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Let this trend continue shall we.
Crying shame it’s not going to help find a cure for cancer, feeding the poor or educating the masses, etc. Anything other than just vanishing.
Anything.
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Sad that it can’t be actually used for humanitarian causes, good in that it’s less personal revenue for Musk to spend on breaking shit even more than he already has…
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The idea that billions of dollars in wealth can just “vanish” depending on how people feel about Elon Musk reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Galapagos about a worldwide economic crash:
“There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.”
Imaginary or not, that money was never going to help poor people as long as it was under Musk’s control anyway.
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I’d absolutely love for him to lose control of Tesla - and then SpaceX. I was just reading about the culture there, and it sounds pretty sexist and toxic, too (with Musk feeling the need to stick his oar in, occasionally, requiring everyone to do a bunch of high-stress extra work). Both companies would only benefit from his absence.
Only if Elon shows up, though.
Musk aside, I’ve suddenly started hearing about how bad the cars are, in terms of build quality, etc. There was this aura around Phony Stark that seemed to keep people from acknowledging the problems with the cars (and the company) that seems to have worn off a bit.
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… you don’t get fired for sleeping at work when you own the company 
who, IIRC, spent his “middle aged billionaire” phase as … a public school teacher
a more stark contrast could scarcely be imagined
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They were lab-ratted over to Mars. They should get there in a few months, they reckon. The physiological data should prove interesting.
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With their mothers. Or maybe at undisclosed locations if they are still secret babies
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The Santa Clarita Valley here has become lousy with Teslas. It used to be that one would see (in much fewer numbers) a Porsche or a Beemer tearing off when red turns to green, as if life was a drag race. Now it’s Teslas, and a shitload of them. Every day. And red lights must, must, be raced up to as fast as possible to get back to that starting line yet again. Obsessive repetitive behavior. I imagine that the ready acceleration at their command only fuels whatever fanboi love addles their brains.
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Yeah, the problem isn’t that Tesla fell, it is that it was ridiculously overpriced. Yes, they do make pretty good cars. But they have never been a real threat to the Detroit automakers or the imports because it is far easier for those companies to change out powertrains than for Tesla to successfully scale up to mass produce cars at competitive prices. But the stock price seemed to assume that they were likely to surpass the major automakers rather than the more reasonable possibility that they could become a 2nd tier automaker. (think Kia or Isuzu, not Toyota or Ford)
In a larger sense, we have a number of companies (eg. uber) that have stock valuations that seem crazy-high because providing goods and services do NOT scale the way that software does. While developing and maintaining software can certainly be expensive, the marginal cost is near zero. And that makes getting an early lock on the market so profitable. You can always sell your 100,001st copy of the software for a fraction of the cost that a competitor can sell their 1st copy. Stuff that requires raw materials and/or people is just not like that. Efficiencies of scale and already sunk costs ARE a thing, but barriers to entry are not as extreme as they can be in software. And in cars they are high enough that existing automakers have an advantage, but not so high that a company can easily dominate through one technological innovation, and have a license to print money thereafter.
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What did he get instead? I do love my Tesla, but I’m done with this slide into Facism.
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Idk as of yet. It will certainly be another electric but with less fascist baggage in the trunk.
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There was always that question about how media that name dropped or even cameoed Musk would look in hindsight. I can’t imagine he is any scriptwriter’s go-to genius after this
Even at the time there was side eye when Star Trek Discovery pulled “How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers? Elon Musk? Zefram Cochrane? Or as a failed fungus expert?”
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I’m assuming that as he continues his descent into madness that he’ll end up living in a hotel somewhere, tweeting endlessly but never coming outside, a modern-day Howard Hughes.
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I’m sure Elon has structured things so he doesn’t directly own a house, and instead, some holding corporation he owns owns a house, he rents it for $1 a month or something from it, and then the holding corporation writes off the lost rent it could be getting as a loss and Elon writes off the $1 as a business expense. Or something like that.
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