The dude thought covid would go away last May.
He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.
He's thought that full self driving was 6 months away for literally 4 years now.
And he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was when he sank 1.5 billion into it.
Tesla sells lots of cars on the promise of self-driving in the marketing.
Musk bought BTC, single-handedly pumped the price of BTC, and then sold at a huge profit.
I don't think he's a genius but Musk is definitely not stupid. He's just not playing the obvious game you think he's playing.
I think there needs to be some rule in discussion that as soon as you start arguing over if someone is dumb or evil, you have to stop. It's impossible to figure out which (or what mix) it actually is.
I was thinking of Jacobson v Massachusetts in my original comment, which upheld state and local governments' broad authority in public health.
Here's a balanced view of the powers affirmed in Jacobson and how that has changed over time to better protect individual liberty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449224/
Note however that applies to individuals, not factories or places of business which are subject to much more regulation.
I really like this, and I propose it be called "Kulak's Law".
Also the word "kulak" is loaded - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak
I think when evaluating situations compassion for people's lives is a more important matter than economical wellbeing. (Even if it's their wellbeing)
Traffic accidents decrease, other accidental fatalities decreases, the number of people who catch covid decrease in a lockdown.
What's the point of being alive if you can't live life? Fine if you choose that for yourself, but you're a monster if you'd dare to assume you have the right to confine everybody else to such a miserable existence.
Marx has a great quote along those lines:
"The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body?"
Does the industrial effort to decarbonize our economy really matter? Is it urgent? Is it essential?
That's what I hate about people telling Trump is dumb. If you've done what he has done, he's definitely not dumb.
Funny thing is that although I never liked Paris Hilton, I was pretty sure she was not that dumb (turned out she wasn't).
The same story when I look at my Facebook feed. Plenty of smart people have all kinds of different views on Covid and vaccination. And all of them call the 'other group' dumb.
Seems like political viewpoints have nothing to do with being smarter than someone else.
So what exactly are Trump’s accomplishments? It’s not like the dude started off selling hot dogs. He made a lot of shitty investments, lost a lot of money, and is one of the few people on this planet capable of bankrupting a casino. In Vegas.
Yes he’s famous, of course, but his “look at me I’m a successful billionaire” image is all smoke and mirrors.
not sure if there even can be a complete list with Musk but, let's also add:
1) privileged background thanks to emerald mining fortune made in apartheid South Africa,
2) union-busting and abusive employer,
3) hoarding $175.6 billion in stolen wages during a pandemic,
4) encouraged a coup
I hadn't seen this before. Do you have an article diving into this number?
Doesn't this have legal ramifications when done in the stock market? If it is shady for that market, why is it acceptable in other markets? Oh, right, they're not regulated.
Intent matters, which also makes market manipulation so difficult to prove.
Start with the guy who started accepting bitcoin for pizza.
Also I didn't get the sense that Musk single-handedly pumped BTC. He jumped on the bandwagon about mid-way through the current pump. I am still foggy on what kicked off the current bull run.
Wasn't that one of the big selling points of BTC?
I don't even have to point to any specific laws, just look at all the websites that talk about stocks operating without any SEC intervention.
I have a hard time believing the people here defending Musk dont know this, and can't see how his behaviour _migbt_ qualify as a pump and dump.
Some would argue that Bitcoin is fundamentally a giant "Pump and Dump" anyway, so nothing to see here.
You may be technically correct, doesn't make it any less sketch or immoral
You can't just classify this set of actions as a pump and dump. You have to do something that is considered a scam, such as grossly misrepresenting the security with the intention of making a profit at the cost of uneducated investors. As far as I can tell, Elon never claimed Bitcoin is environmentally friendly, nor did he make other false claims about Bitcoin's functionalities or capabilities.
(ooooh, was there lead in your hamburger? just the price of freedom, I guess! if you don't like it, you can go eat fiat hamburgers like the plebes.)
liberty: intentionally or intentionally harming people is illegal. If you or your company poison someone, you are held responsible for the harm you caused.
non-liberty: a specific regulation about the level of acceptable lead in meat. limited liability shields the owners from being held responsible.
https://www.energy.gov/timeline/timeline-history-electric-ca...
SpaceX wins contracts because they are able to send payloads into space, nothing to do with marketing, and sending payloads into space isn't even that hard - they basically beat out Nasa who weren't allowed to compete and Boeing who can't send a plane to 30,000ft without fucking it up.
Tesla sells lots of cars because they're electric and Apple made battery technology cheap.
BTC has been running up and down far longer than Musk has been involved and it'll continue after he's gone.
Because he was busy changing the face of consumer retail, the internet, and other huge aspects of society up to a few months ago. Give it a couple of years and you'll see Blue Origin eat SpaceX's cake.
> Why can't every other car manufacture seem to put together an electric car with the same range?
Mostly because other car manufacturers are very serious about not lying about things that are easily demonstrable like range. There's a reason Teslas are the only EV that no one can get the advertised range from, but all the other EVs crush their advertised ranges. Your question is "why doesn't every other car manufacturer lie psychopathically to the consumer?".
Before Musk we had no economical reusable launch systems, economical space flight was sci-fi, and in the 2000s there were many people who thought modern civilization must inevitably grind to a halt as we deplete oil because oil is absolutely irreplaceable for modern transport.
SpaceX built the first economical to operate reusable space hardware at any scale, and Tesla validated the market for EVs. Even if Tesla fails, without them I highly doubt the EV revolution would be happening. Traditional car companies would never have cannibalized their ICE sales with EVs without a hard kick in the ass to do so.
Like him or hate him, no point denying Musk his achievements, which are more than many of us here will manage in our lifetimes and Musk appears to be far from finished. His biggest enemy at this point is himself, that unstable streak is a real worry. But here's to hoping that he will notch up a longer list of achievements.
"He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"
For Musk being grounded will have a completely different meaning though :)
EVs would have happened without Tesla. The "kick in the ass" is the same thing that has driven all other emissions improvements: government regulation.
Lol, what an exaggeration. I don't think anyone argued seriously that we would have to stop using cars at all. The conversation was always about renewable energy.
No they didn't, according to the announcment:
>> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.
Note the wording "*will not* be selling any Bitcoin" not "*has not* sold any Bitcoin". There were major dumps a couple minutes before Elon's announcement. It should be no surprise if Tesla front-run Elon's announcement, knowing that it would affect the price.
They'll keep a trivial amount on the financials, but I suspect the majority was off the books.
They will also use this an excuse to realize revenue in what will appear to be a very lean quarter. I mean they can't exactly sell to "test liquidity" again.
I don't think that counts as a trivial amount on the financials.
Someone wants to buy a 50k car. They give you 50k worth of Bitcoin. You immediately sell the Bitcoin for 50k of dollars.
At no time did you need to own Bitcoin before the transaction.
Of course, that would require Tesla's vendors to start accepting BTC. I strongly suspect LG Chem and Panasonic don't accept bitcoin payments.
Are you sure he has sold?
I think I would agree with that.
Take note of that last part of his tweet[0]:
> Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy. We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.
Here he posed a problem that is now on people's mind. Soon he will offer a solution and people will go nuts about it. He often does that kind of thing.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13926020410258432...
I don't think musk/tesla has sold a single btc..
In recruiting, on the other hand, the Mars marketing has helped them a lot.
The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as a backup-plan for humanity. The Drake equation be damned - in case we're actually alone, we have a pretty strong moral requirement to make sure that (human) life survives.
Sorry, but it's like planning your workout routine in a burning building.
The climate emergency is building right now, this instant. Cosmic threats like asteroids happen on the order of millions of years apart.
We need to stabilize the planet, now, in this generation, immediately, or we will doom a million species and most of humanity.
Once that is done, we can look at problems on the ten thousand to ten million year scales that cost quadrillions of dollars to solve, like "moving to a second planet".
Let me be blunt - unless we go all out, the collapse will happen a hundred years before any Mars colony is self-sufficient, and none of them will survive.
Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a dense enough atmosphere for us.
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Look, I recognize the difficulty that Global Warming has on the human race. But Global Warming is a far, far, far easier problem than trying to have a sustainable, livable experience on Mars.
If all of humanity lives on Earth though, we're just one unlucky meteorite away from going extinct.
Given this: let's develop the terraforming tech for Mars, and establish colonies there.
The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.
I don't see why shouldn't try to do both:
a) Lower the earth's surface temperature
b) Begin the process of building a backup of humanity on Mars
Whether or not A) is true has nothing to do with whether or not B) is worth doing. There's no reason to imply that I'm making a false dichotomy fallacy.
But don't expect me to support the effort by any means, not until you give me an argument for why Mars Terraforming would be a worthwhile use of resources I control or resources I have otherwise influence over.
Nobody wants your support, they just need crazy enough wealthy people
The fact that he's spending resources on nominally going to Mars is completely idiotic. I've got enough of a brain to figure that out.
Its a free country. Which means I'm free to make my opinion on how others spend their money and resources.
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This is relevant because of all of the highly questionable moves Musk has done in the past weeks. He pumped BTC, pumped DOGE online. He pretends that he's a busy and (Aspergers) CEO despite spending huge amounts of effort on pop culture like Rick and Morty, Saturday Night Live, and other cultural mainstays. He proposes that terraforming Mars is a fruitful endevour.
He lies about "Full Self Driving" to the public for years, even as news reports come out as people literally die and burn to death inside of the cars his companies make. He claims COVID19 is a hoax, in an effort to keep his factories open.
He publishes a Finite-Element-Analysis of Hyperloop so basic that a 1st year college student could have done it. He builds tiny tunnels without any emergency contingencies while putting highly flammable lithium Ion batteries inside of those tunnels for Las Vegas.
And then finally, we come to this topic. Where he first hypes BTC (after buying it), and then after selling a huge chunk of it (over 10% in the past quarter), seemingly moves to dump the price of BTC.
Etc. etc.
At some point, we have to recognize that this guy is not an "engineer" at all. Musk is a hypeman at best. His lack of focus (so many topics covered...) suggests mania (as opposed to Aspergers). I dunno. Its getting harder and harder to take Musk seriously on any of these issues.
What is Elon Musk's "one long term thing" ?
* Payment Processors? (Paypal? X.com? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com)
* Electric Cars? (Tesla?)
* Solar Panels? Utility scale electric generators? (SolarCity?)
* Space? (SpaceX)
* Infrastructure? (Hyperloop? Boring Company?)
* AI? (Self-driving cars)
* Internet infrastructure? (Starlink?)
* BTC / DOGEcoin? Crypto-currencies?
For Payment Processors: we're looking at web technologies like Javascript, Two-factor authentication, Back-end Web processing, etc. etc. That's very much in the know for us nerds who hang around here in ycombinator: an extended "hyperfocus" on Payment Processors is a lifetime of effort alone.
There's simply not enough time for Elon Musk to reach "expert" levels of understanding in any of these subjects. Anyone who knows anything about these subjects knows that Musk's discussion points are EXTREMELY shallow. They're deep enough that maybe a layperson thinks that Musk is smart, but... seriously, look at his recent DOGEcoin / BTCcoin discussion points. The dude barely understand cryptocurrencies (or at least pretends he barely understands them, as he "suddenly" realizes the energy implications of BTC).
------------
I'm not really doubting the ability of someone with Asperger's to change subjects. But given how quickly Elon Musk changes subjects, its my personal opinion that he probably doesn't have Asperger's. Do remember: that all the while he's changing these subjects, Elon Musk is partying hard and participating in pop culture (Saturday Night Live, Rick and Morty, Twitter rants, etc. etc.).
His behavior does NOT match any Asperger's individual I've ever met. I know everyone's case is unique, but... that's a lot of "non-Asperger's" things going on (social partying, pop culture, appearances on TV, live talks, CEO position, "jack-of-all-trades" behavior instead of depth into particular subjects... etc. etc.)
I'm no expert in psychology. But this behavior is _mania_: common in say Bipolar individuals. Which is useful in its own niches of course (much like Asperger's is useful in engineering: mania typically causes an individual to visit many subjects... albeit shallowly but yeah, that's probably useful to a typical CEO moreso than hyperfocus actually)
As I said in other comments, feel free to waste your resources on the project. But if you're trying to convince others that the project is useful or fruitful (and ask for other people's resources or help on the matter), then be prepared for some resistance.
The only difference is that the number of people that can live in extreme conditions is much smaller than the number that can live in normal conditions.
Fighting against climate change is purely about making sure that the earth can maintain 7 billion + humans. Any mars colonization program will not progress fast enough to let 7 billion humans inhabit mars within the next 200 years.
>It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.
Nobody said "stop what they're doing" except you. But the usual argument is that Elon Musk is accelerating the progress toward mars colonization and accelerating that progress simply isn't needed because of time constraints that no amount of money can solve. It will take decades no matter what a conman tells you.
Imagine trying to build up population centers at the bottom of the ocean in order to have a backup plan for some nuclear winter on the surface. You could just build your hermetically-sealed, closed-system things on the ground! They'd work just as well (absent, I guess, the getting nuked part). Mars is that, plus you gotta actually get over there to send resources for the first couple hundred years.
Maybe you're right.
If his proclamation knocks, say, half the value off Bitcoin, and it stays there, that wasn't a very clever pump and dump, because they kinda skipped the 'dump' part.
That would be an explicit lie then, something the SEC has jurisdiction over? (I'm not actually sure)
But then when you see people firing up coal plants in your back yard just to mine BTC (as opposed to China) reality suddenly kicks in and it's hard to spin bullshit arround that. Regulators are really dropping the ball on crypto - corporate entities should not be allowed to fuel this shit.
Why do I feel like lobbyists right now trying to kybash to any politician who even mentions regulations?
I heard one financial talking head say today that he's buying gold. If worse cone to worse at least he can make some jewelry.
I'm all for bitcoin, but wasting energy throughout the world seems wrong. And man's quest to make money knows no boundaries.
...and it would give me hope that we might get round steering wheels and individual non-touchscreen controls for critical driving functions.
COVID could've started to go away in May with HCT / massively more aggressive vax.
Some companies gave up on mRNA then. Those that wanted to continue switched to trying to develop mRNA vaccines instead of mRNA treatments for non-viral conditions. Vaccines would require lower doses, which they hoped would reduce the problems with side effects.
Experimental mRNA vaccines were developed for a few viral diseases, but not had gotten through trials and been licensed for use in humans.
Some links to sources are in the history section of the Wikipedia article on RNA vaccines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine#History
Musk opposed those measures though, which makes his level of expertise on the matter somewhat more dubious.
I have lost count the number of times in the past about something I have told people the truth, the 100% truth and they tried to skip over what I said because it did not match what they wanted to believe.
Worse, afterwards when events prove they were wrong they then try to make all sorts of excuses to support their original claims.
You can try and pick on Elon's fine details, but look at the stuff people said he could not push thru. If this was before 2010 the idea of the Tesla cars, Solar Tiles, Power-walls, Falcon Rockets, Dragon Capsules, Boring Tunnel and Neuralink all seem like fantasy - yet today they all exist.
Instead I see people send lots of time concentrating on things like Hyperloop not working out so far while trying not to mention the successes.
For those of us who measure by outcomes, he's a genius.
Tesla employs almost 80k workers, and SpaceX employs almost 10k. Elon might have had the idea, but it's the employees that made it possible and a reality.
I do agree that it isn't "single-handedly," but when I hear Elon speak he definitely does shout out to the team. I haven't heard him take 100% credit for these things.
and the money to convert the idea into execution with a high probability of losing his money.
SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.
Not particularly shocking.
Rich people buy rich people things, yes, and it matter if its a gas car or an electric. And it matter if the battery industry was transformed by that. And it matters that the image of electric cars was transformed. It matters that the largest fast charging network in the world was financed by this.
SpaceX proved that they could make things the government already does massively cheaper. Literally read any report from NASA or GAO. NASA own evaluation showed that the 300M SpaceX spend on the initial Falcon 9 would have cost 3 billion if done by the government.
Since SpaceX join the race military launches have come down in price by sometimes multiple 100 million $. ULA even outside of the 300M$+ launch prices, received an extra 900M every year.
Literally everything the government is buying from SpaceX could literally not be done cheaper by any other government, foreign or domestic or company foreign or domestic.
When SpaceX got started the commercial launch market was basically 0% US launchers, SpaceX alone changed that to depending on you calculate 50-90% of the commercial market now.
There is seriously not a single argument you can make about SpaceX other then simply arguing the government should be doing spaceflight at all. Everything we know about government internals suggest that both NASA and DoD are beyond happy with SpaceX.
interesting, can you cite that?
That's odd, I didn't say a single word about whether or not I liked Elon. Did you mean to reply to my post or someone else's?
>SpaceX proved government budgets aren't scrutinized enough.
Did it really ? Tesla rode on the advances of battery tech driven by mobile devices, there were other EV efforts arround the time Tesla came up. I agree they recognised it early on and made it fasionable + they had this narrative driven market valuation which pressured other automotive execs to invest in the EV narrative. But 10 years is way too much - battery tech advancements were bound to bring us to this point even without Tesla R&D (I think they only started using their advancements recently, before that it was just stock batteries ?), and there was enough money in batteries from other markets to drive advancement without the EV push.
Not denying Tesla played a big positive role in this, but certainly not 10 years IMO.
Electric cars were a gimmick before Tesla, almost no-one was taking them seriously, after Tesla that changed.
also, if you ask me, a super expensive sports car should still count as a "gimmick". I give Tesla credit for reigniting excitement about EVs, but lets not oversell their achievement.
The what?
> the Ford Ranger EV
The what?
> honda ev plus
The what?
> Toyota RAV4 EV
The what?
If you mention Tesla to literally anyone, they know about the cars. The product, and the marketing of it, have definitely brought EV's into the mainstream. Before that, very few consumers knew anything about EVs, maybe with the exception of the GM EV1. Now electric cars are a common sight on the road.
Nisan Leaf was way more recognisable than a Tesla for a while.
And also things like Prius really prooved the point that electricity can be used to power cars.
Not knocking on Tesla, they have a great brand and helped spark interest and speed up demand for EVs. But saying they advanced the adoption of EVs by 10 years is ridiculous.
I honestly don't think we'd have seen the same level of EV adoption by now if not for Tesla. But then I don't really know how to quantify it for arguments sake.
In fact "affordable" Teslas (model S) came after competition like Leaf which was a best seling electric car up until recently.
Fun reminder, Musk did not start Tesla and bought his way into the company. His involvement should not be understated, but it's had years of management shuffles and changes of direction.
SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of giants, if SpaceX didn't exist, the science and people wouldn't just disappear.
But, SpaceX and Tesla for sure accelerated the EVs market and reusable rockets. I don't think anyone could've created this level of buzz around their companies. Main thing being that most of the general public now knows about Tesla and SpaceX and the awareness around EVs and reusable rockets. Now, I'm not saying Musk is some godsend or something, but he definitely played big role in creating this buzz around space travel and EVs.
> their success only makes it harder for other rocket companies to stand out and succeed.
Of course it does. That's one of the main points of one's success and it is true for every single field in existence. By that logic, no one should succeed because that would make it difficult for others? I strongly disagree with that one.
When you have the power to influence policy/markets/opportunities simply by saying the right or wrong thing, that starts to factor into public statements a lot more than what you actually believe.
These types have a solid understanding of what's technically possible by the laws of physics, but wholly underestimate the feasibility of a complete implementation.
It's an open discussion whether these types are "bad" or "good". I tend to believe that hyper-optimists have a role in this world that drives progress forward. Teddy's Roosevelt's "Man in the arena", if you will.
He might be completely aware that it's not plausible while still publicly saying otherwise for financial gain.
He called a guy a pedophile with absolutely no evidence and paid no price for that.
Related is the fact that billionaires and millionaires are just humans with lots of money. People seem to think a lot of money makes people somehow superhuman, or vice versa. It doesn't. Billionaires are subject to all the same fallacies and errors as anyone else. There is no superhuman enlightened "illuminati" that is somehow above and beyond the rest of us, at least cognitively. They might have a little bit more information but they are no more rational than we are.
Based on the COVID denial, cryptocurrency stuff, and memes if I didn't know better I'd say he's been hanging around on the 'chans... and I don't know better.
He can't predict the future, so what?
>He thinks it's easier to make Mars habitable than it is to keep the Earth habitable.
He never said this.
> And he didn't really understand what Bitcoin was when he sank 1.5 billion into it.
How can you prove he doesn't understand what Bitcoin was?
Literally everyone else with half a clue could predict that one correctly.
It probably is easier to survive long term on Mars than Earth because Mars has a very thin atmosphere. Earth could pull a Venus. Earth life on Mars requires underground small sealed compartments with radiation shielding which is a more survivable architecture than one big shared ecosystem.
I think you're confusing mental bandwidth with intelligence, likewise you seem to be putting him on a pedestal expecting him to have an amazing network of advisors on every conceivable topic.
No, he's human and his limited attention is split between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably the other projects he has. Likewise these are complex organizations with a lot of moving parts and it's impossible to not delegate to other competent people, hopefully more competent than not, and then if bad decisions are made by say a Board of Directors and/or CFO then it's perfectly reasonable to reverse course - it's more reasonable than expecting Elon to be an expert of everything, he's not super human.
However I imagine the situation's more complex than meets the eye, some people like you are sticking to cherrypicked facts, others are putting forward conspiracy theories founded on no evidence that this was Elon pumping and dumping purposefully, or that he's just doing it to piss off the SEC because he hates the SEC. Who knows.
Elon in the not so distant past tweeted: "Bitcoin is almost as much bs as fiat money" - so he certainly has enough of an idea to make that statement.
He's not dumb for a scum that scam billions in profit
Re self-driving: Tesla's boom in the past ~1.5 years coincided with his laughable claims about self-driving and robo-taxis.
And re bitcoin: the guy literally tweeted two words "buy doge" and sparked a pump-and-dump bubble. Then he went on SNL, didn't plug doge enough, and it tanked instantly. Then a couple hours ago he tweeted more doge stuff and it started rallying again.
Crazy stuff.
But I'd be very interested to see Musk's personal trading accounts, and the trading accounts of his close associates.
Musk should be investigated, this is not the first time his actions lead to massive market perturbations.
Some of these anti-Musk conspiracy theories are truly crazy especially considering the man is so out there that you don't even need to fabricate weird theories like this to make him look bad.
I think it's fair to suspect something here though, and question Musks behavior these last few years. Yes, originally he wanted to save the world with Tesla and also find a new world with SpaceX (at least that was the outspoken goals), but his current dealings that skirt on legality of things, gives another side of him.
Some people who seemed to be driven by the goodness of their heart ends up chasing the same money-dragon as many before them. It's not impossible.
...we are talking about Elon Musk, right? The one who got rich founding the definitely-ethical, not-at-all-shady company PayPal? That Elon Musk?
Maybe there was no master plan, but it would be a lot better for his personal net-worth if he went long/short on bitcoin before each tweet.
For now. Spacex is going to be the most valuable company on Earth and Mars.
― Shel Silverstein
this is a good point, but if I held Tesla, I would probably prefer cash. it could be that Tesla's greatest value is as a prop for BTC scams.
Teslas catch on fire randomly. Their roofs fall off sometimes. Their self-driving tech doesn't work as well as people expect, and when people get that expectation wrong, it sometimes results in them dying. The bulk of the company's revenue comes from carbon credits.
maybe he's pumping and dumping Bitcoin because he doesn't expect his wealth to last, and if he sold a bunch of Tesla stock, people would notice. a little scam to set aside a nest egg just in case the other scam doesn't pan out.
the weaknesses in this argument are SpaceX and PayPal, so I'm not totally convinced of my own position here, but I haven't seen any good counterarguments otherwise.
he could also just find scams fun for their own sake.
That's why they're not actual net worth. They are not liquid and will almost never be.
Private pump and dump schemes generate real cash, that can be used.
Musk can never leverage his Tesla stocks to do anything useful near the theoretical amount he has. better get some real cash that can buy actual yachts.
There's no conspiracy here.
Not true. They made their numbers by selling 100M or so of BTC last quarter.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36266393/tesla-mad...
> The second item that helped Tesla were sales of bitcoin, the "positive impact" of which amounted to $101 million.
The article says that was 1/10 of what they own. We won't know until next quarter how much more they have sold.
More likely is that Musk liked the idea of Bitcoin, but got a lot of pressure from environmental activists after committing to it and decided it wasn't worth it anymore. Companies change their positions based on the outcry of political activists all the time. That's far more believable than saying Musk tanked his own company in effort to execute the worst pump-and-dump of all time.
Some day the shoe is going to go cold and he's going to be fucked. He'll drop off the richest people list faster than he climbed it (which was too fast).
The most successful the gambler is, the more of other's people they get to gamble.
He's at that point where he could never be right again and it'd never personally affect him. I mean if Tesla goes to 100 tomorrow morning, who gets hurt more? Elon or instructional investors that are supposed to be funding things like pensions?
I always get a laugh for the people trying to scare people that Tesla stock will fall while not realizing a lot of the early purchaser will still make a profit even it the stock tanks big.
Or maybe you don't know what an institutional investor is? Because you're not an instructional investor...
The comment is saying even if Tesla goes to 100, it doesn't matter to Elon. It's not saying Tesla is going to 100. 100 is an arbitrary number representing a steep drop. It's not about what an "early purchaser" holding peanuts compared to any instructional investor is holding.
It's saying the standard of living of the guy worth 154 Billion isn't going to change because Tesla stock goes up or down. His entire Tesla stake could go to 0 tomorrow morning and he'd still be worth enough for it not to matter to his life past maybe some vanity issues.
His level of wealth presently is silly and unsustainable, however SpaceX can probably sustain him on the richest list just fine (takes $20b+ to stay in the top 100, SpaceX can give him that by itself). It would have to RUD for him to fall off, which appears quite unlikely at present. I'd bet against Tesla before I'd bet against SpaceX. There are no serious competitors to SpaceX looking out five years, whereas Tesla has enormous competition coming at them from every angle (not least of which is in China, where they may have already extracted what they wanted from Tesla, explaining the recent propaganda attack there against Tesla and turn south in the narrative in the state controlled media). The US Government, NASA and the military all desperately need SpaceX to succeed, they're nice allies to have so vested in your well-being, they help smooth over problems and risks; they've been paving the way for SpaceX since early on.
If I could publicly pump and dump something I would also be on a hot streak.
Are we forgetting about the secured funding to take Tesla private tomfoolery.
Tesla's valuation is insane, it's great evidence that markets are just kind of broken right now. We could speculate on why, but I decline to do that right now.
It appears to me that he mostly focuses on the fundamentals of his companies, including engaging in braggadocio and performance art to pump interest and keep people thinking about what he's doing. But the point of crap like "full self driving", in my opinion, is to sell Teslas. Pumping Tesla stock is a nice side effect, right up until it isn't.
My point is that if Tesla can get robustly profitable, but the stock declines to some reasonable multiple of actual revenue, Elon would count the negative thirty billion dollars next to his name on the Forbes list as a win.
Once it became clear he'd get nothing more than a slap on the wrist for that stunt they backed off and the hype machine had no counterbalance.
Once the shorts do come back though they will come back with a vengeance.
He's been pretty clear that he thinks shorting, as it works right now, is dirty pool and should be illegal.
I try to stay out of esoteric finance stuff, but it's hard the way the world works these days. I kinda think he has a point about naked shorts, at least, Gamestonk showed everyone an ugly failure mode for that one.
So my take is that the huge Tesla pump was just a side effect, this was Elon taking something personally and wading in like the 800 pound gorilla he is.
No opinion on whether he should have been punished more, or deserved it, I basically don't understand where the boundaries on market manipulation or insider trading or any of those things are really supposed to be. Just moderately confident that he was personally trying to rake short sellers over the coals, not so much moon Tesla stock to an insane valuation.
You're saying he committed securities fraud for a higher moral purpose and you're moderately confident that the fact it led to him briefly becoming the richest man in the world didn't motivate him in any way?
That's quite an interesting claim.
1. Buy BTC 2. Announce Tesla will accept BTC. 3. Sell BTC. 4. Announce Tesla will no longer accept BTC.
Elon Musk wanted to adopt Bitcoin, but he knew there was this big problem with energy consumption. It's bad for his brand, and perhaps goes against his own ethics. Could he say "hey, get the energy consumption down and I'll go all-in with Tesla"? People wouldn't think much of it.
Better option: Buy a huge stake in Bitcoin, announce that he'll be accepting bitcoin at Tesla, get people really excited, heat up the market, and then pull it out from under them. Now all of the big stakeholders in Bitcoin have a clear, almost measurable incentive to clean up bitcoin's act. If Bitcoin adopts proof-of-stake or whatever needs to happen to bring down energy consumption, people will look back and thank Elon Musk for it.
Surely by next week he’ll be tweeting, like, “we are building a giant battery in the desert to mine Bitcoin, Bitcoin is good again, you can use it to pay for Teslas,” and the price will shoot back up, and I’ll once again hit the button that auto-generates this column.Maybe Tesla ends up in a similar situation, making the majority of it profits from Bitcoin. Wouldn't be to bad for them short term, it would mud the waters regarding Tesla even more so.
Even if it moved entirely to renewable energy it would still be a massive opportunity cost. There are productive uses that energy could be put to. Bitcoin is not productive.
Using gigawatts to process a few transactions a second, when existing financial frameworks can process millions of transactions a seconds at a fraction of the energy input means that bitcoin is always a massive waste.
> Bitcoin is therefore best understood as a high-integrity utility-scale settlement network, similar to Fedwire [...] No surprise that like other real-time gross settlement systems, Bitcoin is a suitable base upon which other payments networks can be built. These are numerous, but they include off-chain transactions at exchanges, near-chain solutions like Lightning, sidechains with new trust models like Liquid and Rootstock, and smart contract platforms like Blockstack that rely on Bitcoin’s security.[0]
The myopic focus placed on the bitcoin networks energy consumption has always seemed absurd to me. Considering all the plastic junk manufactured in China, shipped on giant container ships all across the globe, emitting vast amounts of carbon, only to be thrown away a year later. To me, this alternative monetary systems provides far more utility to humanity than some plastic funko pop figurine. But the latter slips under the radar and the former attracts huge amounts of criticism. It's almost as if there is some concerted effort tarnish the public opinion of bitcoin.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-consuming...
This ruins all of the stuff you mention. Or at least restricts these nice features to the rich. People don't have access to these features if they are only used indirectly through the major institutions they work with.
You can't say it is a settlement layer in one breath and then immediately turn around and say that no really everybody truly has access.
The current mining payout is 6.5BTC per block, or roughly $350,000. We are fitting around 1,500 transactions in a block, meaning each transaction costs $300. The price will only rise as more miners join and there is more demand for space in a block. The international poverty line is such that a single transaction would cost somebody at that line half their year's wages.
All that good stuff won't be available to the masses. Just the rich and powerful. Hooray.
Isn't it per 89 years? So basically every person gets one transaction in their lifetime. (If we are generous and allow for 5 transactions per second, then everyone can make 2 transactions in their lifetime. Yay!) That is rather remarkable.
(1500 transactions/block * 6 block/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/y / 7e9 person = 1/89 transactions per person per year)
This is the big reason why I don't buy the lightning network. It won't be possible for people to have a wallet that connects to some lightning hub, since opening and closing a connection requires an on-chain transaction. So it will be impossible for anybody other than the richest few to even possess a useful wallet. Everybody else will have bits in a database they don't control.
I am not a cryptographer, but the cryptographers I know and trust all agree on that.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales...
It is not myopic to look at, and call out, the elephant in the bedroom
That utility exists in most of the crypto offerings. Bitcoin is horribly inefficient as a payment layer although that's exactly what people want. If it's not good for what people use it for, something better will replace it. It's not about who's first, but who's last.
ah there it is, the straw man. The "plastic junk" makes a lot of poor people's lives a bit better, but fuck those people right?
Elon is pretty busy, before he got into space flight, he new very little about it. Some people at the time said as much. However 2 years later the same person said he was literally an expert on many things and had learned an insane amount.
This seems more like Elon became convinced of the potential of crypto currency in general, told Tesla to look into it, if it is a viable cash storage and if it is, logically using it for payments make sense.
Then they based on their internal team for evaluation of environment they saw that their entrance in the market caused a massive spike and released if this continues and they continue to drive people in that market it would be damaging for the mission.
It reasonable that they didn't understand how large the increase in power consumption was and how large it would be if it continued to be adopted. So rather then continue to drive in that direction they pulled the plug.
I know, its not a crazy big brain story, but its actually how most flawed process happen.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclus...
PoS would be a completely different fork, and it's not clear how secure/censorship-proof it would be.
But there is probably a simpler explanation : crypto is still experimental and Elon is pragmatic as new informations arrive. Where Bitcoin is the graal for some people, for Tesla it was only another real scale experiment about a payment method.
Lately, that story (and the products to match) have pivoted from eco-luxury (Roadster, Model S/3/Y) to a story targeting the well-off eco-prepper crowd.
Switch out the underlying technologies and the customer demographics and it would would be offroad pickups instead of Cybertrucks, propane generators instead of Powerwalls, suitcases of unmarked bills instead of crypto, flamethrowers instead of guns (ok, I'm stretching the analogy, but you get it).
And just like with the lower tech equivalents, the likelihood/frequency that most of his customers will use the products to anywhere near their full potential is close to zero, because most still live well within the safety margins of civilization.
And whether he actually believes in any of the story himself is sort of besides the point, because there are enough people that fit the above description who will eat up his products and the story that comes with them.
This is not to diminish how much he's done to accelerate EV adoption. He realized that most people aren't really onboard with using EVs for the sake of the environment, and that you have to target people's selfish needs to move a product, not their prosocial feelings. Remember that Nissan Leaf was the first mass market practical EV, before the Model S, but for a whole lot of people it didn't do much for their mojo.
Notice an opportunity for easy money and get into Bitcoin under the pretense of selling cars for it, then pull out "temporarily" citing environmental reasons. They are now in a comfortable position to hold onto it for how long they might want to, without getting too many questions why a car maker is speculating with crypto coins. If they might need cash (or have to pretty up the quarterly results) one day, cash out some. In the meantime, post doge memes to keep crypto in people's minds.
Profit.
This is pure speculation of course.
Musk, a human being with more power than any one person can handle, makes a decision, then other people and events convince him he made a mistake, and he changes back to his old stance. That we don't want politicians and public figures to ever change their minds says much more about what is wrong with us than what is wrong with them.
What is pretty weird to me though was that I feel like he could have hedged this much better by taking a middle ground. If you want to accumulate a position in an asset, and you have a ridiculous amount of money, don't you do the Warren Buffet method of grabbing it a little at a time, maybe when nobody is looking?
If you were trying to build a position in silver, and your company accepts it as payment, don't you keep spending your other assets and just keep all of the silver that your customers pay you with?
- Musk is not very smart, or at least doesn't always think decisions through or go through proper due diligence(we have evidence for this: see SEC tweets, thai children rescue, excessive management turnover, etc.)
- He (and Tesla management) know he can manipulate the crypto market. So they (first) bought $1.5B in BTC unknowingly to the public, (second) told the market they did (third) sold the BTC unknowingly to the public and (fourth) told the market that it wasn't viable and all the while keeping the profits so they can keep wall street happy/distracted from less than ideal financial performance figures.
Crypto advocates want democratization of currency. Well here ya go - whales can easily manipulate the system.
But on the bright side, guess what?
With every open system 'manipulation' attempt, the market gets smarter & more resilient to such.
Honestly, this is really frankly terrible. Even though I knew that the power consumption of bitcoin miners was high before reading this story, this particular concrete example still moved me.
One could easily be tempted to think "sure it's power-intensive, but this will all move to solar/wind along with the rest of the grid"---but it's hard to square that with stories about dirty power being spun up explicitly for mining.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...
Musk appears to be a fantastically competent salesman and decent rocket scientist, but we shouldn’t expect him to have the Midas touch on other fields of competence.
And while Musk ought to employ people to warn him about all the issues he now cites as why he changed policy, remember that he did start The Boring Company in response to getting stuck in a traffic jam, and got in trouble with the SEC for repeatedly tweeting stuff that CEOs are not supposed to tweet, and tried to name his kid X Æ A-12 — I assume he has sycophants telling him his every idea is fantastic no matter what he does, just as he has anti-sycophants (sychokrupho? My Greek is terrible) yelling as loudly as possible that he’s evil for failing to spend his money on their pet project.
--Ben Evans (https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)
He really should have known better, but all that said it's not hard to imagine how this could've played out behind the scenes. He's previously mentioned having trusted friends who convinced him of the value of crypto, and he may have genuinely believed that it would drive growth of renewables long-term, but then changed his views as he became more aware of the damage this is causing in the here and now.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392974251011895300?s=21 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392030108274159619?s=21
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/exclus...
My guess is that he just isn't very savvy about cryptocurrencies in terms of implementation mechanics and legitimately didn't understand the extent of bitcoin energy consumption until the drop in April brought up that correlation front and center in the news when the price drop was attributed to a disruption in mining due a blackout in China.
It wouldn't be the first time where he jumped into some topic outside his immediate area of expertise and proceed to get criticized for missing some critical nuances (e.g. the ventilator donation thing, the submarine rescue in Thailand thing)
Few ideas:
- using another crypto and discrediting bitcoin to move capital onto others (apparently cardano price didn't crash.. yay for Haskell I guess)
- Tesla having its own token ?
- Simply toying with panic to buy more.
Tesla has solar panel, batteries, and custom ASIC know how or partnership, they could also have their own system in the pipelines now. And with the microgrid rumor (far fetched but I heard the idea propped up by another car brand on radio the other day... Surprising). Maybe an energy currency ?
Easy. By being the nutjob that he transparently is and has been for several years now.
The only mystery here is why so many people seem willing to hitch their wagons to a financial "instrument" whose trading value is so critically dependent on the whims and effluents of such a person.
There was a study published recently showing that Bitcoin uses more than 2000x more energy per transaction than dogecoin, for example. No doubt it is this revelation that has made musk reconsider which cryptocurrency he should be backing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-renewable-fuel-credits...
Probably means his tweets are nothing but greenwashing.
He puts up a clear incentive: if miners move to sustainable energy, then Tesla will accept bitcoin again.
What he did (and this is pure speculation) is a basic pump and dump (well sort of dump, I guess they still have a bunch?). Bought a bunch of Bitcoin, pumped it WAY up, and sold a bunch so TSLA hits revenue targets. A win win for Musk, and it's perfectly legal (versus the other time he tried and got slapped on the wrist by the SEC).
The fact Bitcoin/cryptocurrency drops 365B after someone sends out a tweet is another issue.
It's true markets are highly encouraged by global issues (such as Trump tweets sending stocks high or low) but the fact that Bitcoin went down 15%~ after a single tweet is an issue.
It's way to easy to manipulate it, and that's really bad.