Bubble_Pop_22

> digital real estate was purchased for millions.

It was purchased for millions AT THE TIME OF PEAK MANIA . big difference

Also it was purchased for millions by the only guy in the world willing to pay millions for it…

Don’t extrapolate or you risk making an hypothesis of liquidity and price permanence which is just not there

A mansion in Naples or San Mateo was worth millions in the 1980s, 90s , 00s , 10s , 20s and there are millions of potential buyers globally who’d happily pay that price. That’s an asset which proved both liquidity and price permanence (matter of fact appreciation) but still it’s not a given that it will prove to be such going forward

What's wrong with social media?

It's not boring enough.

Just go out in the real world to buy some groceries and you'll see how boring and mundane the whole experience is.

Big social media platforms are populated by 3B people so they should represent a similar experience, but NO! The content presented to you is not randomly picked from a sample of 3B, so you don't get in your feed a random Indian guy wishing happy birthday to his random grandma.

You get non-random content. Now the reason why you get non-random content is a bit contentious.

People who love to critique social media companies would say they have an hand in that and operate out of bad faith to optimize engagement, people who want to give them the benefit of the doubt would argue that humans are wired to pay particular attention to verbal fights, proper fights, train wrecks, bad news, drama and incendiary content in general. So in the latter case each and everyone of us trained the algorithm to show us incendiary content by paying attention to incendiary content in the past.

Maybe truth is in the middle.

It's not about making a huge leap, but Oxfam is stressing a huge pressure point for marginal improvement of the climate change issue.

Billionaires should not comment when asked, nor should they take initiative to speak on the issue.

They make things worse and prompt consumers to care even less as soon as they understand that the environmentally concerned interview/tweet about cutting back on beef has been sent from a yacht or a private jet.

> It is actually irresponsible to the users (risk management wise) to be keeping all that cash in hand 24/7. The easiest bad case example: are you keeping all your savings under your mattress?

"We never block withdrawls" is the new "We don't crash ever" as seen in the Facebook movie.

If you are in the crypto exchange business you gotta do both actually. Don't crash the website and don't suspend withdrawls ever.

Exchanges big wallet are public info on the blockchain IIRC. The huge problem is that you'll never know if they add up because you'd need confirmation from every user of the exchange who'd have to self-declare their crypto-wealth in some sort of Slack or Telegram group so that you then can compare the 2 totals and see if x=y.

Will never happen. They are black boxes. Only them know if 1:1

all the abundance of stimulants ranging from nicotine to coke :)

Such an amazing theatrical play.

So FTX is AIG and Binance gets to play the Fed.

What happens in the second act when Binance transitions to its next role of Lehman but there is nobody to play the Fed?

Lots of stuff changed since the Middle Ages, antibiotics took the place of leeches, we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, we can take pictures of Black Holes...

What hasn't changed is that given the opportunity everybody wants to be a banker, invest other people's money and pocket the difference.

There was an user a couple of days ago who linked a method to hide threads about Musk on HN.

Does anybody have the link?

I am on mobile but I am sure it will pop

> What is it you think we do, then?

Focus on the stuff we can control and ignore the noise? Isn’t that one of the hallmarks of supposedly high IQ people?

Separating signal from noise?

Whatever happens at Twitter you cannot change it, and now with it being private you can’t even bet on the outcome.

So maybe it’s best to just ignore and let the actors do whatever they want to do..

> Only politics?

When the owner becomes super political then it alienates 50% of the country.

Companies don’t care one iota about politics, they want their publisher to be a partner and a force to propel their commercial product.

Of course they will pull out as soon as they notice that ideology becomes more important than pushing commerce. Which is why what is happening at Twitter. It’s also the reason why advertisers snub Trump’s Truth, whereas they flock to Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok…

> If Meta was to collapse, that would be extremely disruptive to everyone who currently uses their products.

You have to be willing to risk what you have in order to achieve the next leap and an even bigger vision. It's true for everybody ranging from individuals to countries.

This is how things should be.

Meta is using all the huge FCF generated in the 2010s to propel the company to next leap.

There should be mechanisms at the Govt. level to force CEOs to bet the company at least once per decade.

I applaud Zuck, somebody has to push the envelope forward, and Meta is trying to unlock the future of work and home entertainment for 25B/yr with their Reality Labs.

In a world where every CEO looks at governments mandated climate/COVID paranoia to leech off contracts and subsidies or outright transforms public companies into cults/political organizations , somebody has to think about how to elevate the quality of life of people, in a pragmatic and practical manner with new widgets, new platforms and new ways to work.

I don't know if Reality Labs will ever be a success but the goal seems to be producing a leap as big as Windows 95.

We could use some of that amongst this era where everything is about politics .

Given their prices I guarantee you they aren't regular people. Also 500k is a rounding error for T-Mobile , AT&T, Comecast etc.

Tesla would not exist today if it wasn't for Government mandated climate panic. It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.

> Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government

Microsoft , you mean the company almost dissolved by the DOJ? I will retract my statements on Tesla being propped by cronysm when Govt. produces even 1/100th of scrutiny endured by Microsoft. Who am I kidding? It will never happen...for the DOJ to go after a company it needs to have market share of 70% and upwards, whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits Tesla can't even make it to 1% of yearly global new car sales.

1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.

Great dominance in the Financial press, tech press and gossip press though. And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.

That's good.

We know what Facebook is and does. Pioneers need to put all the chips on the table and risk them all in order to get to make the next leap.

You can make the argument that nobody deserves such huge decision making power, but if somebody should then the person who shipped a service used by 2 billion people is for sure the first in line.

I am still rooting for expropriation of all billionaires but if it's not possible then the next best option is to let them spend and bet the company with the highest possible frequency. It's a much better outcome compared to transitioning into politics like Trump or Musk.

Somebody said Samsung?

> by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people

Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world

> You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads.

If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink.

In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.

Tesla and SpaceX are political organizations basing their revenues off political trends

Tesla: Climate change political trend

SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend

Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart.

Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts

Space is a big waste of money. At best it's a zero sum game playing field between countries. Regular people will never benefit from space.

Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.

The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.

> I always wonder how people say Musk is a failure with a straight face. If that's failure, I wonder what would be a success!

Business is about improving the quality of life of the consumer.

Musk never went directly at that, he always involved himself in industries whose main customer is Government, or that would not exist without Government.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, JPM...those are real businesses, which would thrive even if Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP (actually they'd do much better).

If Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP all the functional companies which Musk has would go belly up, not to mention the scam ones such as the NeuraLink and Boring.

Me thinks Musk is stacking up companies the same way the stripper in "The big short" was stacking houses.

In both cases there is tons of leverage involved. The stripper levered up using home equity to buy new apartments, whereas Musk is using political climate.

The functional companies are relying on political climate as leverage.

Tesla= Political will to do something about climate change

SpaceX= Political will to do something in space for dick measuring contest purposes

The Boring Company= hype fueled scam

Neuralink = hype fueled scam

> Monopolies are bad, near monopolies slightly less bad

Natural monopolies (such as the one acquired by Google) are not bad as long as government retains the monopoly of B2 bombers.

It's not really a monopoly when it can be ended at a moment's notice

> These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter.

Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk.

Time change but history repeats itself . It’s always right wing nuts and generally people who fall for cults who end up in the bunker where they discover that the person whom they thought was god , in reality just a human

Given the established link between energy consumption and human welfare and happiness...why not use BTU consumed per capita? Or even Barrels of oil equivalent.

> The real question is, what should Meta shareholders do in response to this stuff? What would happened with respect to the shareholders if Zuckerberg took his foot off the gas pedal with the "Metaverse" stuff?

Meta shareholders signed up for the double class share agreement which enables Zuck to do whatever he wants.

And besides it's is kind of right, given the past execution ever since 2004 he kinda earned the right to bet the company on something new. Billions of people use the different flavors of Meta , and they do sohundreds if not thoudands of times per day. Nobody else can claim to having provided quality of life to so many people.

> 99.9% of users do not care about federation as a principle

Decentralization as a principle is currently responsible for at least some part of the enormous market capitalization of cryptocurrencies.

Nowadays everything is politics and identity politics. Especially on twitter which is the favorite hangout spot for the crypto crowd, journalists and political junkies....I mean twitter for sure is not the social media for pushing commerce and e-commerce, that ship has sailed long ago. They only have politics.

Given the preponderance of politics on twitter, Musk is the worst owner for the platform as he's alienating all left wing people in the US (and potentially abroad) and also right wing people who don't fall for cults and are still against subsidies.

> That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.

Which is a direction which doesn't benefit the quality of life of contemporaries in any way and it's contentious that it will benefit people living in the future.

When something benefits you, well you know because you use that stuff. Today is Sunday and I used dozens of different flavors of Microsoft. Same with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Exxon, BP, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, JPM...you get the gist. I don't suspect, I KNOW that Jobs was an asshole and so is Gates, not to mention Zuck and Dimon...but quality of life provided by company they direct, trumps assholery.

I can't say the same for any of Musk companies, and he's supposedly the GOAT and he's 51. Mind I am not a sub-saharan farmer , I am a well traveled person, but I never used one of his products or services, the closest I was when an Uber was supposed to come pick me up in a Tesla but canceled.

> What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation?

Asshole or not asshole, the role of a CEO of a public company is to sign off quality of life for the public.

Musk is not signing off anything. At best you could say that he's aspirationally signing off quality of life for people who are not even alive yet and would benefit from a less warm Earth. But that is contentious given that solving transportation alone won't solve climate change and Tesla for sure won't be the sole player in transportation. As a matter of fact it will be a small player and the electrification will be provided by the legacy OEM.

Character flaws pale compared to the big question: "What is this guy doing for me?" . There were no such questions with the other people you mentioned.