> so you'll have to explain where you got the money from anyways
Explain to whom?
-12 karma · joined April 5, 2021
Explain to whom?
No amount of money can give BlueOrigin the freedom which SpaceX has to blow up rockets and telecast failure globally every week like it has happened for the last 5 years.
The CEO of Amazon just can't be associated with such public failures.
For Musk Tesla and SpaceX were parallel efforts, they were never such thing for Bezos, in 2015 when he got serious about Blue Origin , Amazon was already a bigger company than Tesla is now and will ever be.
He simply didn't have that freedom.
> Based on all objective measures they are not.
Q: "How can you become a millionaire mr. Branson?"
A: "Be a billionaire and start and aerospace comapany"
These are not software margins we are talking about, to channel my inner Ricky Bobby: If you ain't software, you are last.
> And the believe that Gates has a veto at the WHO and the UN is nonsense.
Gates can pick up the phone and occupy a week long of Biden time if he wants, same goes for Xi Jin Ping, the WHO director and the climate workgroups at the UN.
This is what happens when you do what others would never do: donate money to philantropic efforts way beyond the marginal PR utility returns of such donations. You get politicians lining up because they know they'd be able to take credit and do vitcory laps after a job well done which Gates would never claim ownership of, that is beyond the occasional Bloomberg conference which only policy nerds attend.
Stark difference with Musk who doesn't do philantropy and frankly scans for causes to inject himself in the loudest possible manner such as the Thai soccer team trapped in the caves.
Musk should thank that Gates is magnanimous enough not bring up the mess which Tesla is when he talks with Biden and John Kerry about climate policy. And Musk attacked him first, because he committed the sin of buying a Porsche so that he'd be able to lap Laguna Seca without the car overheating and exploding such as Teslas.
That can change when they start selling their internet services, but again up to now all the promotional energies to build a brand have not been monetized.
The Free Advertisement and brand rising that you mentioned is only valuable if you monetize upon it. As of NOW the only way they have to monetize is selling advertising space during launches and I suppose they get the ads on Youtube as well.
And the best placed individual is the POTUS whoever he/she might be.
Why is this a problem? There is only one reason in business why you'd want to grab the attention of the average person...and that is advertising .
Will SpaceX start advertising during launches? Maybe...up until then being known to the average person is not an advantage.
Some people claim going public would enable SpaceX to cash in on its fame by offloading loads of stock to the aforementioned normies...but that practice scares away smart/value money so again...until SpaceX starts advertising during launches the only person benefiting from the social media fanfare is Musk who gets to be invited on SNL to show how socially akward he is.
Musk looks tough on twitter, but he can't speak and his social incompetence shows a lot.
The POTUS (whoever he/she is) and the first person on Mars (whoever he/she is) would outframe him just like JFK and Neil Armstron outframed whoever was the guy running NASA at the time.
He'd be left with a very low margin business , more probably heavily in the red, like the Apollo program was.
This is all there is to it.
Bezos stepping down and distancing himself from Amazon should provide new lift (no pun intended) and much more risk taking to Blue Origin.
We should all remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not like the frentic months of the software wars where Apple put together the iPhone and its app ecosystem in 48 months and others never caught it.
This is a terrible business (like everything Musk is involved in except Neuralink).
Bezos should learn from Google and understand that there is no shame in killing a project....but I suspect the ego wars against Musk are too big now.
Bezos should have known better. When Musk insults you, you just do what Bill Gates does: You smile, compliment him, stroke his ego a bit and then go back having de-facto veto power in institutions such as the WHO and UN, operating way above Musk head.
What if following the footsteps of search business model the device comes...hear me out...free of charge??? Whoooooaaaa
They'll never risk bugging billions of Android phones
This thing would only work at 2% of its potential unless you also give users an excuse to use the front camera much more frequently and move the ads from search towards the aforementioned front camera environment.
They have a whole lot of social engineering to do which has to go along with the proper engineering.
I guess efficiency and customization junkies would love a GoogleDocs UI which is optimized for their gaze so you can be upfront with them
In one word. It would completely disrupt the data mining business.
They only know when you click on something nowadays. With this tech it would completely change the data mining business and the info it can extract on the levels of engagements.
I predict there will be a system in place to prevent the cam being used at all times though.
Google can come up with something on Youtube streams where the streamer is using the front camera or maybe revamp GoogleTalk with ads, bottom line is giving the user a reason to use the front camera and then capture the gaze
Nobody loves/hates Sergey Brin, Lawrance Page, Jim Simons, John Overdeck, Clifford Assness, Andrew Beal etc...
If you worked in the promotional industry you'd know that rockstars/popstars have to be dragged kicking and screaming , away from drugs and parties, to do interviews and media appearences.
Entrepreneurs who want to be famous such as Musk and Trump...nobody is dragging them, they are the ones who want to do it.
As per the article, master promoters, because they know their business is not capable of making it on their own merits.
I remind you that Microsoft never ever took VC money, just organic growth and re-investing revenues. People who do it the proper way don't need the flashes, quite the contrary they are busy hiding their margins to avoid other people getting in the space.
My guess is no. People want to talk about success and success is measured with marketcap and net worth. 99% of people who know Musk name have really no business knowing his name and care very little about electric vehicles.
My guess he also can't handle going back to 2014 levels of social relevancy and will try and run for governor or some other thing like that.
Musk is fundamentally an attention whore, he pumped the marketcap before the company was mature, it's not like Tesla marketcap grew spontaneusly.
Great! What are the margins? Most likely terrible because you have to build real stuff.
You know who ISN'T full of bullshit? Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.
They just STFU, present modest outlook to set the stage for the company to knock it out of the park Quarter after quarter.
I could care less about the rockets, the truth is in the boring numbers, not the showmanship
They do the exact same thing, and building cars is the worst business there is.
Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.
Also at the individual level the only good move is to secure that you'll not be affected by climate change. How? By becoming rich, which is a natural consequence of not losing out to inflation and also by profiting off the appreciation of BTC.
That's the spring which compels them to invest: hatred towards the Fed policy of 2%, the public would really love a -2%.
The sentiment is so strong that they accept the consequences of the vastly inferior settlment mechanism which is BTC as well as all the headaches.
People don't have the same hatred and concern for companies which Eth aims to disrupt. People by and large love their user experience on Amazon, Google, Youtube, Robinhood etc. whereas Eth and DeFi is overtly complicated with 0 liquidity
The only bull case I can see for DeFi is that nerds with money and cryptopunk attitude would think that regular people would want to exchange JPMorgan and RobinHood for DeFi...in that case of course price will pump because a whole lot of people anticipate something, but it won't happen for real, just as an appreciation due to people betting and projecting that everybody is wired as them.
You need these capabilities to write great songs.
To me the reality is much simpler. A rock n roll song needs more time to be appreciated compared to other styles of music.
Modern society goes much faster than the 60s and 70s. Also competition with other forms of entertainment...music quality has remained essentially the same compared to the 60s...whereas the quality of video based story telling (TV, movies, live sports etc.) improved from distorted out of focus sporadic content to 8K whenever you want
I think at least some people in here are familiar with it, it's called:
"The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success"
Why isn't he working on stuff in a full open source manner like Linus of Linux did back in the day?
Also , let's assume you are in it to solve the problem and believe that the for-profit model is the better than opensource ...then why not live modestly like Warren Buffett?
Guy knows what he's doing. He wants to be famous and rich and surronded by yes-men and yes-girls.
But once you are a company that size the goal is to grow and accomplish amazing stuff but with great margins.
Tesla has essentially arrived at destination with regards to MarketCap, it won't become a 5 trillion dollar company. Nobody will. There is such a thing as the Sherman Act and Antitrust.
Tesla still lags behind in every other metric (especially margins) compared to similar companies of that size.
Seems to me Musk will have to work a whole lot just deliver and thus mantain the current valuation and his level of net worth right now.
Alternatively he could get to 5 trillions by promising new products at an increasingly higher rate and thus avoiding the antitrust laws. Those laws were written for a company which actually has a market dominance, not a company which has a stock market dominance based on the promises of the CEO and people believing in it and buying the stock.
I think from what we've seen, he's going in this direction exactly, he'll keep inflating the bubble that's for sure. He only has one gear
People are looking for something to believe in, which will make them feel like the future will be brighter.
Musk has this ability . Unless he goes crazy and becomes overleveraged with debt he'll be fine.
He'll constantly move the goalposts and keep giving people hope, if Autopilot is proven not feasible, he'll just move onto the next big thing which will fill people with enthusiasm .
He's essentially a politician, a techno-utopian cult leader who is also a CEO and major owner of the stock.
His best intuition was understanding that telling people that the future will be brighter is itself a product which people are willing to buy. Much like people pay for insurance to have peace of mind, people gladly pay to be reassured that the world will be better.
His second best intuition is to never bankrupt the company trying to deliver, just move the goalposts. As long as you don't bankrupt the company you can always move the goalposts
People understand the diminishing returns of wealth, they'd rather be at the helm of a Fortune 100 company and have a net wealth of 100m vs. being a billionaire who made his billion buying and selling real estate in Sweden.
Sweden billionaires are all small potatos guys, they are way inferior to Trump if we are talking about turnover of the companies they own.
The US has the real guys, people like Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Koch etc.
The biggest meaning is derived by elevating oneself socially. It's the reason why people move to cities. Cities are essentially the arenas where the competition happens.
You can say whatever you want , but more and more people are moving to the arenas, and to the extent they stop moving there or an outflow begins...that's because we now have the Internet which is essentially a MegaCity. A huge metropolis , the biggest arena we ever built
Competition keeps us busy, if we are busy competing , then we can't think.
The moment society collectively stops to think and do introspection, it would be the end of the human race, we'd all fall in a deep depression and off ourselves.
If I were to use a word to define the nordic countries I'd use : Flatline
An other which comes to mind is : Stasis
Those places are depressing, people don't have the hatred and the competitive killer instinct which can be seen in big US metropolis and London
If I was the CEO or the President of those companies I'd close shop and go start a cryptocurrency instead
You are sending the message that if the problem is too important, then you should not work on it because as soon as you find a solution you'd be held at gunpoint to make it availible for free.
There will be a huge slowdown in Selfdriving cars tech as well. If Waymo or Amazon come up with the tech , then you'd see people screaming :
"40,000 deaths per year! Young children, pregnant mothers!!! Release the IP, now!!"
And of course government would follow the mob and force them to do so.
Again, off they go to start a cryptocurrency or in the internet advertising business.