Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023 Sorry, Tesla investors who want him back on the job: Elon Musk said he thinks it's going to take until the end of 2023 to stabilize Twitter to the point where he can appoint someone else as CEO. "Twitter is quite the rollercoaster," Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai Wednesday. The Twitter CEO, who also helms …
If you're currently holding a short on Tesla, I'm sorry for your pain (deserved as it is). If it's somehow still a profitable short, I'm amazed you found a broker willing to let you take liability for one so long and if still must be painful to have watched so much profit evaporate. The worst part must be knowing that if you'd just purchased in January, your profits would be greater than any short stretching back even 6 months (without risking unlimited losses).
Tesla doesn't have anything magic in the EV market, even if there's a good argument that it once did. It isn't appreciably closer to self-driving than anyone else and they don't have any unique EV tech.
It currently has a P/E ratio in excess of 50 and, sure, I'm losing money as the stock goes up. But the stock is a story stock - it goes up and down according to what Elon Musk says. Therefore, as it becomes clear that he isn't some brand new form of tech Titan, and as his stories become more unreliable, the value of the company will, I'm betting, decrease.
How's that product pipeline looking? Is there really anything coming that justifies Tesla being quadruple the value of Mercedes Benz, for example? I'm not convinced. And even if Musk is the genius who can propel Tesla ever higher, his remaining obviously distracted by Twitter is hardly going to help.
As I understand it Mercedes was actually the first car maker to be accredited for Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving. Level 3 in the US and for quite some time now. Level 4 only in designated spaces in Germany and more recently.
Musk has been selling "Full Self Driving by next year" for about a decade now, and he has to otherwise Tesla would be valued as a car maker with lower multiples. By convincing investors that Tesla is not a car maker but a tech firm he has been getting far higher multiples for the company's valuation. He can't back down now or Tesla stock would collapse.
I agree - plenty of companies were (and are) studying autonomous driving. As I mentioned before, Audi sent an autonomous car up Pikes Peak before Tesla was even thinking about self driving, and got formal permission to test on public roads (read: had it working and was deemed safe enough) in the same year that Tesla announced it was starting on self driving.
The difference is, of course, that those car companies don't have legions of fans glossing over the glaringly obvious problems while it's evident it cannot even park properly.
The Dawn project has also done quite an exposé although one always has to exercise some caution as it's apparently involved in something similar. That doesn't change the facts, though, and they're not quite as rosy as Musk is pretending.
Your broker must be laughing all the way to the bank (or be suicidal about their business). In all seriousness, I believe you're just lying about holding on to a short but I'll humour you (and put aside my personal views on the predatory nature of shorts); the reason to not hold a short for a prolonged period is because not only are the potential losses unlimited but the potential profits are limited to the value of the initial loan (which can only be realised if the stock loses all value).
For any other amateur investors reading this, if you think a stock is overvalued but aren't confident about when the drop will come, it's safer to identify correctly or undervalued competitor stock than it is to run a short. This is why they're called short and long positions, the educated investor doesn't plan to hold a short and doesn't swap long positions quickly. (standard disclaimer about not being financial advice, prices may go down as well as up, your entire investment may be at risk, ect.).
Tl;dr: it's a funny story but I hope no one actually takes your bitterness as a serious example. If you are serious, please seek help.
"Tesla doesn't have anything magic in the EV Market" - hahahahah
How about the best electric motors, the best batteries, and a vertically integrated manufacturing platform which others (i.e. Ford & GM) recently said they may have to move to a similar model in order to be competitive.
As the Germans say: "Das war einmal" - for a start, car manufacturers have now retooled and start to bring out models that, first of all, look MUCH better (even the Koreans have done a sterling job this time) and in some cases have a far better range although I'm not sure if the tricks that made a Mercedes clock well over 1000 km are compatible with mass production - I guess they'll find a way. The new 800V platforms also charge very fast and because they're universal, do not suffer from lock in (so they cannot lock you out either if you dare source a part secondhand instead of allowing Tesla to gauge you for a new part).
Secondly, association. Quite a lot of sane people have been rightfully put off by the behaviour of Musk himself, recently again proven to be an attention hogging child by forcing Twitter developers to change the algorithm so his blabbing was seen by more people. "Pathetic" doesn't quite begin to cover it.
I would not have wanted to buy a Tesla because I can see where Musk et al have been cutting corners and it would irritate me, but Musk's activities have made that an absolute dead cert, and from what I hear others are indeed not buying Tesla again for the same reason.
Thirdly, lies. Other companies do NOT expose innocent road users to lethal risk by claiming their automated driving is anywhere near reliable. They only install the things that already work. And you end up with a speedo that's actually in front of you. And better sensors than only cameras (although it appears they're now finally going at least for extra radar in the v4 hardware, not suitable for a retro fit).
So indeed, they don't have anything magic. Musk's antics have ruined their first mover advantage, badly.
Also, 362,758 Teslas are again facing a recall.
Why? Well, F-ed Self Driving. Nothing serious, though, just trivial stuff like driving through yellow, ignoring stop signs, going straight in lanes where they should turn.
You know, simple stuff, nothing that would affect other road users, no siree, just believe Musk that all is well.
Compare and contrast:
> engineers changed Twitter's algorithms to brute-force Musk's tweets to be more visible to tweeters
and
> "maximally trusted digital public square"
Clearly, Elon has the most advanced Electric Monk available:
“Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.”
He's the modern snake oil salesman. It is long past time that he was tarred and feathered.
Just wait a little bit. There is another Tesla technology day (or whatever they call it). The Tesla cult is awash with speculation about a new battery that can recharge in seconds. Good luck delivering 80kWh of power to a car in 'seconds' without tripping the local grid.
To see the Tesla Cultists in full cry just head on over to sites like Teslarti. The ranting makes the MAGA cult seem tame by comparison.
Please note that most members of both cults are in the USA but I did see a MAGA flag on a car in S.W. London at the weekend. Sad.
If Twitter makes it to the end of FY2023 I will be truly gobsmacked. Around half the advertisers have left, ad revenues down around 70%, only about 0.2% of users are willing to cough up for the service, and the new solution seems to be to allow cannabis sellers to advertise, except the restrictions on advertising for such companies (which are still technically illegal in the US) means the effectiveness will likely be blunted (happy coincidence).
No, the new solution is you can sell csam on twitter as long as you don't actually post it there.
While we all laugh at his hilarious rich boy shenanigans he's gutted the csam team, stopped paying for the software that automatically blocks images and stopped reporting people selling it on Twitter to the authorities. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/07/pretty-much-every-expert-agrees-that-elon-has-made-twitters-child-sexual-abuse-problem-worse/
For once, actually think of the children?
I suspect Musk will pull Twitter out of the EU first. The GDPR issues are piling up and legal action will be close. And that is before the enforcement of the EU's Digital Service Act (DSA) starts. Last week Twitter failed the DSA test on tackling disinformation on its platform and in future I could see issues with anticompetitive behaviour as described in the DSA. An interesting point is how many active users Twitter has in the EU. It's definitely in the tens of millions but it's unclear whether Twitter would meet the legal threshold of 45 million users in the EU that would put the company in the DSA's strictest regime.
If you then factor in that most of Twitter's advertising revenue comes from the US there comes a point where the legal costs of court case after court case exceed any profits made in the EU.
Because the Religious Right/MAGA RINOs make everything partisan - it's all they have. IQ45 did it, Elon is doing it and then they blame others for the problems they create.
The same happens with the Flat Earth mob, evolution and AGW deniers, SARS deniers, anti-vaxxers and so on = basically the same people.
It is a standard Religious Right / MAGA RINO disease, they make everything partisan. IQ45 did it and Leon did it, then they blame others for the problems they create.
Same problem with the Flat Earth mob, evolution, AGW and SARS deniers, anti-vaxxers and so on - basically the same people.
We knew he wasn't going to step aside when he started the poll. The only question was what stupid excuse he was going to tweet when the result became clear.
Do not picture us frustrated or angry. Instead we are laughing at the antics of a fool.
[Apologies to those who used to get something of value from Twitter and to those trapped by an H-1B visa.]
"And then there was Musk's reported unhappiness with having less engagement on Twitter than US President Joe Biden during the Superbowl at the weekend"
And that sums up the reason why Musk originally put in an offer to buy Twitter in the first place so he could have his own personal platform for his minions to worship everything he says, and hes now throwing his toys out of the pram when people with more importance in the world than the 'pedo guy' have more followers interested in what they have to say.
The fact that he even offered way above market value for Twitter and locked himself in without doing due diligence first, suggests people way over estimate his brilliance or that he was high when he made the offer and wasn't thinking rationally. Neither of those scenario is particular good for investors of the several companies worth billions he is in charge of or for the employees under him who he seems to fire off at will if they displease him in some way.
I doubt there are many people at Twitter who are not actively looking at a backup plan to get out of there within the next 12 months if they can.
This made me smile and thanks the gods that I never signed up for Twitter or got suckered into buying one of his cars (rocket booster or not)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpluW83egyA
He has such a thin skin that he got the Twitter algorithm changed just so the tweet about the Superbowl from Pres Biden did not get more exposure than his lame attempt.
Cry baby cry.
If you can get off Twitter and can avoid buying/leasing a Tesla then please do it now.
Good, keep the liberal left laughing.
Do you remember 2015 when the lefties were laughing at Trump and his supporters non-stop and the raving loony right were begging us to take him seriously? I admit that joke ended with the election results. This joke has been running continuously since April 2014 and shows no sign of slowing down.
"It was good for the first few metric tonnes..."
I always find that an odd phrase. It's usually Americans who use it, but not always. In almost the entire world, a "metric ton" is just a ton because we all use metric anyway. Worse, the implication of "metric ton" in the way it's commonly stated, it's a BIG amount. And yet, a metric ton is smaller than the commonly used US ton.
> And yet, a metric ton is smaller than the commonly used US ton.
Afraid not. I assume you're thinking of the non-metric "ton" under the UK imperial system, which actually refers to a "long" ton (1016 kg).
But the standard US "ton" is a "Short" ton, which- Wikipedia confirms- is significantly smaller, at around 907 kg.
In other words, yet another of those inconsistencies between the different versions of medieval units that provide you with more "fun" opportunities to get things wrong. (At least the definitions of "short ton" and "long ton"- when given in full- seem to be consistent across the two systems, unlike, say, rarely-used units such as "pint").
If they can engineer a way to pop Muskrat to the top of everyone's feed, why can't they just fix it so that his tweets are marked for him to see HUGE numbers of reads and retweets and what ever else he wants to see (I am not and have never been on the platform)? The numbers don't have to be real, just large enough to keep him happy. Problem fixed. Somebody mentioned blocking his tweets, to see what would happen. Maybe it would be fun if a sizable number of people did this? It seems that we hear about his tweets even if we aren't subscribed to that platform.
He wants the algorithm changed because he's upset Biden is getting more views than him? That kind of thing is straight from Trump's playbook.
I wonder if Trump heard about the change to boost Musk's tweets, and will tell him "I'll come back to Twitter if you give me the same boost". That would be a quick way to cause millions to drop Twitter!
I made a post in an earlier thread postulating the idea that Musk might be doing debt transfers from his other ventures to Twitter. He can do this by takiing out loans in the name of Twitter, seeing as it's his company, then having his public ventures issue new stock for the purpose of debt elimination that he buys for himself using the Twitter money. Appointing a new CEO at the end of the year might mean the debt transfer is complete. New CEO takes it public, Musk no longer has control so comes out clean, and he owns even more of newly debt free Tesla and SpaceX. Illegal? No because I doubt anyone has ever done this before. Might be illegal in a year or two, but Musk will already have this in the bag.
I'll be interested to see if my postulation is correct. I won't mind being wrong, but I'm fairly sure this is what's going on.
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