UKH

I feel sorry for his staff but hopefully there will be better employers who can appreciate their skills. He says he hates laying off staff, yet unceremoniously fired all the moderation staff, the ones who policed shitty content and made twitter half decent.

How such a jackass has become the most followed and wealthy individual on the planet is beyond me. 

For those in the know, is he brilliant,  or just lucky. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68818113

From the title I thought this was about mass redundancies at the Muppets.

Then again, Elon is a prize Muppet.

I can't recall who it was but some Trump-supporting turnip-headed senator held Musk up as an example of what an African-American can achieve.

I'm not a finance guy but Musk's wealth seems kind-of interesting, because a great deal of it is tied up in the value of the companies that he owns or part owns (particularly in Tesla stock), but their value is largely based on assumptions about their future earnings, not their current sales - I think at one point they were the most valuable car manufacturer on the planet by market cap and worth more than the next ten biggest put together, despite selling relatively few actual cars. And the assumptions about their future earnings seem to be (or seemed to have been) based largely on the idea that Elon Musk is a brain genius who will run a car company like a Silicon Valley startup and take over the world with disruptive thinking and magic AI and cheeky "420" jokes while all the lumbering incumbents are still thinking that digital speedometers are a pretty neat idea. And to be honest, those assumptions seem to have been looking increasingly shaky lately.

Compare this with, say, Amazon, who'd still sell most of the world's stuff and run most of the world's internet with or without Jeff Bezos.

So essentially his wealth seems to be very much based not on how brilliant he _is_ but on how brilliant he's perceived to be by the people who want to buy shares in the stuff that he works on.

Thank you. That fits with what appears from the outside for those of us who couldn't work it out. So essentially, it could well be built on a house of cards.

The assumptions about future earnings is something all the big tech companies including amazon have relied on at one point or another in time.

Although in his case there is definitely a meme stock element kicking in although that is somewhat balanced by there is a certain amount of pushback against him now. The trick to being a good meme stock is just amusing some people without annoying anyone else aside from finance professionals wanting to short sell you.

For Tesla he did gain a substantial headstart but it does seem to have been wasted by the failure of the self driving cars and everyone else diving into the market particularly the Chinese companies with their state support and protection.

SpaceX is pretty impressive but its unclear how that will convert to profit and most of his other ventures arent overly successful or dependent on third parties.

Yeah, for sure. But those assumptions have to be based on something - like some sense of what their total addressable market is, for starters. In Tesla's case, it seems to have meant believing that there was a good likelihood that in the future they'd be selling more cars than the rest of the industry put together, which is quite a strong statement in a market that already has a lot of big players with deep R&D pockets, and AFAICT it basically comes from the prospect that they could have "full self driving" well before the rest of the industry, and while people will say that belief in that is purely down to a sober analysis of their verifiable results to date, it does also seem to be somewhat tied into how much faith you've got in their tech-visionary CEO.

There used to be a character on here, can't remember his name, who was a professional investor and sounded like he was very successful and knew his stuff (he was pretty good value on the forums in general). I recall around the time of Musk calling the diver in the Thailand rescue 'Paedo-guy' he posted that his company was heavily invested in Tesla and were now looking to get their investments out of it as quickly as possible. 

Although as the saying goes, the market can be wrong for longer than an investor can stay solvent.

You're basically talking about "support" from a country where the best they can do for presidential choice is Trump or Biden (*), so it's not altogether surprising.

(*) - the UK isn't that far behind and in 2019 with Boris and Corbyn we were giving the USA a good run for their money.

is about to experience a massive influx of well-designed and far more affordable Chinese EVs that will seriously undercut Tesla.  Either that, or the US and EU impose heavy import tariffs and trigger a disastrous trade war.

If he tried to sell his stock he would crash it's value very quickly so he could never realise his current worth. When CEO's sell all their stock, unless it's to fund a very expensive divorce it probably means he knows something we don't.

I mean the flipside is that while most of his wealth comes from Tesla stock, we're talking about one of the richest people on the planet, and I'd imagine that he's got enough squirreled away in more stable investments that even if the wheels come off the Tesla thing he's still going to be richer than the average rich person...

Just lucky.

Like so many others he made a lot of money in the first dot com boom making a web service that nobody remembers.

He became fabulously wealthy through Paypal, which was something which was made by a rival company to his, which was bought by a company he co-founded, at a time when he wasn't working there. 

He was then brought back in to the company, made a balls up of it, and was ousted from it a second time.

With him gone, the company sorted out their technological and business issues, and eventually sold themselves to eBay which, as the biggest shareholder, made him next-level rich.

If that's not luck I don't know what is.

Plenty of engineering challenges around with efforts being led by sane human beings who believe in things like workers rights, it's shitty that they need to find new jobs, but they will likely be able to contribute more value in better run organisations.

Potentially very lucky:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqqndqndpq5o

Not only laying them off, but now trying to get ruled as illegal, the federal government body that watches over workers' rights.

What a charmer.

It seems to me that Biden has been an excellent president. It’s hard to think of any US politician who would have been better, and easy to think of plenty who would have been worse.

jcm

Hmmm... That $56bn could pay a lot of wages, and investment...

Maybe they could use it to pay to fix the sticking throttle pedal on their trucks that they've had to recall.

Seems they had the same problem on the cars as well.

Doesn't look as if Tesla make anything other than a shoddy product. Admittedly not a cheap shoddy product, but a damned expensive shoddy product.

Their battery technology is excellent, and some way ahead of most of their competitors - at least until or if Honda's solid state technology materialises.

I always wondered why Tesla did not just license their technology, as Microsoft did in the 80s and 90s, since they are clearly excellent at making batteries and crap at making cars.

Not sure its their technology or manufacturing skills.

Although they have started their own R&D and manufacturing in the last couple of years a lot are still made in partnership with panasonic and others with some of the "gigafactories" being a joint venture.

Not sure the cars are that bad, plenty of shoddy manufacturers out there, JLR

Not too many four door shopping cars with a 1.9second 0-60 time either