Hacker News Reader

Comment by thanhhaimai | Hacker News Reader

This move makes it more likely that the internal number for TSLA is not good, and Elon is expecting the price to go down.

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.

View on HN

> more likely that the internal number for TSLA is not good

The external number for TSLA is not doing very good either

Still higher than just 1 year ago. Still vastly overpriced.

To put it in perspective, over the past 6 months TSLA has performed as well as META and much better than GOOG and MSFT.

That's true, and in the last two months it's done worse than all of those put together!

Yes I guess if you bought TSLA two months ago you're hurting. If you bought it 6 months ago you're doing better than the S&P 500.

even despite the white house showroom ad, no less

It's interesting in conjunction with the SEC/DOGE move.

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.

xAI was seperated from X in what sense? xAI employees were X employees [1]. X reportedly had a stake in xAI, although The Verge says that hasn't materialized yet [0]. xAI's primary UI was X.

(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-...

I don't understand the relation with TSLA.

Musk leveraged TSLA stock to buy Twitter.

Elon sold 19B in stock, took a loan for 6.25B, and the rest was other investors.

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.

"Net Worth" can be misleading.

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?

There's a margin on TSLA stock at $112 or $115; Like some other commentator said as well - he collateralled TSLA stock to take a loan to buy Twitter.

his margin call level is not public right?

> his margin call level is not public right?

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-...

What happens if you collateral a stock for loan and the stock somehow becomes worthless?

Same thing that happens if you put up any kind of collateral that later becomes worthless: the lender doesn't get their money. That's the risk of collateral.

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.)

I’m not an expert in this but as far as I can tell there will never be a margin call. There’s only a margin call if he defaulted on his loans. All the banks will do is ask to restructure the loan to compensate for the loss in the collateral.

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...

It sounds more like a way to save whats left of X, and leave xAI investors holding the $12B bag of debt that X is struggling to service.

This is my feeling too. Good chance of a margin call coming for all his loans backed with TESLA shares

This doesn’t seem like a branding related deal, it seems like wanting to further marry their operations for strategic reasons.

What was stopping him doing that before? He owned both companies.

I don’t see how this is anything other than financial engineering to protect Musk’s personal wealth

None of this is really related to TSLA.

> xAI was relatively separated from X and TSLA, and wasn't having the backlashes associated with the two.

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).

This sounds as tinfoily a take as I've heard here. TSLA is not related to this in any way.

The purchase of Twitter was leveraged using TSLA stock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com