9 thoughts on “Elon Musk”

  1. Rand was dismissive of my suggestion to go over to Seeking Alpha and the Tesla Analysis and News page.

    The short sellers who are pessimistic about Tesla sound like grumpy old man pragmatic realists. The people who are “long” Tesla and mad at the “shorts for hating” are prone to every trope and cliché of Warmists, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, The Main Stream Media, never Trumpers, 9-11 Truthers, white supporters of Black Lives Matters, Michelle Obama, Yvette Falarca, Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden and the people in my neighborhood with that sign written in English, Spanish and Arabic welcoming everyone except for Vikings fans.

    1. Or one could go to the nearest Cherokee casino and ask people how to win at the slot machines.

      Disclosure: I do not own TSLA or any derivatives thereof. I check the stock price only for chuckles. I’m far more a spaceship guy than a car guy, so I wish Elon would sell Tesla and build Mars cyclers.

      1. I was told that a mathematically optimum gambling strategy would be to figure out the largest amount of money you could “write off”, bet all of it at one time on one high-payout roulette wheel slot, and win or lose, walk away from the casino and never return.

        The deal is that many gamblers make repeated, smaller bets, allowing the Law of Large Numbers to kick in and leading to the casino getting all of your money with much higher certainty. In the preceding strategy, the casino stands to get all of your money, but it is not longer a certainty as there is a small but finite chance you will walk away rich.

        Tesla is in a very precarious financial situation. Elon Musk is not only betting that company that they can pull through with the aftermath of the Model 3 launch that went as well as healthcare.gov, and he is placing on the gaming table his extravagant lifestyle leveraged on borrowing on his 20 percent of 50 billion market valuation in the company. There are large numbers of retail investors who have what I regard to be unrealistic views parallel to fervently held belief in the Socialist economic/political system and the Tooth Fairy. The institutional investors (Fidelity, Vanguard) managing “growth” mutual funds labor under no such delusions, so they are just gritting their teeth right now.

        One of the themes on Seeking Alpha is “you shorts have been predicting bankruptcy since forever and how is that working out for you?” Tesla is said to have come close to bankruptcy with the Model S rollout, but they squeaked through, with some deep-pocket investor or institution on standby to bankroll them.

        Option contracts allow one to bet opposite “the table” from the aforementioned parties. Yes, it is gambling, no, I don’t have a “position”, yet. But I regard it is a much better deal than the casino of which you speak.

      2. I want to add that the Seeking Alpha Tesla page is not just about investing.

        It is about watching how Warmists act like the Super Fans in that SNL sketch (Da Bears! Da Bulls!). Believing that the last two major hurricanes were the result of driving gasoline-fueled cars, I don’t know if can judge, but believing that Tesla is not in a precarious financial situation, that is an objectively quantifiable situation that demonstrates the silliness of everyone from the Warmists through to my neighbors in Ulyanov, WI (they changed the name from Madison because James Madison held slaves).

        A lot of people on Rand’s fine Web site want to compartmentalize Musk-Tesla, which they (they? Rand?) profess not care about and don’t believe in, from Musk-SpaceX, which they do believe in.

        I am not sure Musk “believes” in the way his cult followers do. I have also come to believe that Musk’s role is more that of a promoter, a Martian real-estate developer, than as an Ayn Randian get-er-done architect-engineer-doer hero.

        Yes, we have a Real-estate Developer in Chief is the White House, whom Rand and a lot of other people didn’t “believe in”, people who have come around to believing. It appears that the Developer in Chief has a lot of good doers working in the back rooms doing great things, and Mr. Musk may be the same kind of catalyst with his commercial ventures.

        But the linked article was in praise of Elon Musk as a doer, which I think doesn’t give proper credit to some really smart, hard working people.

    2. Vikings fans are notoriously rabid right-wingers with a long history of rape and pillage. And we absolutely can’t have any of that around here.

  2. No, no Curt. It is pillage THEN rape. Burn last.

    I can’t figure Musk. really driven, smart guy who has attracted very competent, smart, hard working people, organised and motivated them and he has swallowed the global warming nonsense completely. WTF?
    Right now I see Tesla Motors as the greatest risk to our expansion into space. I’m not sure Bezos has what it takes and I don’t mean money.
    Musk is at least a “get ‘er done” guy.

  3. Elon was absolutely essential, possibly right up through the FH launch. But now? Has SpaceX reached the point where it could survive without him?

    If Elon were to get hit by a bus (physical, financial, or criminal) tomorrow, could Gwynne keep things going?

  4. I’m a big fan of SpaceX, have been for a long time (since the first F9 launch).

    I’m not a fan of Tesla, mainly because I am highly dubious of Tesla. I don’t like their business model (though I don’t blame them for taking advantage of government stupidity in the form of subsidies).

    I don’t like their cars, either. Above all I loath the idea of “connected” cars, unavoidable software updates, etc. I know that’s not limited to Tesla, but every Tesla is like that. I also don’t like electric cars – the time to recharge makes them quite impractical, and I’m not about to drop tens of thousands extra for a new car to save a few bucks a week at the pump. Plus, if they still have the drawback of destroying the battery pack if it goes to zero charge, that’s a ten grand or more mess, which isn’t IMHO a risk worth taking for the sake of spurious savings at the pump. Another factor is their proprietary nature; you pretty much can’t get them worked on anywhere but Tesla, and those are expensive, plus few and far between (none within 100 miles of me).

    And the model 3? I’ve been in one, briefly, but long enough enough to despise the idea of having a center mounted “dashboard” instead of having a speedometer in front of the driver.

    My hunch is thus that they will remain a niche market (due to a lot of people like me preferring other options for cars), but their current growth and structure doesn’t look to be a company that can do well with that limited a market, and another rollout like the model 3 mess would IMHO wreck their reputation for quality, and thus massively harm their market niche. I just hope that if Tesla fails, it does not drag SpaceX down with it.

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