Why didn't Ford and Boeing, companies with a much better footing than Musk, simply move into those sectors (EVs and re-usable rockets, respectively) and mop up all those subsidies for themselves?
Tesla did lobby, quite a bit. They've also been angry about the subsidies that require cars to be union made.
Tesla was already a successful, innovative electric car company before it started lobbying like a regular car company.
All of the risk that paid off (what makes a businessman a good businessman) was done in the early days when he invested 6.5 million that he turned into billions.
He didn't create the company, and he didn't create the Roadster.
FWIW I have no idea how finances work, just can imagine Elon getting into weird loopholes.
SpaceX is privately-held, but has raised billions of dollars from dozens of investors, so that won’t fly neither.
Why not, when twitter's operational costs are ~5.5 billion and you are reportedly laying off 50-75% of staff?
And trolling does not help either. The sink thing was trolling and between that and layouts, the remaining people will be dysfunctional for quite a long time.
As you note, it's really hard to cut deep enough to cover $1B in interest payments without cutting stuff that ends up hurting your revenue. As Twitter cuts their R&D, they're leaving themselves open to missing out on the future. Should Twitter have continued to invest in Vine? Well, the benefit of hindsight says "yes" given TikTok's success. As much as everyone is making fun of Meta's metaverse plans, it's certainly possible it'll be important in the future. We really just don't know. I remember everyone saying the iPhone was a silly toy and people would want to keep their Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices with keyboards. We can literally see the future and say, "nah, that'll never happen."
If Musk cuts engineering too much, does the service just become mediocre?
As you say, it's hard to cut deep enough to come up with $1B.
