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Comment by hiitsmyaccount | Hacker News Reader

Yes, let's combine Twitter, an AI company, and a space company with a solar company, car company, battery company, and robotics company, so that we can have one huge valuation that can't be possibly delivered upon and losses will be absorbed for a short period. What could go wrong?

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Have you heard of the concept of Conglomerates?

In the US, GE makes your microwave, aircraft engines, and also the gas turbine your power plant uses.

Siemens makes appliances, MRI machines, and even nuclear reactors I believe.

Or in Korea: Samsung, Hyundai, LG. Samsung makes chips, TVs, washing machines.

Japan: Mistubishi makes washing machines and excavators and mining equipment.

India: Reliance has cell phone service, grocery stores, and oil rigs. Tata makes cars, has tier 1 datacenters, and runs hotels too.

This is hardly a novel idea.

Samsung makes a lot more than that. Well, lots of them make a lot more than what is listed, but Samsung pretty much has division for everything.

Interestingly conglomerate market caps are punished by the market.

The only recent exception is Samsung because of memory suddenly costing 10x.

Japanese companies manage fine doing this kind of thing.

What about Tesla's management style would you call Japanese?

I’m highlighting that companies can and do have all kinds of departments doing seemingly unrelated things if they want to.

I'm pointing out that Japanese companies can do that because they're organized and managed like Japanese companies. Tesla is not, and in fact lacks pretty much all the organizing characteristics and long term planning that enables keiretsu to function.

Don’t think it requires layers and layers of management attending meetings for 12 hours a day to function as a prerequisite.

Kamikaze

Do they have a gigantic tumor like twitter and Space AI slapped on the side? If all of the products were profitable it would work.

I don’t have time to look up whatever Masayoshi Son has wasted a few billion dollars on today, but yes kinda.

I'm glad someone else gets it.

I think Twitter is the one that actually makes money.

Until they sold all their compute to anthropic, Ai was the boat anchor.

Starlink makes the money.

No way in hell is Twitter making a lick of profit.

Reliance in India basically ran a severe loss for Jio (their new mobile network where they essentially gave the country free mobile internet), but paid for by the profits of their fossil fuel business.

For a while, didn't Amazon do the same? They basically ran a loss with Amazon retail but profits on AWS, until they spun off?

So yes, this is fairly common with conglomerates, (Amazon sold diapers at a loss to put diapers.com out of business). And in fact, this tactic is a target for anti-trust laws where they exist.

Japanese keiretsu also usually have a bank at their center or have both horizontal and vertical integrations. Where they don't have integration, they at least have financial integration. Whatever Musk is doing is far less cohesive in every way.

Did you forget X money and Musk's literally first job being in a bank?

A payments platform is not a bank. Beyond the services being different and the customers being different (consumers vs businesses), both had to partner with... well a bank, to provide the actual financial services.

Musk's hype the stuff up, raise money, can be applied to any venture.

The only charitable part of this idea is that it will insulate the stock price from the actual balance sheet. It asks investors not if they want to invest in an EV automaker but in "Elon Musk Inc" essentially. He's been doing some variation of this his whole career, this would just give him the ability to dilute the numbers of each component industry further. The problem is the brand name of Elon Musk is worth a lot less than it was in the 10s.

It would almost be as big a monstrosity as Amazon

but... All elon companies. More valuable bundled, because all the elon lovers don't have to pick where they throw their tithes. I'd love it even more if they throw in a tunnel construction and a human brain implant company in the mix while they are at it.

Tesla-Yutani

Add weapon and tank and they will reach the scale of Samsung.

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