, and so on. Its a possibility. I don't know that it will happen, but you also don't know it won't. The difference between you and me though is that because I don't blindly believe in one side being right and other side being wrong, I have a much better chance of seeing signs and taking respective action, like selling my house and moving out of the country before it does.
The TLDR of this is that you vote Republican because you are an idealogue. I vote Democrat because of rational decisions. If you want to continue doing this, its not my problem. The least I can hope for is if you do some critical analysis of yourself and figure out whether the things you believe are actually true or do they just sound good.
>US has shown the citizens no longer deserve the freedom that they had
>We do need a big powerful government full of Democrats to run things.
>Democrats have proven that they actually do give a fuck about the country, so they should have more power to unilaterally exact laws and legislation without trying to appeal to the Republican voter base.
And after that they say that it is the Trump who is the fascist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._...
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/524/417/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_Executor_v._Unite...
So the government has spend the last nearly 50 years completely failing in building rockets or sats the way SpaceX did. SpaceX with little money did it in less then 20 years.
And now you think its smart to have have the government taking over again? Do you want the government to run the global Starlink network, dealing with costumer complains?
What part of NASA or any part of the government in the last 20 years convinced you that they could operate SpaceX?
DoD tried to make space good and literally created ULA and after 10 years they often paid 300+ million for a launch?
And just FYI, Starshield is Starlink for the government and the government already controls those themselves.
That's how China does it.
Also, the US has little history of this and the history it does have is utterly terrible. Go look up the performance of US own weapons factories threw history, basically just a long list of failure that lead to real issues in wars.
The US does not need to own the company to be able to prevent them doing something they don't want.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/trump-poll-allies-enemies-friends...
- Enlisted swear oaths to the constitution and President
- Officers swear an oath to the constitution
I’ve only been told this, I don’t claim to know.
Uhhhh... not in the US (or any western) military you won't.
If the order is valid, it's your fault for questioning it.
The individual. If your boss orders you to do something illegal, it’s up to you to be sceptical and do your research. That’s the only way it can work without converting a part of the population to drones.
- enlisted: https://www.army.mil/values/oath.html
> I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).
- officers: https://www.army.mil/values/officers.html
> I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. (Title 5 U.S. Code 3331, an individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services)
So, it’s transitive, but the enlisted oath is limited to lawful orders.
They took an oath to protect their interests. That’s it and that’s all.
The real question, anyway, is not whether the military will obey Trump's illegal orders, should he issue them. It's whether the military would do something to stop the militias if Trump lets them off the leash with an explicit mandate.
And my concern is that most of the lower-ranking officers and people below them will prefer to sit it out. Because if they do something, and it's not enough, they are all looking at actual treason charges and likely death sentences.
Some light reading --> https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/deploying-soldiers-on-a...
By all reasonable accounts, GW Bush should have been prosecuted for war crimes. Trump should have been prosecuted the moment he left office for a spectrum of crimes. There is even a strong argument that Obama should have been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen combatants.
But power protects power, and the moment that seal is broken all hell breaks loose amongst the ruling class.
How many people were held accountable for the 2008 crash? Zero. That would mean everyone else has to stop their criming too.
Who knows, maybe Trump is stupid and petty enough to take revenge on his enemies. If he does, no doubt his entire administration is the next against the wall as soon as the winds change.
> There is even a strong argument that Obama should have been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen combatants.
I don't think this is very strong at all. There is zero evidence that Obama intentionally targeted civilians outside of al-Awlaki. Suggesting that he did, and that he should be prosecuted for war crimes, puts him in the same moral category as those who ordered actual torture on enemy combatants and launched wars on fabricated evidence. It's preposterous.
You're collapsing several degrees of responsibility with this lazy equivalence, and minimizing the heinousness of the people who actually designed and executed torture programs.
"Don't worry, we've got your back. If your country asks you to do evil, we won't hold you to account. So go right ahead."
Who is worse? The criminal or the corrupt judge?
So... there is evidence he intentionally targeted a civilian?
It's just that in the meantime the rule of law in the US died and he was elected again.
If there are elections in 2028 and MAGA loses he's toast. Big if.
Regardless, Trump is old. Even if he's convicted of something in 2030 or whenever, he probably won't go to prison. He may even be dead by then; he'll be nearly 85, and no matter what his doctors have been told to say publicly, it's hard to believe the man is in super great health.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...
Concerns about Constitutional issues with state penalties interfering with federal duties also led the judge in the New York state case, where he was convicted of 34 felony charges, to sentence him to "unconditional discharge" -- essentially, he remains a convict, but faced no penalty beyond the fact of officially being a felony convict.
Issues relating to prosecutorial behavior have stalled Trump's prosecution on state criminal charges in Georgia, but those charges remain active (whether the prosecutor's office that was handling the case can continue to do so is an issue currently subject to appeal, and may not be decided for several months.)
According to the rules we put in place at Nuremburg, EVERY US President since World War 2 has committed war crimes.
Hamilton, Washington, and Madison all separately wrote that Section 8's War Declaration clause was intended to be a substantial limit on the President's power. Even the small, mini-conflicts in the 1800s required Congressional approval to initiate, it wasn't until the 1950s that the Executive branch destroyed that check on Executive power.
Unfortunately, they've essentially given more or less blanket approval for various wars and war-like actions since before 9/11, and that approval keeps getting renewed every year.
Let's hope we won't how that plays out against against the reality of having bills to pay and family members to take care of after enough layers of leadership has been replaced.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rockefeller-rich-elon-musks-w...
So adjusting for all that Rockefeller would still be richer than Elon.
After 2028 elections, all of that umbrella cover will go away. Optimistically speaking it could happen as soon as after Nov of 2026 (midterms).
The midterms could have some meaningful effect a lot sooner than that if we start seeing across-the-board primary challenges of pro-Trump Republicans. Of course, all of this is assuming that the broad Republican constituency have to some extent gone anti-Trump, and I really don't know how much basis there is for that assumption.
> Republican primary voters don’t seem to be upset.
Replying to both of you. It has started -> https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5214236-democrat-james...
The attacks members of Congress are troubling, but in a way don't matter too much: the deciders for control of the Senate or House are swing voters in swing states and districts. Whether or not the Republicans in Congress are MAGA adherents or older-school reasonable Republicans matters less than you'd think (and less than I'd like).
The one wrinkle in that is the Senate filibuster: if Democrats regain control there, depending on their margin, they could need up to 10 reasonable Republicans in order to make progress on most things. 60 Democratic Senators is unlikely.
What has Trump done to take away votes from people? Every election is still happening. US citizens are still able to vote.
Seems to be absolutely no basis for that assumption. His approval ratings are in the mid 40s, and the people that vote in primaries aren't exactly the waverers and independents that just wanted a change from Biden.
It could change when he properly tanks the economy, but association with Trump isn't likely to be a problem in primaries when you've got more than half a party's membership so immune to reality they'll insist that not only was Trump doing a good job of running the country in 2020, but he also won that election...
What on Earth are you talking about?
https://19thnews.org/2025/03/save-act-voting-married-women/
> An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million men do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name, according to the liberal Center for American Progress.
The OP would say these people are being deliberately disenfranchised. Personally I’ve long since given up judging these things based on what I think may or may not be in the hearts of those writing it. We don’t know so it just becomes an endless back and forth. Instead I look to the facts: the SAVE act would make it more difficult for many people to vote, with an aim of stopping those who are unauthorized to vote from doing so. There’s never really been any solid evidence of the latter happening in notable numbers so to me the trade off doesn’t feel worth it.
IMO something like the SAVE Act needs to also legislate the process by which a citizen can easily get an ID in order to vote. But it doesn’t, it just says that states would manage it. Given that some states used “literacy tests” to disenfranchise black people not so long ago I personally don’t trust they would all approach ID access in a fair and equal way.
> Yes. All states, the District of Columbia, and the 5 territories are REAL ID compliant and issuing REAL ID compliant driver’s licenses and IDs.
I have a DL in US and I'm not a citizen. It says on the license that it's only for driving and not for employment or voter registration.
> IMO something like the SAVE Act needs to also legislate the process by which a citizen can easily get an ID in order to vote
That sounds like real id to me?
You need to be registered as a voter, which requires that you be a citizen. How that is enforced varies.
There are also ID requirements at the poll site. Again, those vary.
In every state I've lived in voting was in some way (optionally) tied to your driver's license. But the body issuing the license has always known whether or not I was a US citizen so it boils down to the same thing.
According to https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/real-id-faqs "Yes. All states, the District of Columbia, and the 5 territories are REAL ID compliant and issuing REAL ID compliant driver’s licenses and IDs."
So from my understanding all DLs would qualify too (Except maybe older ones that were issued before real id?)
I’ve tried to get one twice since they started doing them, in two different states, and failed to have one thing or another on the bills and paystubs and such that I took in, so don’t have one. My wife’s got it even worse, they need an original of our marriage certificate (due to the name change) and that’s gone missing. She hasn’t bothered to screw with it, because she’s got a passport anyway (which, as you note, will do after all, I was wrong)
Let me give you a better one.
Trump can arrest the electoral college members from the blue districts under the guise of election fraud. And if that doesn't work, Vance can just pick his own set of electors. Remember, the Supreme court made it legal for Trump to literally drone strike US citizens without legal recourse.
Of course this will cause a bunch of Tumroil, which is good for Trump, because he can just holdon to power.
If you think that has no chance in happening, I envy your optimism.
The midterms are Congressional elections. There is no Electoral College. The Electoral College only functions when electing a President.
That's only if the SAVE Act passes, or whatever else they dream up passes. The House can pass whatever MAGA wants, but the Senate needs votes from Democrats to clear the filibuster.
Unless of course the GOP yet again does what they say they'll never do, and drop the filibuster.
I actually expect Republicans to do so soon enough now that their control of the Senate is virtually guaranteed for the foreseeable future, and they are reaping all of the disadvantages of the filibuster without the benefits.
PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS
~ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/pres...
The sweeping 12-page order contains a number of provisions, including a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to vote in federal elections as well as a requirement that all ballots be received by Election Day – both of which fall outside of the executive branch’s authority to mandate.
But, there’s also a section, buried deeper in the order, that, if implemented, would give Trump’s Justice Department the authority to pick and choose what states get federal funding for election administration. It would require states to loop the DOJ in on supposed violations of election law that it encounters. But it also mandates that basic information about voter roll maintenance be shared with the DOJ as well.
If states are unwilling to enter into what is referred to as an “information-sharing agreement” with the Attorney General regarding “suspected violations of state and federal elections laws,” the Attorney General is allowed to withhold grants and other funds from those states, the executive order says.
There are several commentaries at length going into the hidden traps and pitfalls of this latest executive order kicking about, so far it looks loaded.
>He added: "I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote," Trump said.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gE7xoHJkgvE
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they...
When I watched the video, I saw no malice.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7xoHJkgvE&pp=ygUqdHJ1bXAgc2F...
"In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you'll not gonna have to vote."
Unlike with Musk's "heart goes to you", if there is some context that can turn this into a benign remark it would have to be truly radical. Any takers?
And think about what would need to happen if you'd like to see actual change in leadership of the executive branch. You'd need the House comfortably controlled by Democrats, with the Senate controlled by a supermajority of Democrats. I think that you'd need both the President and Vice President impeached, convicted, and removed from office, while preventing the current/acting President from having a new VP nominated and confirmed, so that the Speaker of the House became acting President. This seems even less likely.
Your numbers are on point. But, there's another Math that could take us on that path leading to the same goal: A lot of republican lawmakers aren't happy currently. Although it's a long shot, some of them could join Democrats in impeaching those two clowns.
US is going to do the same thing Russia did with Putin.
If we end up having elections, its actually gonna be worse of long term, because despite tanking economy, most people aren't going to suffer that much, which means the pattern of Dems inheriting a shit economy, everything getting blamed on them again like with Biden, and then a smarter Republican comes along and its a repeat again in 2032.
Solidly red states don't need election interference; they're going to vote red. Solidly blue states aren't going to tolerate interference. The handful or so of swing states will be watched incredibly closely by everyone else for even a hint of interference.
> and then a smarter Republican comes along and its a repeat again in 2032.
I mean, this is just how American politics works now, and has worked since extreme political polarization took root. That's what happens when you have FPTP voting and a two-party system, where members of each party show complete disdain (justified or not) of members of the other party.
Look at what Dems are doing now. AoC and Bernie are hosting rallies - i.e being worthless.
States will roll over, because day to day business is gotta continue.
These types of speculative remarks insinuating trump is a dictatorial nazi is very lazy. If you disagree with his policies, debate the policies.
>This is not theoretical, we know how he reacts when he looses a election.
It sounds like from your perspective, the sequence of actions should be pretty obvious: create a market on polymarket or something for Trump to not acknowledged a loss, put up some money on it, and at the expense of people who perceive this question as theoretical you should easily get your x20-x30 insurance if something like that happening and can go to live in Europe in your own mansion (or even castle, there are many of them in Europe).
I don't know how much I would gamle in such a case. There are many outcomes compatible with his previous actions. Maybe he gets a heartattack. Maybe there is no election. Maybe the election process is manipulated so he wins. Maybe he actually wins, fairly or 'fairly'. Maybe they find a way for him to run, maybe it's Vance. Maybe someone else.
The important thing is that we should prepare that shitt will happen, and democracy don't survive automatically. We literally have him on tape, pressuring Georgia secretary of state to "find 11,780 votes" and overturn the state's election results. And it is not 'lazy' to prepare (intellectualy and physically), and when it happens it's too late to 'discuss the politics'.
You are probably not aware of this, but these are the events on and leading up to Jan 6.
* Trump calls fraud on elections with no real evidence. Lawsuits are filed. Every single one of them gets dismissed except like one, which ends up turning more votes for Democrats anyways
* Some adviser puts in an idea in Trumps head that Pence can reject the results and send them back to the states
* Trump basically gathers a crowd together, tells them to march to the capital to save our country. As the protesters are breaking in, there are records of him just calling different senators and asking "are you sure you don't want to delay the certification of the vote", all while being told that protesters are breaking in and getting hurt.
* Trump sends a fake set of electors from key states, calling on Pence to "do the right thing". Those fake electors were of course arrested and prosecuted.
None of this is disputable, undeniable, as it was brought up in a republican controlled supreme court hearing, which you can read for yourself. Supreme court decided that President is basically immune from legal punishment as long as he is acting within official capacity.
So saying he is gonna do more shit this time around, granted that he has legal immunity to do so is about as speculative as saying the guy who does 2 Nazi salutes probably believes that the Nazis were right in a lot of things.
Care to place a wager on it? I precisely bet you will ignore this offer though.
He knows without presidential immunity he risks prison. And he has previous for trying to steal an election.
I have no doubt he'll see to it that he never faces the risk of prison, and this is the most obvious way to go. That and he's clearly a power hungry megalomaniac.
I think it'd be more informative to ask why he wouldn't try to get this.
Just being rich doesn't mean he's got all the power to stop that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
Him being a Trump associate is a lever, but not a financial one… unless and until they have a falling-out. I'd be surprised if that's any less than 6 months away, or more than 3 years away.
> The same fantasy applies to any past or current president ever spending a day in jail. He literally commands the most powerful military apparatus the world has ever seen. Even a sliver of that capability and influence ensures nobody will ever dare to try and slap some cuffs on him
Depends if he dies in office (~10% all causes, he's old etc.), and if the dems regain congress in two years.
Trump was already very close to getting one day in jail due to inability to behave himself in the trial where he got all those felony convictions, and he did get impeached twice.
That's the other thing: Trump's tastes and whims are super fickle. Trump and Musk have already clashed on a bunch of things, and there's no reason to believe that won't continue and/or get worse. And Trump's priorities could change, without a corresponding shift in Musk's.
This is arguable in real terms.
Thank you for dropping this fun fact. Pretty telling of my "western" education, I have never been taught anything about this guy. Quite memorable years of reign too!
I suspect that many zeros were unheard of in pre industrial times, making most hundred billionaires richer than Mansa Musa even in absolute terms.
No it doesn’t - that much gold hasn’t been mined in the history of humanity. Gold is not a good metric for comparing this across history.
But going further, I think you're misunderstanding my point - gold is a terrible measurement of wealth on the "human-history" time scale. At that scale, you have to consider monetary wealth as it relates to "the power to get things done" in general.
In that framing you can look at:
1. Power/wealth relative to the next most powerful people (like the Mansa Musa story). For pure wealth we often look at this in relation to country/global GDP.
2. Absolute ability to get "work" done, including technological changes.
3. Relative ability to get "work" done, adjusting for technological changes.
He's probably not close to top 10 in #1, because his relative power compared to the next most wealthy or powerful people is not that disparate, he just wields it more blatantly than we are used to in the modern era. For example, Augustus is believed to have personally controlled 6% of the world's wealth, not accounting for his power over the Roman Empire.
Elon is probably in the top 10 or so of #2, behind all modern US presidents, Putin, Xi, and maybe a few other world leaders. There's no doubting that his wealth could be converted into far more kW of work than at any other time in history as a result of technological leverage.
Much like #1, this is probably not close. The Ming Dynasty leaders, Augustus Caesar, Ghengis Khan, etc.
That’s disputable
> He literally commands the most powerful military apparatus the world has ever seen.
That’s also disputable
> That’s also disputable
Why? Which military has ever existed that would have a chance against the current US military?
Conventional armies have a hard stand against partisans.
The US in Vietnam and Russia and the US in Afghanistan.
The Russian army is more powerful than Ukraine‘s, still no win. Same with Russia in Afghanistan.
That’s like saying I have the most expensive car in Formula 1.
Powerful is associated with winning that’s the whole point of pointing it out.
If you had to perform a military action and had to pick either the taliban or the US military to be your military to use, would you ever pick the taliban?
The only reason they had a chance was because of external factors, not the power of the military itself.
> Conventional armies have a hard stand against partisans.
No they don't. Its just not worth doing in the long run.
And whatever you may think of the US military forces, they have the ability to do lots of things.
Result beats potential.
And most of the US military except the special forces need time of from work and visit the army shop.
That's like saying, this NBA team after a 5d journey, and no sleep played a basketball game against a local team, with the whole crowd hostile, a complete broke court and a totally different ball.
And even then they would win for 20 years straight and the other team is only annoying to deal with. Until the owner decide there is no point in it.
And from this you conclude that that NBA team is bad at basketball because 'real-world results'.
You're delusional if you don't think that. You could just launch a few dozen cruise missiles at the target and at least one will make it through.
So, does your magical aircraft carry those dozens of cruise missiles, immune to every modern anti-air missile it will encounter? You know, instead of spending all that money on aircraft carriers, some countries have spent their money on air defense instead. Try to fly an F35 to Moscow.
Sorry, but this is laughable. If what you said was true, geopolitics would look very different. The US would break the whole nuclear deterrence game, since you could eliminate all nuclear launch sites, conventionally, before a strike. Why even have nukes then?!
Right, but the scenario was unspecified enough that I assumes peace time and the planes can retreat before the enemy notices the attack and shoots them down.
> Try to fly an F35 to Moscow.
I won't fly my F-35 to Moscow, I will drop some AGM-158 JASSM-ER over eastern poland and the pilots will probably be back on the ground before the russian air defense has even tracked the missiles.
> Sorry, but this is laughable. If what you said was true, geopolitics would look very different. The US would break the whole nuclear deterrence game, since you could eliminate all nuclear launch sites, conventionally, before a strike. Why even have nukes then?!
No, I don't get why people think that. That's the exact reason why countries have Nuclear missile subs. So they can retaliate, even after a first strike.
But even if they hadn't, what you said wouldn't follow. Because having the ability to strike whatever you want doesn't mean you can prevent a second strike. If you launch cruise missiles, the target can detect them and send a retaliatory nuclear strike before the cruise missiles arrive and destroy the silos.
I didn't say the US could hit all points on Earth simultaneously. Russia has a bunch of nuclear silos and submarines. Brighter Russians than you have designed their nuclear arsenal to survive this US capability.
Rich people become poor people all the time. Its hardly unheard of.
Quoting Gandhi: "There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Always."
Sure, they always "fall" in the sense that they're not immortal and they'll eventually die, but it's often (usually?) the case that a family member or some sort of protege steps up to fill their shoes.
He lived "in a villa rented for him by the government of Saudi Arabia in the posh Al Hamra district". https://www.dawn.com/news/135283/idi-amin-led-quiet-life-in-...
Tesla makes pretty nice cars if you're willing to drive them yourself and you only occasionally use autopilot as a kind of smarter cruise control. Never use FSD unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a system that only works in select locations and otherwise tries to kill you every few minutes.
Cue HN commentary about how that’s worse, but I’m only commenting here because this comment directly contradicts my lived experience.
No he didn't. He was an early investor in a car company, eight month after it was founded, and later history-revised his way into a founder title.
Not that this should be surprising, considering the childish ego on that man.
Putin might well be richer.
Also it is hard to compare his wealth to historical figures, such as Mansa Musa.
This is called upholding the constitution and it’s fundamental for a democracy. If you say president is immune, you get current US.
And even most leftist woke socialist president between probability of a prison for himself and the current US will choose current US.
The main reason Trump hasn't been impeached and (possibly) jailed is because the political system in the US is dysfunctional. Party because it's not a great system to start with, and partly because a critical section of people made the decision to intentionally break it for selfish gain. But there is nothing that says it needs to be like this.
Well his wealth can decrease by 200x and no sane person could claim that he's "suffering" financially with what he has left.
> somehow go bankrupt .. were also wild
That depended entirely on how Tesla's stock performed. If he had to liquidate $20 billion of his stocks to pay back the Twitter loans his wealth would have decreased by much, much more than that.
No, that was absolute fantasy numbers, and in no universe did it verify any value of Twitter.
Musk really, really knows how to play people. He deserves that credit.
And I mean, bond discounts or not have nothing to do with the value of a company. The discount on a bond is based upon the likelihood they'll ever be paid off, and after it was clear that Musk would save the failure of X by using one of his other companies and AI hype to do so (as others have said, just like SolarCity), the bond lost its discount. X's value could be $1, but if the bonds are going to be repaid they'll sell at no discount.
When debt is worth near par that only means that equity is very likely positive (not null). Doesn't tell you anything about how positive.
Self dealing. Nobody cares anymore.
It's good to be the king. Even better to own him.
> A prominent international law firm reached a deal with President Donald Trump on Friday to dedicate at least $100 million in free legal services and to review its hiring practices, averting a punishing executive order like the ones directed at nearly a half-dozen other major legal institutions in recent weeks.
This isn't theoretical. It's happening.
And another law firm is being blackmailed because it used to employ someone who worked for Robert Mueller (of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation)... Geez Trump's team is actually busy, but busy settling old scores.
Milton donated $1.8M to Trump, and Miltons lawyer's sister is Pam Bondi, the Attorney General.
This is nakedly corrupt and a strong signal that you can get away with all manner of financial fuckery if you are on Trumps "good list".
/s
Comments like these are wildly off the original topic and practically invite the dead replies. As a rule of thumb, if you're about to put "/s" at the bottom of a post on an even remotely political topic, please reconsider. Especially if your sarcasm is already quite obvious, and obviously being used to bash a political outgroup.
It's probably being spoken by some podcast that helped get Trump elected.
When they have an actual conspiracy, with actual billionaires paying the president and getting full access to the government, while getting public contracts... all of this being live streamed... they're still stuck in George Soros and the Deep State lizard people fantasy.
https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-...
I don’t think this is a change in the human condition; we’re extremely greedy hairless apes. But guys like Elon really show how low we can go.
But, as the wealthiest man on the planet he's more likely to just be given what he wants: more self-indulgence. When you surround yourself with yes-men and sycophants, actual help isn't likely.
Further, it's entirely right to call this out when his actions impact the rest of the world greatly and the man has obvious problems. To then try and turn it around on me as if I'd done something wrong by pointing out the Emperor has no clothes? Well, I could offer you some choice words, but I'll hold my tongue. However, in my estimation, you could do with some self-reflection and probably a bit less "taste of boot on your tongue".
Speaking of the moon, NASA's SLS is projected to cost several orders of magnitude more than a super heavy launch, and is only aiming for the moon as opposed to Mars.
If there's one place that Doge could really, actually stop a lot of waste and fraud, it's at NASA. Of course, that would be the conflict of interest par excellence, and face a bunch of opposition from red-state congressmen with huge contracts in their constituencies. Objectively speaking, though, it's a huge waste of taxpayer money.
At 0.3% of the federal budget - if NASA was 100% waste, fixing it wouldn’t make a dent.
The “waste” is really just a different risk tolerance. You could make many of the NASA requirements go away, but nobody wants to be the one who signs up for that when the next disaster happens.
The statement that NASA would have achieved reuse eventually is weird considering that NASA still exists today, 35 years later, without succeeding.
Sorry, this is false. When NASA engineers have raised the question of non-adherence to NASA standards by CCP contractors, they were told it wasn’t their role to dictate those kinds of requirements. You can see this in a number of mishaps, like when a strut failure resulted in a lost rocket because they didn’t want to follow well-established and codified aerospace supply chain quality standards. NASA is buying a service with CCP, not a product. This says nothing of the political requirements NASA must work through that contractors do not.
>The statement that NASA would have achieved reuse eventually is weird considering that NASA still exists today, 35 years later, without succeeding.
NASA does, but that NASA VTOL rocket program was cancelled in 1996. My point was that the tech was feasible for NASA, but not a priority.
NASA spending 35 years pursuing pork projects instead of useful technologies like VTOL sounds like the very definition of waste to me.
You’re missing the point (which seems to be a common thread on this) so before I spend too much time constantly reiterating: 1) What do you think is the goal of NASA and 2) What do you think is fundamentally different about CCP?
For example, the commenter uses the word “waste”, probably because they lack a nuanced understanding. NASA operates under different risk constraints than SpaceX. For example, they have to manage political risk which is why centers are spread across politically important states; that prevents funding from drying up. When a project is managed across different geographic locations, it creates funding stability at the cost of inefficiency. SpaceX doesn’t have the same problem, so they can skirt many risk reduction requirements, as well as consolidate operations to maximize efficiency. From that standpoint, both sides of the public/private partnership have unique roles. But people tend to want to color such things in oversimplified terms because it hits well on social media.
There are other differences in risk, but I’m already tired of typing.
Like most things, when people have an overly simple or dichotomous take of a complex issue, it usually belies an incomplete understanding. The OP started off with a claim that showed they don’t understand how the CCP works, and just kept digging.
but what I really wanted to say (because I'm a special interests person)
is that hair is a mammal trait. all mammals have hair!!! how cool is that?
The other part of this is that if TSLA stock drops to $100-ish he'll be at risk of being margin called on the loans he took against his holdings to buy X. I wouldn't be surprised if this deal involves some X shares being sold for cash (that was raised from VCs) to pay down those loans, and/or the lenders agreeing to take xAI stock in lieu of cash.
This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme. I don't think this is the last time we've seen this type of move: he'll keep starting companies that are at the forefront of whatever the current hype cycle is, then leverage the extremely inflated valuations to benefit himself.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musk...
Where it states that Twitter is now worth 1/5 of its $44billion price. I highly doubt it re-made up the equivalent value in the span of 6 months. If anything they likely lost more money as advertising sales have plummeted.
So, not profitable.
1. Borrow lots of cash
2. Buy a victim company with the cash
3. Carry out weird financial/legal alchemy to make the victim company solely responsible for paying off the loan
4. If the victim company can’t handle the debt and goes bankrupt, then you don’t own the company any more. That’s sad. Especially for the people who lose their jobs. But the people you borrowed the cash from can’t chase you for it, so no harm done, eh?
5. If the victim company pays off all the debt, then congratulations: you bought a successful profitable company for free!
I don’t understand step 3 or why it’s legal.
And we're not even talking about the missed opportunity costs of the ~ $27bn cash used to purchase Twitter. Most of that value is completely gone.
Fidelty, which still owns a decent chunk of X, and is required by law to do due diligence on the value of that holding, and also has deeper insight into the value of X since they are also required to see X financials (since they own a big chunk of the private value), puts X value at 20% of the original 44B.
So please demonstrate your claims.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-musk...
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/musks-x-sec...
> Banks have completed the sale of $5.5 billion in debt for Elon Musk's X, according a Wednesday report by the Wall Street Journal. The debt offering was increased following a strong response from investors. Ultimately, the loans were sold at 97 cents on the dollar.
This is not the same, as no ownership was traded, but it signaled surprising confidence that the debt could be sold with only a small discount.
X being forced to sell off debt at such extraordinarily bad terms means X is likely about to implode.
If I borrow $4 million to buy a house worth $1 million I could technically say that sans the debt I'm a millionaire, but that's hardly a useful or positive claim.
Of course, you can't buy $20B worth of mangoes for $40B worth of Mango Holding Company stock and then suddenly make your mango-holding business worth twice as much money.
But you can pretend!
Private valuations, especially VC-funded companies, have been nonsense for decades. Elon is just exploiting that egregiously.
These Reddit level takes with zero research are making threads like this really annoying to read. All emotions, zero facts.
This is all public, I don't understand the weird speculation...
I agree with the other poster.
AI Overview
Elon Musk is limited to borrowing against pledged Tesla shares, with the total loan amount capped at the lesser of $3.5 billion or 25% of the value of the pledged shares. Musk's current holdings of about 411 million shares and 238.4 million pledged shares as of April 6, 2023.
Here's a breakdown:
25% Loan-to-Value Limit: Tesla's policy caps the loan amount Musk can take out based on a percentage of the value of his pledged Tesla shares.
$3.5 Billion Dollar Cap: Musk's borrowing is also limited to a total of $3.5 billion.
Pledged Shares: Musk currently has 238.4 million shares pledged as collateral for his loans.
Overall:
Musk is borrowing against a portion of his Tesla stock holding, subject to the limits set by the company policy.
For more info:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-06/tesla-alt...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465...
That wasn’t the only funding, of course, but it’s a big chunk:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220422035052/https://www.bloom...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/musk-twitter-s...
Elsewhere I suggested people to just Google it, because it gives you an honest answer. So does chatGPT. So does the Wiki page on the deal, with sources.
Here is one said source -
https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141940/elon-musk-tesla-...
That's because his scam of charging $8k over the price of a Tesla for "self driving" was complete vaporware. It never worked and it never was going to work. I am disappointed I fell for it.
There should be a class action lawsuit against TESLA for everyone that purchased the $8k self driving "feature". We were all told it was "being rolled out". It was a total lie.
Edit: Elon mentioned in the last earnings call that if you are on AI3 hardware and bought FSD that they will have to upgrade you free of charge to AI4.
Edit 2: To clarify, FSD 13.x is only available with AI4 hardware.
Another thing is a lot of people don’t even keep cars longer than 8 years (and people who are buying new, $100k electric cars are more likely going to upgrade sooner than someone who’s buying a $30k civic.) they paid for FSD thinking it would be ready soon.
> It never worked and it never was going to work.
That is evidently false. If I had a longer commute it would work fine too. I have done ~2 hour road trips with it already.
You are bringing up a different point, which is that FSD arrived later than promised or at least implied (I don't know exactly how this was sold in 2017). That is self-evident at this point.
Unfortunately, that's because they were sued in court and lost when they tried to force people to buy the upgraded hardware in the past. Not because they stand behind their products.
The reality is we don't actually know how reliable these systems are, and Tesla has a long history of spreading misinformation about their own technology and obfuscating the facts. We don't even know how many cars crash while in FSD mode. We don't know how they crash, or why. None of this data is made publicly available, and of the data that is shared it is carefully curated, and we have no guarantee the data is not fudged. For example, are we certain that FSD does not disengage itself in dangerous circumstances to skew statistics in it's favor?
Trusting Tesla marketing on the topic of Tesla products is like trusting any kind of marketing. They have an incentive to sell the car, so they will lie, and they will cheat.
That is probably because you are unaware how far it has gotten. Irrespective of that, a driver still needs to be there and pay attention. As soon as you take your eyes of the road for a few seconds it will warn you very prominently.
I'm going on the record here to say that FSD will be a better driver than 99% of humans in the next 2 years. I may be wrong, but I don't think I will be.
AFAIK a retrofit from AI3 to AI4 isn't possible.
He valued it at the same price minus debt.
Automating some administrative tasks? Gauging sentiment across swathes of the population on a given topic? Providing stuff like the “reader context” but attempt to pre-empt it so better info is shared to begin with? And yeah, probably lots of Twitter bots for different things. Provide automated customer support for companies on there, or help people find products relevant to what they’re discussing/browsing etc.
There are literally a million options; I find it hard to believe you couldn’t think of one
…okay? Did you read it? Was there enough info? Where did you get confused? I’m happy to provide clarification, but if he stopped so quickly he couldn’t think of a single way that a social media platform could leverage in-house AI (or vice-versa) and the power that would come from (still, somehow) being one of the foremost social media sites on the planet, then it’s not the time to ask questions, it’s the time to think a bit more.
on x? like... for marketers? do we really need ai to schedule tweets or auto-reply with “thanks for the follow”? feels like we’ve had that stuff for a decade already. just because it’s ai now doesn’t make it new or useful.
> gauging sentiment across swathes of the population on a given topic?
you mean gauging sentiment from a user base that’s gotten increasingly loud, extreme, and way less representative of the general public? that’s not insight, that’s just noise with extra steps.
> providing stuff like the “reader context” but attempt to pre-empt it so better info is shared to begin with?
in theory, sure. but that’s assuming the platform actually cares about curating good info and not just maximizing engagement. reader context is cool when it works, but it’s super inconsistent and often buried. ai preemptively “fixing” info sounds nice until you remember who’s training it and what incentives are driving it.
> twitter bots for different things / automated customer support / product recommendations etc.
yeah i mean, bots have been a thing on twitter forever—some useful, most annoying. ai-powered ones could be better, but the platform’s current vibe isn’t exactly welcoming for brands trying to do legit support or sales. good luck pitching your socks in a thread full of people arguing about conspiracy theories.
Also seems to fit with Musk's vision of turning Twitter into some kind of US WeChat, an app people do a bunch of stuff in. Using LLMs to do a bunch of stuff seems to be the way the hype is going right now.
I don't know if I see long term value here, but I can't say I don't see the story.
I now own a $1 billion dollar water bottle
Do you understand where money comes from, cause Elon and you seem to not understand.
When xAI was founded, the X investors got 25% of xAI.
So he didn’t sell for less than he paid for it.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/investors-who-backed...
It’s more than he paid. There’s 12 billion of debt you’re not accounting for.
It's not wild, it's - if there is malfeasance - unprosecutable.
Like I could give you 20 dollars and it’s made up in a sense, it’s just a piece of paper, but also you can go to the store and buy things with it.
Whereas if you’re an investor in a company and the CEO does some self dealing which nominally values your shares at 20 million, you can’t go spend that. It’s even more made up
"All money is made up, but some are more made up than others."
(in reality some of that $20B would probably make it back to bank A as money circulates, so the actual amount of reserve money that banks have to borrow depends on more complicated factors. This also doesn't talk about what happens if the borrower defaults. But the fundamental principle remains the same, and is what ultimately limits how much money a bank can lend).
Well, I invented a new name, sold it to myself and now people say I’m worth more money.
Anything productive, Musky?
No. Nothing else.
You're fired Musky!
And that is for sure either illegal or immoral. /s
Some inverters believe they suffer from "conglomerate discount" [1]: that their whole conglomerate can be worth less than the sum of its parts. Who decides what the parts are worth? The investors, of course. Buying shares of their own company is a pretty standard way to fix the "discount".
He has access to the real revenue number. If it's going well, he wouldn't have to perform this maneuver. xAI was relatively separated from X and TSLA, and wasn't having the backlashes associated with the two. Now he risks having the xAI branding tarnished too. He wouldn't do this unless the TSLA internal numbers are bad and he has to protect himself first, at the cost of xAI brand.
The 6.25B loan, assuming he still has it, is really not an issue considering his net worth. He can add more collateral or sell a bit. In fact TSLA stock is higher now than when he bought Twitter.
Wikipedia say Musk has repeatedly described himself as "cash poor" -- most of his worth are not in cash.
How much of his net worth are in $TSLA?
But you do know “things” have a way to find path to get in public :-). Also, as stated in the following article, Tesla filed with SEC how much of stock was used and you can use the timing to find the stock price during the period of acquisition.
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-facing-margin-call-tesla-...
This is why mortgage lenders require you to maintain insurance on your property: if the house burns down or something, the lender still wants that money. If a house gets destroyed in a way that's not covered by insurance (say, by an earthquake in California, where most people don't have earthquake insurance), then the lender loses their money. (The former homeowner probably stops payments and gets their credit ruined.)
Further, it’s just $6bn which musk can easily cover.
> The funding included $7 billion of senior secured bank loans; $6 billion in subordinated debt; $6.25 billion in bank loans to Musk personally, secured by $62.5 billion of his Tesla stock; $20 billion in cash equity from Musk, to be provided by sales of Tesla stock and other assets; and $7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
(This is primarily around your backlash comments, I'm sure some shareholder malarkey could make them technically separate).
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/news/638933/elon-musk-x-xai-acquisi...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/10/24339249/elon-musk-xai-x-...
The external number for TSLA is not doing very good either
For ever, companies wanted to cook their own profitability metrics - see the famous (pre-Musk) Twitter revenue per click or something, or adjusted by size of community.
Public company disclosure rules, however, dictate fairly strictly what is and isn't revenue, profit, capital and so on. Right now, you can publish any wacky statistics you like, so long as you also provide the GAAP ones - "generally accepted accounting practice".
But who knows, perhaps DOGE in SEC relaxes that, giving companies more scope to hide bits of their business they don't like.
I don't understand this point: why would these backlashes care about the on-paper separation? (I'm assuming by backlash, you mean that of public opinion, which already knows about the xAI-Musk association).
B) I never said it was a good idea or anything. Just proposing what thought process happened.
Nearly ever such company is "limited" to engage "in any lawful activity" so as avoid exactly this issue.
This reminded me of this one time my father used the term "annales" which in french apparently means "past exams" or something :P
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/29/elon-musk...
In fact, Twitter debt is selling at 97% of value, indicating high confidence in the company. [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-high-price-114...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-value-on-wall-street-is...
I helped some friends buy this debt. It has nothing to do with Twitter’s strength as an enterprise, but Musk’s brand as a political one. There is a great book on 90s Russia before Putin took power—the pre-Berezovsky playbook looks like the way to go in America right now.
Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete bloodbath it should have been.
Not only does the Grok API not have access to Grok 3, which was released more than a month ago, it doesn't even have it's own SDK? [0]
> Some of Grok users might have migrated from other LLM providers. xAI API is designed to be compatible with both OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs, except certain capabilities not offered by respective SDK. If you can use either SDKs, we recommend using OpenAI SDK for better stability.
(every code example has a call for `from openai import OpenAI`)
How would using Grok be viable for any enterprise? And if Grok's API is designed to be drop-in replacement for OpenAI's, how are they not able to just use Grok to whip up their own SDK variant based on OpenAI's open-sourced SDK [1] and API spec?
DeepSeek docs just point users to use OpenAI SDK: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/
Anthropic recently did some something similar: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/openai-sdk
This is a bit of a silly game, their stock is very meme-y so whenever you set the start of the time range the aggregate % can vary heavily.
We see it in our day-to-day lives. People aren't buying new cars. Cars on the road are getting older and older. Views of Tesla continue to dwindle. Anything Stellantis is on life support. I mean, Chrysler has literally one car. GM is clawing for any sort of relevancy. And Ford is only afloat because of toxic masculinity. We all know that it's bad in the US, and we know outside of the US it's 100x times worse for these companies. We also know the US car market as a market is getting overshadowed.
It doesn't matter what stupid investors think. We can see the writing on the wall. These investors are delusional, period.
Edit: Comment flagged for pointing out inconvenient facts, it's wild out there
Tesla (TSLA) Q1 delivery consensus: 377,000 EVs – worst performance in 2 years - https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/tesla-tsla-q1-delivery-consen... - March 28th, 2025
Tesla is banned from Canada EV rebate program, gov freezes suspicous $43 million in rebates - https://electrek.co/2025/03/25/tesla-banned-canada-ev-rebate... - March 25, 2025
Tesla sales fall by 49% in Europe even as the electric vehicle market grows - https://apnews.com/article/tesla-sales-recall-trump-byd-b6f5... - March 25, 2025
Tesla’s fall from grace may have no equal, says JPMorgan: ‘We struggle to think of anything analogous’ [$120 price target] - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-fall-grace-may-no-18005... - March 13, 2025
Tesla’s stock nosedives — wiping out $700B in gains since Trump’s election victory - https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/business/tesla-stock-drop-eras... - March 7, 2025
Australian Tesla sales plummet as owners rush to distance themselves from Elon Musk - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/06/australia... - March 6th, 2025
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/ (1YR)
Facts you don't like aren't "weasel words."
By now, though, it's seeming more like they're too incompetent to do that. They'll probably still do it, but they'll crash the whole economy at the same time so the money that's flowing to Tesla won't be worth a whole lot. But it was a reasonable prediction at the time.
a) sales internationally are plummeting at such a rapid pace
b) consumer confidence is down with predictions of a looming recession
c) the brand continues to be tarnished by the association with Musk and Trump
d) auto tariffs will increase the costs of parts and the likelihood of reciprocity
That kind of growth would be difficult for a new entrant, but for an incumbent that's been around a while and already seeing sales decline, it's a pipe dream. Of course, it's not all about cars for Tesla. They're betting big on humanoid robots and "full self-driving", although they've been stuck at Level-2 self-driving for years and the robots, well... Let's just say we don't hear much about them for a reason.
Of course, Tesla has never been a company for rational investors. I used to hold a lot of Tesla stock back in 2017-19 when they had plenty of doubters. I remember seeing how Tesla owners would organize themselves grass-roots-style to show off their cars and convince others to go electric. The company was getting a ton of free marketing and had a very devoted customer base. My, how things have changed. Now, they have to shut down showrooms across the country due to "terrorism".
So where is the upside? Well, protectionism could help them in the US market, but they're a global company with stagnant sales in the US, so it's hard to see tariffs helping more than they'd hurt. And that's pretty much it for upside AFAICT.
Happy to hear from a bull that I'm wrong :)
Meanwhile Elon is too busy rage-tweeting and K-holing to work on any of the things Tesla promised it would do this year, like release a model 2 or something with robots
On top of that, in the EV category, Tesla is pretty much the only one made in the US.
Remember that their current P/E ratio is ~134, so the stock price already has a ton of growth priced in.
Tesla sales are falling worldwide and losing market share
What he's pulled off with xAI more recently is really quite incredible. And obviously this isn't first time Elon proved he can execute better almost anyone else.
I don't really have opinions on him as a person, but as a an entrepreneur you cant flaw him imo. He always finds a way to beat the odds.
What?
Elon Musk uses his immense wealth to cheat. He's infiltrated the government and uses his power to directly harm Americans, in order to further enrich himself. In addition, almost everyone who has worked for him has corroborated that he is an awful boss.
He is also prone to dishonesty. When confronted with something that requires accountability, his strategy is to protect his lies with newer lies. FSD, the state of twitter, DOGE, and on and on. He is so dishonest that it's almost always safer to assume he is lying than to give the benefit of the doubt.
But, even on a personal level, he struggles to stay afloat. He has impregnated multiple woman and is practically forming an army of illegitimate children. Those who were close to him either speak of him with extreme disdain or not at all. The only child he has any connection to is used as nothing more than a political pawn.
The only reason anyone even thinks he might be okay is because he's rich. We tend to have an extreme bias in favor of the wealthy, almost akin to a brainwashing. The reality is being rich does not correlate with being moral or decent. It doesn't correlate with being intelligent either, but that's a separate conversation.
That's basically the response to deepseek? Aside from a few people pearl clutching about "chinese propaganda" or whatever, most people praised its efficiency and performance on benchmarks. Credit where credit is due. Also note that China is an authoritarian regime where there's no separation between the state and private enterprise. Every company of non-negligible size has a CCP committee inside of it.
I genuinely have no idea what he's done that's incredible. I don't even know what xAI does apart from being a chatbot inside of twitter.
Grok is now competitive with the other big players in the foundation model space. To do this they had to recruit some of the top AI talent, speed run the building of massive AI data centers and of course execute well to bring it all together.
All of their competition have either had a time and/or financial advantage over xAI so it's quite impressive what they've managed to achieve given this. Deepseek's achievement in this sense is more impressive so I'm not delusional, but I was still very surprised to see how good Grok 2 was.
"xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent."
There's a solution for that: build a Twitter bot that posts strange things.
And he scammed the taxpayers of New York State for a billion dollar factory to build solar roofs. Factory built, stock was pumped, no solar roofs though.
The puffery about waste and fraud is pure projection coming from a scammer like Musk.
In concept seems like a really interesting idea. I guess it never ended up working out.
I don't understand it all ...cut people's jobs who make multitudes of billions less (cut 25k probationary employees like ripping off a band-aid), want people to work like the Chinese do (day and night) so we are the leader in AI (?) and after AI starts replacing jobs we all need to be on a welfare system. Isn't a welfare system the biggest waste to the Republican party (independent here)?
Does he even know his end game with all this or he's just having fun be the most powerful person?
Eg, for an extreme example, if xAI is worth zero, their actual holdings are now a third of what they were.
As a high-profile example, the SEC sued Theranos, a private company with only accredited investors, for making misrepresentations to their investors. https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018-41
The Securities and Exchange Commission deals with private securities, and also with public securities exchanges and the firms listed on them. Public firms have more oversight from the SEC, but private securities are not outside of their purview.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-securities-exchange-comm...
U.S. JUDGE REJECTS ELON MUSK'S BID TO DISMISS LAWSUIT ALLEGING HE DEFRAUDED TWITTER SHAREHOLDERS BY WAITING TOO LONG TO REVEAL STAKE
What's going on ?? Because he very obviously is guilty of this.
Here is the article - I get a feeling that this is very much related:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musk-must-face-fraud-laws...
They are most probably related, but I don't see how.
Huh?
From https://archive.is/rfBcg:
> Advertising revenue was $1.14 billion during the quarter ended Sept. 30 [2021], in line with consensus estimates.
He sold a bunch of Tesla stock, used other stock as collateral for a $6B loan and the rest was outside money.
He did all this for a $6B loan he could repay no problem?
He can't sell large amounts of stock in one go or it would trigger the price to crater.
Rich people with lots of wealth tied up in stocks will often borrow money from banks at low interest rates and use stock as collateral. This is common knowledge.
If the stock dips too much, the bank can call in the loan/make him put up more collateral, because the original collateral is worth less.
Elon does not have billions in cash or other liquid capital just sitting around. He would need to sell a lot of stock to see that money and that would cause him a lot of problems.
[citation needed]
We're at the point now where any heavily monetized player can build one of the strongest models. I mean, especially with all of the incredibly open Chinese companies releasing cutting edge research now that most American firms have gone quiet or only releasing their tailings.
(I've been using it the past 2 days and am pretty impressed - the first high-end Google model I'd willingly use instead of GPT-4.5 or Claude-3.7.)
But we are at a point in history where everyone who believes in upholding democratic values needs to call out those in power who are actively trying to destroy it.
Vote with your wallet.
And it’s risky to build your product on top of Grok’s platform, because its owner is totally unstable and you don’t want to be exposed to ketamine fuelled decision making that could negatively impact your business.
https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal...
I should have had a clue because I was talking to a CEO of a startup and trying to encourage him to invest dev time in AI features. He was reluctant even though he was optimistic about AI. He had too many things to work on, not enough resources. I suggested he raise more capital. He pointed out that raising capital in an older startup would mean people scrutinize your revenue growth. He would be able to raise more money at a better valuation for a completely new AI business than he could possibly raise to inject cash into his existing traditional startup.
So this makes sense of my initial confusion. I am just surprised it happened so fast.
Marc Andreessen made headlines a few months ago during the campaign about some shadowy meeting he was brought in about AI. He claimed the government told him they had picked a few winners of the AI race and no new foundational startups would be allowed to compete. Everyone has been talking about a "Manhattan project" like push for AGI to make sure the US gets it before anyone else. Given how quickly xAI has risen, given it's access to massive GPU resources, I can't help but reach for my tinfoil hat here. A platform with the reach of X/Twitter combined with an AI is a technocratic wet dream.
There’s also a dwindling number of Silicon Valley influencers who still maintain the old pretense that it’s a globally important news forum and a place for serious people to interact. They’re an island in a rising sea of shit.
This has "sure buddy" vibes all over it.
For one thing, it works really, really well.
OK, now I know somebody has fast-forwarded the calendar to April 1st.
This seems a bit, uh, hyperbolic
Greenland could probably be induced to vote Republican fairly easily, and so send 2 Republican senators to Congress.
I've just spitballing, of course - in the current situation the GOP is not in the position to throw away any advantage in the House.
Trump's "51st state rhetoric" doesn't actually have to be what happens, were he to do something drastic.
>Trump, in the afterlife, gets permission to go back and visit Earth for one hour. He goes into a bar in NYC and asks the bartender how things are going for America. The amazed man says, "Wow, sir, we have the most incredible empire thanks to you! Greenland, Panama, and Canada!" "That's great," says Trump, "What about Europe?" "Oh yes," says the bartender, "They also couldn't resist us!" "That's so beautiful," says Trump. "Well, I have to go back now, how much do I owe you?" "One ruble and fifty kopeks," replies the bartender.
Honestly surprised the VCs that dumped all the money into xAI are on board. I’m guessing he still must have controlling stake.
Why would he give them a controlling stake? I suspect they don't have control.
Musk's companies have raison d'être, and the mergers (SCTY & TSLA) generally have one too.
X has been bleeding money, but has no access to cash. AI on the other hand he can peddle to sovereign wealth funds, apply for government grants, etc. X then becomes a write off against a larger company. xAI seems to be a pretty small company though; linkedin gives me 11-50 employees, which is pretty small for a DIY scaled LLM company worth (WHAT?!)...
Well some VCs are going to be happy. Or sad. Either way, they'll likely need to mark down their fund.
Fixing it isn't odd.
And right now, Gemini's public models aren't cutting it.
$80B for Twitter+Grok is potentially a bargain, but it all depends on execution.
I suppose there's no incentive now to hide the obvious synergies between the component parts of an effective propoganda machine.
He can now use the money raised by xAI, to pay off the debt of X, which was bleeding money.
So today in corporate America we have:
- Trump pardoning one of the most obvious scammer of the past 10 years - Trevor Milton
- Trump pardoning some obvious crypto scammers
- Musk using investors money from one of his companies, to bail out his another company, at the valuation he himself set
Unprecedented times. The damage to the rule of law will be hard repair - it will take decades.
who?
SBF on the other hand did bad stuff and has only served one year out of a 25 year sentence and I'd be a little surprised if he's out in a hurry.
White collar crime is legal, folks. (Donation required)
Our job as humans is to train his AI models until we can no longer justify our existence.
I assume with this deal some of that debt got converted to equity ($1B?) and any callable mechanisms got repriced but I cannot find details to figure this out.
There are actually bad things to hate him for but acquisitions fraud is probably not on the table.
No xAI shareholder has any incentive to be honest about that. If they criticize it, Musk will cut them out of all future investments. And if they are an xAI shareholder, criticism may well be grounds for seizing their equity.
Particularly if they are an xAI employee: Musk companies usually have a equity contract & NDA which says that your options can be canceled at any time for $0, they can be bought back even if vested, you are not allowed to sell without their permission while they are private (ie. forever), and you are gagged about all this: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/spacex-employee-stock-sale... (Similar to Altman's OpenAI NDAs and equity agreements that OAers were unpleasantly surprised to discover back around the coup.)
He'll keep his ball of twine rolling past TSLA's next earnings date on April 22nd.
Grok 3 is right up there with SOTA models and the time in which they trained it was fairly impressive. Seems like they have as good of a shot as anyone at capturing the market.
The AI company is public, but he social network was private.
Source: https://forgeglobal.com/xai_ipo/
Neither are valid comparisons to xAI owning X.
Probably this is the reason why all the reddit free public APIs are gone - to block scraping.
Owners: Advance Publications (30%), Tencent (11%), Sam Altman (9%)
X just produces extra valuable training data as a byproduct. Like power plants create certain byproducts that can be sold etc. Good to see it going to Grok primarily, as other LLM's are far from being truth seeking with their built-in, documented, extreme bias.
I can't think of any other example of an AI company owning it's own social network, it's a fresh precedent.
Content created by X users is for X users to find either through their feed, basic search, or Grok. There's no foul play here, and how Grok uses data on X is not hard to defend even from a basic "better search" angle. Your "emphatize" comment sounds like "will someone think of the african children" kind of detached waste of breath, something the Chinese call "Baizuo".
Now, you may not like that, but it's still real.
Does the xAI company have investors to be valued at 80 billion? Can someone point me to its investors list or news about a previous funding round?
Hahaha, ha ha, ha...
Maybe more accurate to say "spreading my truth".
March 19: "Elon Musk’s social network X has raised close to $1 billion in new equity from investors" "Musk himself participated in the equity raise" "The deal values X’s equity at roughly $32 billion." https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/elon-musk-x-twitter-equity-fu...
Non tangible reasoning: Since xAI uses data from X to train, and xAI likely will be used to explain and make new tweets. It makes the entire operation less complex. Elon is positioning X as the interface to the world and xAI will likely help control that. Remember he is gunning X to be an everything app and likely AI will be the core of how that will play out.
Tesla used to be cool, SpaceX still is. But these two appear worthless to me.
Here is a chart from Tesla AI, 2 years ago: https://x.com/Tesla_AI/status/1671589874686730270
Judge by yourself where it's now.
Folks, it's all smokes and mirrors !
I have five dollars in a box, and I buy a different box, also known to have five dollars in it, for the $5 in the first one. Now, according to this logic, I have a portfolio worth $10, since I still have the original box, worth $5 and the new one, also worth $5.
If I tried this at a gas station, I would be arrested if I got caught.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/elon-musk-420-tw...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-humor-jokes-over-...
I have a box with $5 and you have a box with $5. We agree to merge our boxes into one and now we both have 1 box with $10.
Plot twist: me and you are the same insane person.
I build another box A and people get excited. They say they’ll pay 5 cents for 1% of it, and I have a paper that says I own most of it.
Time passes and the amount people are willing to pay for the boxes changes, and at some point people are close to not believing box T is worth 10 cents per 1%. If that happens, the bank will want their 10%!
To prevent that, I decide to sell box X to box A. I pick the price I want for the sale, but the important part is that I make sure box A writes a new paper saying that the bank now has to get 20% of box A if box A fails to pay them, not box T anymore.
In the end, I can’t say I own box X anymore, but I never cared much for it. I only bought it as a meme. That’s okay though, because I don’t need to give any of my box T to the bank, and people are willing to pay 8 cents for 1% of my box A since it now owns box X too.
I read somewhere that he used his tesla assets as a security to get a loan to buy X and this provides some buffer or sticks it to someone else in case tesla goes down?
You can buy them or not—that’s up to you. But the valuation? $200B - official.
I just paid my wife $2.5 million to acquire our 1999 Saturn S-Series. Absolute classic car if anyone wants to buy it. I'll sell it for a clean $3 million.
If there are others, it's likely to be representatives from firms like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz?
Also worth noting that in July 2024 he was discussing having Tesla invest 5B in xAI, I forgot about this one: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815907844434112999
Musk used his extremely overvalued company to bail out his other way overvalued company that he ran into the ground. It's a thinly-veiled, self dealing ponzi scheme. (It also echos the final fate of Solar City).
Am i behind the moon because i haven't heard of xAI?
If that is the case, why don't this people put their money where their mouth is and invest everything they have in shorting Musk owned stocks like Tesla, SpaceX, xAI? They might have the chance to see their dream come true and Musk go broke and homeless.
On what do you base your assertions?
Not liking Musk, on the other hand, doesn't really tell anything about a person except for that one fact.
So that's why Elon is so retarded! The whole "ketamine" and "full self driving" nonsense was starting to make me worried. It was actually passion this whole time - how touching.
(edit: Bloomberg says the banks unloaded their shares earlier this year, reportedly "without taking a loss")
How does a loser from South Africa, who has been kicked out of nearly every company, obtain this? Perhaps this is what every loser in America dreams about themselves being able to do.
Look, maybe the Twitter dataset and control over the algorithm is worth $45 billion. But I've seen the state of ads on Twitter these days and it is clearly not worth anything close to that from advertising income.
I had a thought that Twitter will eventually become a group of: famous people, media, and bots all just tweeting at each other.
Or people do still use the platform. I never have, so I can’t say one way or the other.
- Control of high engagement Twitter account with 50 bazillion followers.
Like commits on Github for tech bros. All those spelling mistakes won't fix themselves.
I gave up an early 5 letter word account on Twitter because I refuse to support a bully that has clear fascist intentions and the entire platform seemed to be turning into bots spouting racist Nazi tropes.
What suggests that? It seems neutral to me. It gained a billion dollar valuation since the acquisition. Ad revenue is returning back to the levels it was at. There were other revenue streams added to more effectively monetize it.
Since that time Twitter's valuation continued to drop, and by late 2024 several investors (like Fidelity) had marked the company's overall value down to as little as $9B.
Now with the recent stock market turmoil and Tesla's massive share price drop, his Twitter loan is in danger of getting margin called, and that would spell disaster for Tesla, Twitter and his own finances.
Separately Elon also started xAI, which received $6B of funding at a $40B valuation, and is in talks to raise more.
So now he is doing some financial engineering to "sell" Twitter (X) to xAI. This means (1) whoever owns shares in Twitter can mark up their books again and (2) he can raise more funding for the combined entity and use that to pay off the Twitter loan.
Wow
I don't know how you can get closer to the robber baron ideal than being able to distort the market like that.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-s-...
I took a giant shortcut, without providing sources, that was meant to indicate that we are in a situation that closely resembles the "Gilded Age" or "Robber Baron" era in the United States.
I was intending to point towards the actions of individuals in the analogous position of those "Robber Barons", in particular here, Elon Musk.
This dude used the data from Twitter, fed it to xAI (xAI spent lots of CapEx from investment on GPUs). Mix mid-"AI" training on such a ridiculously valuable dataset for free == cool models. Cool models + data stream of Doomscrolling == Higher valuation.
This just seems like a "nepo-baby" hit it big on some meme coin and bailed out Daddy.
Lol
I’m in favor of the British twist.
That led me down a rabbit hole, and here’s my working theory:
Despite the public feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, I believe OpenAI and xAI are quietly collaborating behind the scenes. Specifically, I suspect Grok is either running OpenAI-derived models or sharing infrastructure, and in return, OpenAI is gaining access to Musk’s massive data/compute resources via xAI and X (formerly Twitter).
Supporting points:
Microsoft is stepping away — They were OpenAI’s primary compute partner but have started signaling they’ll use other providers.
Grok’s rapid development — It came online way faster than would be realistic for a startup AI lab with no prior foundation.
Massive hardware investment by xAI — If OpenAI was looking for non-Microsoft compute, xAI could quietly be the supplier.
Grok's API being compatible with OpenAI’s SDK — suggests architectural overlap.
Recent political shift in ChatGPT’s answers — The model's tone has become more "centrist" or Musk-adjacent in the past year.
And now — Musk just merged X and xAI, combining their compute, data, and models into one company. That move erases corporate barriers and would make a quiet collaboration much easier to conceal.
Why keep it secret? Because the brands are oil and water: OpenAI is publicly "woke"; Musk is toxic in mainstream circles. If users knew Grok was OpenAI-powered, Musk’s fan base would revolt. If OpenAI users knew they were working with Musk, the backlash would be massive.
It’s just a theory, but the pieces fit too well for me to ignore.
Curious if anyone else has noticed this or has data points to support or refute it.
Personally, I think everyone should just continue to say "Twitter."
However, naming something "X" is just stupid. (Unless it's an owl in a popular children's show.)
Because…?
For example let's say you want to see all the times you've mentioned that site in your HN comment history. If you search for "author:tomcam twitter" in the search thingy at the bottom of most HN pages it turns up 34 comments and it looks like all of them are actually about that site or contained links to content on that site.
Change that to "author:tomcam x" and there are 13 comments. Only 4 of those are using X to mean Twitter. The x in the others come from OS-X, X-rated (in two comments), 2796 x 1290, x.into(), X.js, X-Files (in two comments), 4 x 8.
You get to pick winners AND be protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from liability for anything said on the platform.
Stockholder privacy is protected by law; they could be Russian, Saudi, Chinese, North Korean crypto-currency hackers; CIA; friends of friends, mom and pop, whomever.
X algorithms and work practices are protected by trade secrets, confidentiality agreements, and binding arbitration.
Even superpower-nation security services are deeply dependent on the willing participation of the telecommunications industry. They would be blind to a unwilling provider, particularly one with their own worldwide network.
Don't blame Elon Musk. We built this system. "If you build it, they will come."
(Edit: I acknowledge the downvote and normally delete if/since judged not helpful. But I would appreciate it if the flaws were pointed out explicitly: a category mistake in ascribing personal responsibility for collective effects? assuming the worst, or fear-mongering? just hyperventilating? I honestly don't want to waste anyone's time. I thought pointing out that legal protections necessary for companies could be so abused would stimulate the policy-minded.)
That should be, and i thought was, prohibited. Either you're a common carrier (and protected as such) or you're editorializing. Unfortunately the enforcement seems to be lacking more and more, and that even without considering that Musk is probably not subject to any enforcement these days.
I think that is fair to point out.
He's an idiot but I'll give him some credit, he just dumped a bunch if shares at their inflated value before they could drop even more. The guys he conned into buying Twitter with him won't have a reason to seek revenge now, and he can make whatever bullshit claims about the value if X he wants, since it's a private sale.
He did roughly the same thing with Telsa acquiring Solar Winds. Musk's Net worth is smoke and mirrors.