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It's advertising, literally the only thing that matters is public perception. If Elon dickishness makes public perception toxic that's all that matters.

This is only really true for television advertising, since most of it is brand building, instead of "click here and buy now" online.

Also reddit itself gives a huge number of ways for advertisers to access the reddit audience without paying for it.

Thousands of other things also have carbon emissions: beef production for instance. Or deforestation -- while it doesn't have a positive CO2 benefit, it removes a CO2 sink. The fishing industry has massive CO2 costs that aren't from fossil fuels.

lol the nba lottery tax but for carbon

Taxing it is still pretty hard to do. It's often hard to know exact emissions or what to test. I agree its probably an easier solution, but the accounting of "who is actually producing the carbon" is incredibly complicated, and will become more incredibly complicated as soon as literally billions of dollars are at stake.

Third is the political problem. The international community has some tight limitations on who can refine Uranium. That's reasonable in a lot of ways as an effort to limit nuclear proliferation, but countries don't exactly like being put in the position that they can produce nuclear energy but only if 100% of their supply chain is outsourced to current Western powers.

For every purchase over a certain price this should probably be legally mandated. The same thing happened to a number of parents who had kids spend $1000s on the app store before they became more aggressive with deciding with how things can be purchased.

vrrooom vrrooom, "that'll be $3000, sir"

> I think it was pretty clear that he was thinking about Saudi / middle east / Norwegian / sovereign wealth type funding on equity side. Then debt for rest if needed.

He was "thinking"? That's not funding secured. Why have all of these institutions specifically denied having discussed it at the time too? Either it wasn't these institutions, or funding was very far from secure at the time he claimed it was.

> It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.

If you are going to get investors for something like this, you're also going to roll over all the debt/options that you have on your books as well. It would have been close to ~100 billion, the largest LBO ever done.

> And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them.

You don't read about them because the CEO doesn't announce they secured funding for one in the middle of trading. You know, the responsible thing to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_K%C3%BCbelwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Schwimmwagen https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/bmws-dark-hist...

This was an $100 billion deal at the time. It would have been the largest LBO of all time. If there hasn't been any institution revealed to have been financing it at this point then there wasn't one.

> No one has been confused I don't think. I saw the considering the $420 buyout, I took it to mean just that.

Clearly options traders didn't, since all options above $420 went to zero.

> The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.

I disagree. I think the behavior of the stock holders have been pathetic. The short sellers demands for greater transparency and a company not entirely based on smoke and mirrors are easily met. The company itself has refused to meet those minimal standards.

> He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.

So? This shouldn't be an excuse for fraudulent behavior. Everytime I bring up a specific problematic behavior of Elon Musk, someone wants to reframe the conversation around the totality of his behavior, rather than the single criticism. I don't know about rockets, but from what I hear, Elon has done a great deal for him. Good for him. That doesn't make any of his behaviors faking a buyout ok, his behavior in the SolarCity merger, or his behavior with the Boring Company.

If we want better businessmen, we have to hold the ones we have accountable. Continuing to refuse to do that for Elon is spawning generations of people like Trevor Milton who assume laws don't apply if you're charming enough.

> The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.

He lied to shareholders about both SolarCity's financial state and faked a product in order to secure the merger. You can say, "these are public companies" all you want, but the public companies voted for the merger purely on Elon's word, which apparently isn't worth much.

> Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.

Not fake a product and lie about the financial status of my company. You know, the bare minimum.

> His twitter post was clear, he was "considering" taking TSLA private.

$420 funding secure indicates he already had financing ready. Why has this mystery funder never materialized.

> Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.

This is hugely problematic as a response. Elon Musk's behavior is unethical whether Tesla stock went up or down. The stock price should not be used as justification for previous lies. If we accept that, then we accept markets where people can gamble on a lie and things are fine if their gamble works out. That's not the business culture I want to create. People should be honest about risks so that they can be properly evaluated.

> The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players.

Elon Musk is literally the second biggest player! Ignoring his malfeasance creates more people willing to emulate him.

> Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!

You won't find me giving a kind word to the SEC's currently regulatory practices, but we need to recognize that corporate culture is made from examples. When someone like Elon Musk publicly flouts all responsible corporate behavior, and doesn't have an example made of him, then that is going to breed people willing to make the exact same decisions.

> He said he is considering something. It was not definite.

"Funding secured" is definite.

> Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.

It is a huge crime. In the middle of trading, he decided to fraudulently claim he had a buyout offer for his company. That screws over not just short sellers, but any one who had calls above the $420 a share price. There is no universe where that is healthy for our markets.

> if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.

He's currently in a court case for his buyout of Solar City, where he announced a fake product, used it as reasoning for his one public company to buy a company that he, his brother, and his cousin's had the largest stake in, and he, his brother, and his other companies (Tesla and SpaceX) were the largest bondholders in. This is a cartoonish set of conflicts of interest here. But apparently that shouldn't matter, because "stock price."

I mean, similarly to my certainty Donald Trump was lying that his taxes are under audit, and thats why he can't release them. Do I have exact knowledge of Elon's head state, no, but I can make inferences from all his actions since. If a buyer truly existed to facilitate that transaction, that would be public knowledge at this point.

> They also went after him for a lot of other stuff.

Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.

Not equate, realize that they are both part of a pattern.

We also should not let Elon Musk's actions only be evaluated in their totality. We can argue about the net sum of his contributions, but it should be fundamentally irrelevant to evaluating any individual one. He shouldn't lie or allow fraud. His actions with the Solar Roof launch, Boring Company, Self Driving, and funding tweets all cross ethical lines that we as a country need to make clear are not what we want from our business leaders.

Nikola has focused on some substantially different segments of the EV market than they have. Nikola has focused on the trucking market, rather than the consumer car market, which at least is different from many of its competitors

If you want some market crash hedges they are perfect.

Car companies are treated as government institutions. BMW and Volkswagen used to produce tanks. The German government will ask them too again if they start struggling to much. Companies like Fiat or Ferrari are as big a part of Italian national pride as rooting for their football team. Hyundai is 10% of South Korea's entire economy.

The car industry is political. Anyone assuming one company is going to sweep in and own everything hasn't paid attention. These companies will be defended until the ends of the earth by their own governments, so you have a massive put existing for all of them by default.

I would agree that fraud is always going to happen; how much though is up for debate, and I would tend to argue that more fraud makes the world worse at funding revolutionary ideas. More revolutionary ideas happen and get funded in the US, which while I believe has become rife with fraud over the past decade, is no where near the scale the number of frauds in China or Africa or less well monitored markets.

Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.

> it's easier for more people to raise a lot of money for risky endeavors.

Is it easier to raise money for risky endeavors or for "hot" endeavors. I'm not sure this no structure to how a lot of people are now allocating capital is actually contributing anything positive, just pure malinvestment.

AMC is a perfect example. It's a company that raised hundreds of millions at valuations 10x of what it had months ago. Is AMC a "risky investment" we should be allocating capital too? Box office receipts and still down 50% and may never fully recover. Why is AMC a good use of that capital rather than institutions that can replace it completely?

Why do you think Elon Musk is obviously different? He's definitely had many events where he has lied about aspects of his business. You could argue that it doesn't matter now that he has built something real, but that's down to a lot of luck, not ethical backbone.

It's part of the fraud triangle studied in most business schools:

"The fraud triangle is a framework commonly used in auditing to explain the reason behind an individual’s decision to commit fraud. The fraud triangle outlines three components that contribute to increasing the risk of fraud: (1) opportunity, (2) incentive, and (3) rationalization."

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ac...

Companies that are "saving the world" are rife with people willing to rationalize their behavior. That's why it is imperative they are scrutinized properly so that the other elements don't also become rampant. We've failed completely with that on the latest wave of greentech companies.

I'm not sure you are following the Elon-Solar City case if you think Elon's only sin is being a dick on Twitter. Or the original $420 funding a share saga.

Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.

Eh, your mileage may vary, but I've normally found too completely open ended questions impossible to ever really get a good signal from. I've done enough interviews to feel like questions with a pretty binary "you either get it or you don't", evaluation make it pretty hard to judge someone. I'd rather ask questions where there are multiple levels of evaluation, rather than a single trick.

And if a company repeatedly and systematically flauts this behavior?

Luxury car makers still should fraudulently sell incomplete products.

They are. Electrek just likes overstating their own importance.

It was written very lazily and quickly, by someone who knows that getting an article out first is going to be one of the most important things to driving clicks.

It's easier to pay to keep a brand on top. If you're paying to revive the reputation of a brand, the uphill climb is much more painful.