this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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$400,000 isn’t even that much for a company like this, it might’ve cost that much just trying to fight this.
Twitter's revenue has cratered hard, and because its privately owned, every dollar Twitter loses is a dollar that Elon has to come up with.
Because his wealth is entirely in overinflated Tesla stock, and because he's already massively overleveraged from buying Twitter, coming up with that money means selling Tesla stock, and because the Tesla stock price is based on dreams and unicorn farts any amount he sells tends to sink the price.
This means that for Elon to cover $400,000, that could easily lose him tens of millions in net worth. And there's no telling when the Tesla stock price will just collapse entirely as investors finally start valuing it like a car manufacturer, and not like kind of predestined savior of the human race (for context, Tesla in its entirety is currently valued at $800bn. Ford is currently valued at $40bn. And Ford sell a LOT more cars than Tesla).
This is mostly incorrect.
First he's not overleveraged from buying Twitter. He bought it with Russian, Saudi, and 400 other investor's money. There was aist recently published.
Second, he doesn't need to put any personal money to pay Twitter's fines, Twitter has its own money/debts and accounting.
Third, even if it was his own money, he would sell stock, he could borrow against it, avoiding selling it.
Fourth, even if all of the above was true (which it isn't) for a hundred-billionaire, losing tens of millions doesn't register. It's like someone with a couple million bucks in the bank losing a few hundred. It's like a nice dinner.
Then WHY fight something that would've been pennies and now will at least be dimes? As much as I want to believe musk is close to insolvency, I don't think its quite possible yet. But then why die on these stupid little hills?