this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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SpaceX, from a financial standpoint, is just an elaborate Ponzi scheme for Musk, who treats all of his companies as his private fiefdom and personal piggy bank. In reality, none of them are genuinely profitable, and depend on government subsidies and capital investments to survive. The goal is to just build a barely viable business and then scam people with bullshit promises. Any real cash flow is immediately converted into cash for his personal use. Though from time to time, he uses that cash prop up another of his ventures. Very likely, all of this will come crashing down at some point, and it will be revealed that his companies are nothing like what they seem.
I feel like Twitter (I will always deadname it) was the beginning of the end for him. Unfortunately, things like this can take years or decades to resolve, but whereas 5 years ago he had the midas touch and could do no wrong now there seems to be nothing but a stream of negative news about him.
Time will tell
Naw, imho it was the Thai kiddy-submarine incident. He seemed at least semi-plausibly not horrible up until then; but then firmly established himself as just another piece of shit billionaire when he couldn't handle some diver stealing the spotlight from him.
Good point, I had forgotten about that nugget in the sea of shit nuggets around that man.
Yeah, that's when I started to call him "The pedo guy" (using his own words).
At that point he'd outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.
Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who'd heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn't just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.
The "midas touch" is basically just securities fraud. Something he can't get away with forever.
In what sense? Lying about the actual capabilities of the business? Full autonomous drive next year and Mars at 2022?
All of those statements existed to either drum up investment money or get people to buy non-existent products. So those things are examples of securities fraud too.
I would argue that SpaceX is now to important to NASA, and therefore the US government, to be allowed to fail. It may not be under Elon's control, it may not be called SpaceX, but it will continue to exist.
Then it would be another Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.
I would bet that they'd be owned by one of those.
They've literally made reusable boosters and have multiple operations to deploy satellites and go to the space station (not to mention starlink ) . While I'm not a Musk fan, those achievements are irrefutable. SpaceX may or may not be making money, but it's a far cry from a ponzi scheme. It's why so many are trying to copy their technological achievements.
It is a Ponzi scheme from a financial sense. In the end, it's just a launch provider. It's not suddenly going to become the next Apple in terms of market value. But it is valued like that, and they were able to raise billions of dollars by lying about its potential business ventures.
Not that I am doubting this, I just don’t know enough, but do you have any sources on all of what you’re saying?
Like I know the guys a scumbag, but I want to be accurate in what his scumbaggery entails.
I agree but isn't Tesla real and well selling, at least in the US. Wouldn't it be profitable?
Tesla is certainly making a fair bit of money. Though it only got there because of a shitload of government help, both from the US and elsewhere, and indirect government help, like the government pretty much forcing other automakers to purchase EV credits from Tesla to make their fleet average CO2 numbers lower in order to avoid fines.
Which I'm not 100% against, but then again, Musk constantly complains about government subsidies on various things, while receiving a shitload of government help himself. Same level of hypocrisy as his whole "I'm a free speech absolutist" thing.
E: spelling
Eh, a quick Google search said that Tesla wasn't profitable for 17 years and survived due to government subsidies and investor funding. After that they've been making ~$15 billion per year and sold around 1.3 million cars worldwide per year.
In contrast Toyota sold 10.3 million vehicles and made $61 billion in profit.
As with their 17 years of unprofitable business they are currently more proportionally profitable, but a big portion of that is Musk fanboys and limited supply. If they actually started selling more cars they probably wouldn't be as proportionally profitable.
Additionally, Tesla is supposedly becoming less profitable due to several factors including not making a new model in 10 years, reports that they fraudulently marketed features (being sneaky with how range is calculated so that the true range is way less than advertised), and Elon's antics hurting sales. Elon's antics are a big deal, some people who wanted Teslas before don't want them anymore because they don't want to be associated with him (like flying a Gadsden Flag in the mid 2000s vs now).
Elon's antics don't stop there, he's also hurt the investor's opinion as well. A big reason Tesla's stock was so high is because people were buying them and not selling them. This caused their price to stay super high, but when Elon bought Twitter he sold a ton of stock. The price was at an all time high over $400 per share, his selling cratered it to ~$115, and is currently around $165. Investors don't like it when the owner of a company single handedly tanks their investment so the owner can make a bad investment, even more so when the writing on the wall says he'll sell even more of the stock to fund the bad investment.