Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer Elon Musk's Weltanschauung isn't so much "forgive and forget" as it is "resent and remember" – then post a nasty meme on the internet about the person who "wronged" you. In April 2022, Musk had us sniggering at an unflattering snap of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates along with the caption "in case u need to lose a boner fast" …
Getting Musk pissed off is a too easy achievement. There are no points to gain from getting Musk being pissed off. You Xcreete, Musk is pissed off. You sneeze, Musk is pissed of. You keep to yourself, Musk is pissed off. You allow yourself to be known, Musk is pissed off.
Just give it up already. And Musk will be pissed off at that too and Xcreete his inner feelings to show how pissed off he is, again.
Was reading some article the other day and the author was asking whether, at this point, even Mars would be far enough away for Twitler to fuck off to. I'd propose a galaxy far, far away, but that seems like a great way to start an intergalactic war if there's any intelligent life that has mastered long-distance space travel. So, where's the nearest black hole we know of? Or even a neutron star would suffice.
You're forgetting a very important life lesson: Don't shit where you eat. Granted we now know that black holes can sometimes "burp" up contents and do eventually evaporate, because of the intense gravity and corresponding warping of time, we effectively sequester him for millions, maybe billions, of years. Then all that would be left are the shredded atoms that constitute his being presently. If there are any malevolent cosmic deities out there that reconstitute him, then any humans surviving at the time can just toss him into another black hole.
Immediately brought to mind how Angel Islington in Gaiman's Neverwhere was disposed of by Door (?).
The other side of the Universe I think would a good start. The eternal umpire would have pulled up stumps by the time either Islington or Xitler got back.
Shorting Tesla on the scale of Gates purchase doesn't hurt Tesla. The risk for the person doing the shorting is that they get stuck in a short squeeze, which Gates did which is why he lost $1.5B. Had Tesla stock dropped in price & Gates sold, Gates holdings would not have materially driven the stock price lower & so it's effect would be in the noise. Both of these men know all of that. What this really tells you is Musk (surprise! surprise!) simply doesn't like viewpoints not aligned with his own.
But it's hardly surprising that Gates thinks that Tesla is overvalued. Practically everybody rational thinks that Tesla is sitting in a stock bubble; the only real question is when the bubble is going to burst.
Tesla is nominally worth 10x Ford, despite shipping fewer cars and making a smaller profit.
Agreed. Tesla has a PE Ratio of almost 80, vs Ford's of about 12, GM's of about 5, Mecedes's about 5, BMW about 6. If you properly price Tesla as a car company, the proper value for it's stock is about $17 per share, not $274. Even if you want to delude yourself into thinking it should be more like Ford, you'd still only be at about $30. Gates made the right call but got caught in a short squeeze.
I made a nice bit of profit from the recent Tesla run up - bought in at 213, out at 264 in less than a month. Planning to short it when this latest spike starts to falter. Hope dear Elon doesn't get wind of that!
I mean, I'm not doing it for any other reason than to make a few bucks. Tesla's stocks have been doing a pretty regular cycle - and the way the price fluctuates means there's some big money moving in and out, over and again.
I do find it laughable that Elon thinks Tesla is the best solution to climate change, though, especially if those EV's keep catching fire...
But, seeing 2 of the wealthiest men on the planet getting into a pissing contest (and Bill losing $1.5B) over shorting Tesla, is my kind of entertainment. Proof that neither man is the genius people make them out to be.
"Tesla is nominally worth 10x Ford, despite shipping fewer cars and making a smaller profit."
Another really good test is to look at all of Ford's assets, tooling, IP and a large installed base to sell parts/service to. Whatever your transportation needs, Ford is likely to have a model that fits the order. Tesla has 2 luxury models and one mass market vehicle in two sizes. The 3 and Y are very similar that I often have to look really hard to determine which is which or see them side by side. The Semi is shipping to Frito-Lay and the Cybertruck feels to me like one the too radical designs that may do well for a couple of years and then drop almost to zero once there's so many on the road that aren't pointing at them anymore. No estate, no van, no fleet optimized model and still no Roadster 2.0. If the tech is so good, why no skateboard so bespoke builders can create niche vehicles with Tesla underpinnings? The electric double decker busses in London are built on top of a BYD chassis that shows up and is driven off of the delivery trailer (man, that looks so weird).
"Shorting Tesla on the scale of Gates purchase doesn't hurt Tesla. "
Arguably, once a company has sold shares and they are traded on the public markets, in a certain sense their value can be external to company's fortunes. Selling short is just taking a position that a stock is going to lose value where purchasing shares is a bet that the stock will rise. With Tesla's market cap so out of quilter the the company's finances and assets, a well timed short could be a good way to make money. Even a lot of money.
I'm going to have to pirate a copy of that biography. I haven't wanted to buy a copy since I've been too worried that it would just be yet another puff piece.
I'm no great fan of short-selling but it's just as much as part of capitalism as the kind of debt-bingeing or "over-selling" that Musk has repeatedly engaged in to finance keep his businesses from failing. In fact, it's a necessary corollary. Musk goes to the capital markets offering his shares in his dreams as collateral for cheap cash, Gates and the like act to stop this being a one-way bet.
When quizzed by Isaacsson on why he had shorted the stock, "he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall." Pressed to clarify, he admitted that it was to "make money." Old habits die hard.
Well of course the intention was to make money. That's the usual intention behind all investing, whether it be your money (e.g. in the stock market) or your time (e.g. in improving your skills). Why is that something shameful to "admit" to?
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I don't get the impression he was. He was a hard nosed businessman to his competitors, but I can't recall anything vaguely like the pedo guy episode, welching on contracts, welching on undertakings and legal obligations to twitter staff, actively encouraging kind of pathetic racist behaviour in Tesla factories. The list just goes on.
Or for that matter Jobs' wage fixing collusion, IBM's HR modus operandi, the Ebay CEO pigs head death threats, etc etc.
Never underestimate the ability of Twitler-level assholes to do their best Sarah Palin impression and "drill baby, drill!" If they hit bedrock, they'll find a way to drill into it. They hit a molten core, they'll find some way to overcome that. Whatever would have stopped a non-asshole will be nothing more than a minor impediment to a Twitler-level asshole.
What is it about crybabies who play the victim card constantly but think they are tough guy bullies like Musk and Trump? I don't understand how such an obviously false persona appeals to so many people. How do they attract so many fanboys who excuse past lies and happily believe the next lie as the gospel truth?
Maybe some people are as attracted to cognitive dissonance as others of us are repelled by it.
It's because people who are total bullshitters themselves see someone who is a total bullshitter who has done well, and elude themselves into thinking that they can be just as "successful".
Musk has succeeded due to a combination of starting off with money, being in the right place at the right time, being ruthless, and being a good liar. None of these are really things anyone can, or should aspire to. I mean, I'd love to start off with money, or completely luck out, but "aspiring to" it ain't going to make it happen.
It's one of those age-old questions. My personal thought is it has to do with that "critical thinking" thing that everyone says we need more of, but few are willing to put in the work to cultivate. If you have a robust critical thinking ability, Trump and Twitler are rather transparent in their efforts, but if you're the sort who is accustomed to just accepting whatever a talking head on Fox News or talk radio happens to say, it's easier to be taken in by the facade.
There are people who like, or crave, being in a pecking order.
It gives them some sort of sense of security or something I never really fathomed, and they adore these transparently awful people who posture as the capstones of the implicate order.
They'll slot in somewhere and peck on those below while tolerating the head honcho shagging their wives.
At least Musk doesn't prey directly on poor people like some new-church leaders....
As they are, and always have been, the only suppliers of an alternative to ICE vehicles, with their range of sensibly-priced, minimalist electric cars that eschew any kind of frippery for the sake of maximising the efficient use of the stored energy.
So what, Polestar, Rivian, Ford/GM, Volvo and Audi et al don't exist on the planet you live on?! (Added bonus - These manufacturers actually know how to build cars and don't have panel gaps the size of my pinkie finger off the production line).
"Have you seen the Rivian build quality?"
Rich "rebuilds" has a Rivian and pointed out that the entire side of the pickup is one stamping. I never noticed that and it means that there is no buying a new quarter panel to fix an accident. On my first mini pickup I had something happen to a front quarter panel (not admitting to anything) and was able to take is off, give it a good beating, fill and paint job. With a Rivian, a section would have to be cut out and a new donor piece welded on, smoothed and repainted. Muy expensive in labor and skills.
Oh, I think plenty of us could tell it was sarcasm. Even Muskolytes wouldn't describe Tesla's iPads-on-wheels as "minimalist".
At least we can all agree that climate change is entirely caused by people driving existing ICE cars, though, and will be completely solved by making everyone buy a new electric vehicle.
If you look at a stock market as a control system for finding the correct price of one share of a company’s stock, then short-selling is a fundamental requirment. Long options (the kind Musk likes) are a way of buyers indicating that the current price is too low. Short options are the opposite: by setting a future sale price below the current value, option-takers are indicating that the current price is too high.
Between them, these two signals act as the error in a closed-loop control system, and the price, theoretically, settles on a reflection of the demand for the stock. Without a negative feedback signal, the price would rise uncontrollably until it crashed. (See the Dutch Tulip Bubble for an example of a market that had no shorting).
Or that’s the theory, anyway. The problem with the stock market as a control system for finding a correct price is that the system makes it easier to send the long signal than the short one. To short a stock, you need the strike price, plus a lot of money to cover your potential losses; to go long, all you need is the price of the shares you’ve bought. This biases the feedback towards increasing prices, and it’s not really an error, but rather a designed-in part of the system.
Musk, like nearly all VCs (Musk’s role in both Tesla and SpaceX was as an early-stage investor), exploits this bias by hyping stocks, thus transferring the risk of failure to small investors who will buy and hold the shares post-IPO. The reason he’s so against short sellers is that a short-selling run is the only thing that can really correct the price of an overvalued stock, and like every other VC, he needs overvalued stock to keep other ventures afloat.
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