I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.
This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870
Musk doesn't have to be a 'real engineer'. Most 'real engineers' would obsess over mundane details and rarely think about the bigger picture or making a profit.
In 2015, Elon Musk on Hyperloop: "it's no that hard", "it's like a tube with an air hockey table...", "I swear, it's not that hard" [1] Eventually, it was hard. You can literally go on and on with these examples.
You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .
There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.
This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century.
I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.
Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?
This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.
Most of the top engagement on Twitter comes from the right.
This is very different from X is "an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool".
Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news.
Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?
(History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)
On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.
Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...
...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.
For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.
...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.
Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.
Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.
Similarly it is remarkable that you can land a booster that wasn't designed to do that. But can you actually refurbish and re-fly it for a meaningful savings? This is another instance where software accounting practices don't work when you're dealing with big expensive tangible objects like rocket engines.
SpaceX has been around for 20+ years. And they are still their own biggest customer for launch capacity by a very large margin. Where is the demand?
I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs.
They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time.
2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b...
3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC).
4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct:
* https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.
You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.
The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother.
Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left.
Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk?
Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion..
Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.
Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.
To sane wash things a bit, the assumption, I guess, is AI will surpass human level and so increase world GDP.
It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.
He was never in a policy position (perhaps one year under Feldstein in Reagan's CEA?).
In a 2011 paper examining talking head / pundit prediction accuracies, Krugman came out on as most accurate:
* https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...
> With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX
Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?
> (paulkrugman.substack.com)
Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).
I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.
I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?
It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.
Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.
