This is so weird, did he miscalculate how intense the backlash would be? or he truly doesn't care?
Or he's completely deranged and the drugs have irreversibly damaged his mind. Both scenarios, or some intersection therein, are plausible.
Or, more likely, to institute some kind of perpetual monarchy passed down through his 14 kids.
> Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance.
No, one is a cruel fox and another one is a stupid monkey.
Their skills lie mainly in adaptability to the situations they found themselves in and using them, but neither is a mastermind.
Russians close to power have historically often met that fate - at least since 1917, I suspect either prison or forced internal or external exile was more common before that. Americans not so much I think, so this probably won't transfer.
Lots of examples from American history too though where things turn out better like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Girard
lose -> lost
loose -> loosened
It is rare for Oligarchs to be in electable position. They do not need for that.
Seems unlikely to me that his long term goal was to lead the Republican Inquisition in a great crusade against the libs.
It's probably the drugs. That or he just got bored with the nerd CEO shtick and now his new passion is epic pwning teh libs.
Imagine you're one of the richest people on the planet. What are you going to do? Keep chasing more and more money, like a drug addict chasing more and more high? Nah, that's not sustainable, surely not when you're already virtually at the top, and you can have everything you want. Run a charity? Why? Starving children in Africa weren't your problem when you were poor, why should they be now?
Dick around and do dumb shit, that's what you're going to do. Because you can. You have enough money to buy popular social media and turn it into shit because it's fun and why not. And your best buddy who's on board with doing dumb shit happens to be the president of America. Dream come true.
- Space X -> we need humans on mars
- openAI -> we need the power of AI
- neuralink -> also the AI talks to our brains (arguably the most rational path to immortality, a common goal of billionaires)
- tesla -> e cars are feasible, simpler, better for the environment
- starlink -> internet for anyone is feasible and rural areas are poorly served
- boring company -> make roads 3D and traffic is gone
all that, I wouldn't call dicking around. He doesn't give a fuck about a lot, but he gives a fuck about cool sci fi stuff
His Tesla stock is personally levered. I don't know at what point he gets margin called, but a sharp drawdown in Tesla's stock price could force him to sell stock in his crown jewel, SpaceX. (Or just extract money from it somehow. Either way, diminish it.)
He took on 13 billion of debt for Twitter, but it seems like dreaming to think this would be enough even if Tesla went bankrupt.
As of 2023 Musk had 238,441,261 "shares pledged as collateral to secure certain personal indebtedness [1].
I have not seen any great reporting around what prices he borrowed at (and thus when his margin calls may come).
> Is any of it tied to SpaceX?
Not directly. My point is if Tesla goes bankrupt he has to sell something to make good on those loans. (After, presumably, a year of court fights.) If Tesla is under there will be litigation around an xAI disposal. So that basically leaves Twitter and SpaceX, and one of those is more marketable than the other.
[1] https://ir.tesla.com/_flysystem/s3/sec/000119312523094075/d4...
I wish English had better language to distinguish possibility arising from limited observer information about the world versus possibility arising from uncertain future. I'm not saying you did it, but people tend to conflate the two.
Thing is, people just put up stupid stickers about purchasing their Teslas before he went nuts, but he has never been centered.
Or going further back, he got pushed down some stairs as a kid because he was bullying someone whose father had killed himself.
Est-il habile où est-il heureux [1]?
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Mazarin not Napoleon
The guy is clearly very skilled at identifying opportunities and putting together the best team to execute on them. Probably better than any other human alive today.
People may not like the guy for whatever reason, but saying he isn’t talented is absurd.
It's an inherently toxic format. It promotes incoherent, contradiction-ridden, emotionally-driven, short-attention-span meme-think.
IMHO Bluesky is no better, which is why I'm not there. It's the same format, an incoherent soup of sound bites competing to emotionally trigger you into amplifying them. This format is the kind of thing a mad scientist would design with the explicit goal of rotting the human mind.
The good thing about books and longer-form works... even things as long as Reddit and HN comments... is that they can encapsulate complete thoughts that are connected to other thoughts. Building systems of thinking is how humans reason coherently about the world. Meme soup reduces us to some kind of animal level of grunts and short-horizon reactions but with language. It's gross.
I've been calling "social" media companies in general "the tobacco companies of the mind" for years.
However, there is much wisdom in McLuhan's "we become what we behold" -- and consuming too much "social media" turns one into a performative puppet. Twitter is the distilled version of this (Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter Poisoning").
If Elon Husk huffing Twitter 24/7 while owning Twitter isn't a case of "getting high on your own supply", then I don't know what is.
Are infomercials toxic? maybe? Is banning them useful? maybe - can you find them addictive, as a post-TV individual? I can't, and I can't get schezophrenic like those perpetually enraged Twitter users, either.
I think it's just that those people, including Musk, didn't have the new form or literacy, a stronger grounding to the reality, required to be online. Twitter/Bluesky architecture itself, IMO, is about 10^2-5 less toxic than anything before it.
I have a feeling that if Einstein, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Churchill or really any of the great historical figures had access to Twitter, there legacies (or lack thereof) would be very different today.
Newton was known to be very egotistical and his grudge with Hooke was well known: https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/isaac-newton-dark-si...
Einstein was generally considered a very kind and generous man, outside of his marriages: https://www.grunge.com/264270/the-dark-side-of-albert-einste...
I don't know much about da Vinci, though he designed machines for war and he must have performed a lot of macabre work on cadavers for his research into anatomy (not that studying anatomy is a bad thing).
they have different values on life because they literally built different, thrown people at hard times and that would change people see life
Was that before or after he started over-promising/lying about Tesla's full self driving capabilities?
I don't think he was ever likable, it's just that back then his reputation hadn't caught up with his hype.
And it is not even the intent of his actions, it is the haphazard, chainsaw slash-&-burn, "move fast and break things" way he is doing them.
The same thing was done by Al Gore in the 1990s, cutting 250,000 federal jobs, eliminating 100+ programs, and consolidating over 800 agencies [0], all without creating these kinds of programs — specifically because Gore CONSIDERED all the issues and players and worked with congress to get it all done in a rational, and more importantly effective way. And that effort is respected decades later.
In Musk was using a similar approach, he'd earn respect, which indicates he is not making changes for efficiency for the government or people, but to slash-&-burn for his specific goals, e.g., gutting regulators requiring him to behave responsibly in his businesses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
Also, Tesla just jumped bc Musk said that there’s going to be full sell driving in china…. Next year…
We’re back to 2017-era strategies but in china this time.
Like if he didn't sell a ton of Tesla to buy Twitter he'd have more in Tesla?
Full sell, indeed!
Tesla lost their innovator / first mover advantage years ago, choosing to spend their R&D on dead ends and vanity projects like autopilot and the cybertruck while not delivering on projects that might have merit if they would actually listen to their target audience like the semi. They would've remained pretty successful had they iterated on their existing offerings, improving range, quality and reducing production costs of their existing lineup.
[0] https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-won-...
Look at the TSLA price since the announcement.
Honestly I don’t see trump living through this term, let alone another.
No other republican has his cult of personality, so idk what they’re going to do when he keels over.
Whether he declines before then, to a point of uselessness for the republicans, is a different question. Also I'm assuming someone is pumping him full of every drug available to prevent his decline as much as possible.
vance seems to think he's next in line, having been anointed by the billionaire class, but he's all hatred and no charisma. Although saying that, he may just shuffle into the top spot when it's impossible to dislodge him. Or he may just get accepted by whichever bot farms drive the rightwing social media frenzy.
I'm personally hoping that their general fascist incompetence will fuck their chances of an everlasting reich.
This seems very similar to claims I heard from Republicans about Biden a year or two ago.
Especially when the competition dies off leaving spacex the only one standing.
If Sundar or Tim reduced market penetration across EU by 43% they’d get recalled in a quarter.
It’s because musk is the Tesla stock price. The entire valuation of that company is based of the force of personality that musk has.
If they ousted musk, the Tesla shares would be worth less than any other auto maker instead of more than all of them combined.
> Doesn’t the CEO have fiduciary responsibility to not tank the company in a worldwide market?
I don’t think this is necessarily true in a legal sense
That’d be best for the company long-term but they’d have to survive the inevitable lawsuits first, not to mention the high likelihood of physical violence if Musk tweets about it. I think the board are basically sitting around praying that the horse learns to sing before they’re forced to act.
I know this is off topic, but I find that sentence beautiful. Is this a common idiom or did you just come up with it?
The US is a smaller EV market than Europe.
Starlink's international prospects are getting trashed. Meanwhile, its competitors have basically free money from foreign governments to compete with SpaceX.
No one's putting in the work to deliver for twice the current price.
Personally, I don't think he is some genius mastermind, he just took some risks with business strategy and tactics and ended up being really lucky. Eventually, luck runs out.
Also, success and sycophants have probably caused him to get a lot more arrogant and less careful.
Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously.
Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.
Which are caused by the retooling of the Model Y production lines which took 3-5 weeks. Y represents 2/3 of the sales globally and all factories where down simultaneously. They started 2025 with only 12 days of inventory worldwide.
Deliveries are back up in China and at current trends, they might achieve ~130,000 sales - just like Q1 2024, even though they had to close down their most production factory lines. China is the first to get back to speed but it says a lot about the "sales dip" which is actually a planned production dip.
Honestly it's surprising that it's still so high. Compare it to any other car manufacturer and its valuation seems ludicrous. A lot of people are somehow still persuaded that the company is going to have some kind of amazing breakthrough Any Day Now.
There are still other issues that I have with Tesla vehicles, but I am looking forward to see how RAM's upcoming Ramcharger will do (all electric drivetrain with built-in generator for extended range).
They had some mechanical issues with the fuel line that was a fire risk and they software locked it to reduce the tank capacity by 20% in the US so it wouldn't be classed as a plug in hybrid, but even with those problems I've generally heard positive things about it. Basically acting as reserve to avoid range anxiety on early small battery EVs when it was all quite new.
I'm rooting for Musk to fall on his face as much as the next guy. But I'm not delusional enough to substitute my desired reality for actual reality. By any measure Musk has had a remarkably successful year or so. He's much richer and wields more influence over the government than any non-president in history that I can think of.
The Tesla hype cycle is either nearing its end or peaked and I'm sure he knows this. The valuation for this company is ridiculous by any standard. So he's on to his next thing. By joining ranks with MAGA and he's purchased himself a driver seat for the most powerful country and strongest economy.
Obviously he still cares about Tesla, but it's not his primary focus anymore. He's moved on to his next big thing which I'm sure he expects to be many times more lucrative than Tesla was.
Can you name me any billionaire who isn't an opportunist? How can you become super wealthy without being opportunistic? Do you think by being kind and law abiding gentlemen, massive wealth just lands into your lap while your competitors let you by? This entire platform is full of opportunists. You don't get anywhere in life by not being opportunistic, life is just too competitive the higher up you go.
100% tax for wealth over $100M, problem solved
if people were really so reluctant to buy a cheap, high quality car, BYD wouldn't be selling millions of them.
(anecdotally, Chinese cars are pretty popular here in Ecuador, but they're fossil fuel cars, not EVs)
Right … it’s a “calculated move” to cater to far right, and Neo Nazi groups abroad (ie, AfD).
It’s a “calculated move” to not only do one but two Nazi salutes on national television.
Let’s stop treating this guy as some sort of genius. That Potemkin village/illusion was dispelled long ago.
just look at all the batshit conspiracy theories he greenlights on X if not states directly
I've yet to see any good writeup on how this recent trouble would affect the legalities of that lawsuit.
And then there’s SpaceX…
They already limit signups in oversubscribed areas, and as good as starlink is, it's still a technology that has higher latency, and higher ongoing costs from what I can see.
Meanwhile, once fibre is in the ground, with PON there's very little maintenance required. And upgrading speeds is a case of upgrading the OLT and ONT's - I'm going out on a limb and guessing that's much cheaper to do than launching thousands of upgraded satellites.
Which they are not even close to yet. Starship is about launching the suckers in bulk.
My FTTP ONT is using less than 2.
That's 788kWh per year ((90 * 24 * 365) / 1000) and at 25p per kWh that's an extra £197.10 of energy usage per year. Compared to £4.38 for my FTTP ONT.
It's cool tech, no doubt, but it's not a replacement for a fibre connection by any stretch of the imagination, and so the positing that it'll be the, or one of the, bigget ISP's in the world seems off base, most likely by an order of magnitude or more.
SpaceX is narrow; specialized, high revenue per launch, but not that many launches (although they're doing more than any other company), whereas tesla is broad, no longer unique but potentially big volume of car sales and recurring revenue from infrastructure and maintenance, could have been a competitor to GE and the like.