11 ms·

The crypto crisis should significantly diminish musk wealth no?

heartbreak 4y ago
You’re getting downvoted for no apparent reason, but there’s an argument to be made here that crypto crashing would cause retail investors to pull out of investments altogether, and meme stocks like Tesla would take a hit. Bloomberg, WSJ, etc. are all writing about this potential contagion effect today.
ben_w 4y ago
No, why would you think that? His wealth is mostly owning 20% of Tesla, plus some extra few billions from owning significant fractions of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Presumably there’s some cash in there as well, but on his scale a hundred million is a rounding error.
- SamBam 4y ago
  It still confuses me that being part-owner of an old dot-com payment company, part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold), and part-owner of a (very good) rocket company make a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet, but that's probably because I just haven't looked into it enough.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    I think Mr Musk will no longer be the world's richest man by end of 2023.
  - paganel 4y ago
    That "mid-sized car company" has revolutionised an ~120-year industry while still managing to remain at the forefront, that's why its valuation is so high (even though I also do believe it's over-valued). I'm not saying this as a Tesla-lover nor as a fan of Musk, in fact, as a lover of gasoline engines and of cars in general I see this as a tragedy (I regard EVs as refrigerators with some wheels attached), but it is what it is.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      Where is the revolution? There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric. Even if tesla have an edge, it's evolutionary, not at all revolutionary.
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        I assume revolutionary in that other companies have only really started taking EVs seriously due to the success of Tesla.
        adventured 4y ago
        People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit. It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else). It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
        MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        So what? It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
        mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Tiny compared to ICE sales which will soon be regulated out of existence in many countries in the coming decades.
  - FatalLogic 4y ago
    Probably the deciding factor is he owns a relative large portion of those: Almost 20% of Tesla and almost 50% of SpaceX Compare to Jeff Bezos, for example, who owns 10% of Amazon
  - mattmaroon 4y ago
    A lot of the richest people in history (other than royalty) just owned one part of one company. Sometimes a car one. Why's that surprising?
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    It's all about the car company. This company only sell cars for a rich elite but the market bubble over it is the most remarkable of modern times.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      I'm not sure if the target market will be even the elite, but upper middle class. Which happens to have gotten rich working in semi-associated markets.
      - JohnBooty 4y ago
        Yeah, I know a lot of "upper middle class" folks in the US who have bought Teslas. To be slightly more quantitative, we're talking about folks who make roughly $100K and up, particularly the ones who and don't have kids. So, roughly the top 15% of earners in America.
  - chris11 4y ago
    > a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 106. I have no idea why Tesla is so expensive.
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      Tesla is currently valued at over 20x Ford even though Ford did 13x Tesla's revenue last year. That stock should have dropped through the floor a long time ago.
      - tricky777 4y ago
        It is because (some) people believe/have faith in Musk. To some, he is a icon/leader to follow blindly. They trust him a lot. Which is because, his work/impact as ceo is visible on company and industry levels. contrast that with mba shortsighted ceos and/or ceos who sit on their assess waiting for golden parachute to deploy (thats the sentiment, irrelevant if unfounded). Charisma and beeing somewhat casual/releatable person on tv also helps.
    - outworlder 4y ago
      Only makes sense if Tesla becomes something else other than a car manufacturer (robots, robotaxis, etc). If it's just about EVs they should soon be priced below Ford. Even self-driving is insufficient as long as a driver needs to pay attention. Other companies are catching up - who cares if they need more hardware and can't do just vision, it's becoming cheaper.
      - SyzygistSix 4y ago
        Like a power company with a nation-wide charging network?
  - tempestn 4y ago
    The majority is due to the fact that Tesla's valuation skyrocketed in 2020-2021. The second-largest car maker by market cap is Toyota at 217B. (They're about double VW group, the next-largest.) Tesla's market cap is now 740B. For a while there it was over 1T. Here's a fun visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQlsDHbl0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQlsDHbl0M
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      VW will produce more EV next year than tesla (800K)
      - omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago
        Hopefully they will produce 800k EVs. In 2020, they produced 263k EVs, so they'll roughly need to triple production. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doubles_deliveries_of_all-electric_vehicles_in_2021.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doub... Tesla produced 936k cars last year, so VW will probably need to build more than 800k EVs to surpass Tesla in 2022. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-evs-worldwide-2021/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-ev...
        SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        Interesting. BTW they target 1.2 million in 2024
        omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago
        *In 2021...
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    > part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold) Because the market doesn't, and shouldn't, value things solely based on a snapshot of current business, as opposed to a projection of future business, based only partially on the current snapshot. A phrasing that gets at the market's thinking looks more like "A car company that effectively created the electric car market, right before the entire industry started making credible commitments to switch primarily over to EVs, all while being the most successful company at getting some degree of automated driving into consumer hands and awareness". Your phrasing implies "pre-Cruise GM, but with less sales"; it's no wonder why you're confused. Note that I'm not claiming that Tesla is appropriately valued right now, and as someone who works in AV, I think their approach to self-driving is misleading and irresponsible. But it sounds like the bulk of your confusion comes from a significant misunderstanding of what the stock market _is_.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      The stock market is not about retributing merit though. When the EV market will be very significant, there will be no strong reason to choose a tesla over dozens of alternatives. There will be Huaweis/xiaomis equivalents for cars.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        Not to forget much more strong brands outside the tech circles. It is not like all of Porche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren and so on just drop dead and stop producing cars. And these have much bigger brand value for traditional customers than Tesla will ever have.
      - wutbrodo 4y ago
        As I said, I don't think tesla is properly valued right now (though I haven't looked into their financials rigorously enough to have a strong opinion). The market is betting on Tesla being "Apple for EVs", with a combination of first-mover advantage and innovative secret sauce. Apple similarly had competitors but an Apple bull in 2008 is a very happy man today. I was narrowly responding to the parent comment's misunderstanding of what valuation is: specifically, the fact that it includes more than simply the current state of the business, incorporating future success as well. "Tesla's market prices relies on super optimistic assumptions" is a sound complaint. "Tesla is a midsized car company" is a nonsensical one.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    Corrected for inflation, John D. Rockefeller is probably the richest American ever.
    - SamBam 4y ago
      Hmm, according to this calculator [1], Rockefeller's net worth of $1.4B in 1937 would be worth $28B today. Elon's is around $240B, so it sounds like 10x the amount. Even by different calculations, it seems like an order of magnitude is a big difference. By GDP, they are both worth around 1% of the US GDP, but the US GDP is many times what it was then, particularly post-WWII. Musk's buying power seems significantly more than Rockefeller's by any metric. 1. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Tesla is also a worldwide company and trading around the world is significantly faster and easier than in Rockefeller's days.
      - auntienomen 4y ago
        I think Rockefeller probably wins when the contest is 'fraction of available wealth captured'. The world is far richer today than it was in his days. We have wealthier people, even inflation adjusted, but I don't think we've had any one since who owned so much of what existed.
      - JasonFruit 4y ago
        Your figures are clearly correct. I accepted what an article said without checking into it myself. Thanks for doing the work I should have done.
  - SamReidHughes 4y ago
    I'm really confused how you're confused. What is a better way to become the richest person than by owning and growing a series of hugely successful companies that provide products and services to people?
    - lumost 4y ago
      To my knowledge, none of these companies were run at a profit during Musk's involvement. While this is a normal part of growing a business, it leads to a bias on what people think could happen - rather than what does happen. How much money did musk really make? how much of it is an artifact of monetary policy.
      - drusepth 4y ago
        I think that's the big difference that causes confusion here: Musk is wealthy, not rich. The companies are worth a lot, but generally not producing dollar bills for him. His ownership in companies worth a lot is why he's valued so high, rather than strictly how much money or cash leverage he has.
      - lupire 4y ago
        80% of Musk's wealth is either confidence in Tesla's future, or memes, depnding on your perspective. It's not even pretending to be about completed work.
        aaroninsf 4y ago
        Let's see if TSLA is over 500 two weeks from now...
        SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        It's on free fall. Btw I just did an overview of the current EV market and there isn't even one car maker that is able to make them under ~35K$ VW and a few others will sell in huge volume next year (VW 1.2 million in 2023 actually, much more than tesla) but I see currently no validation from the car makers that they will reduce the costs. The main bottleneck is apparently the price of the materials and I don't see why they would get lower considering demand is exploding. That's why I studied the hydrogen market and it looks like a lot of hydrogen cars are coming in the next two years, they will have greater range than EV and to be seen but are likely to be cheaper to significantly cheaper. It's true that the availability of hydrogen is an issue but it will progressively be solved, California is already covered for example. So yeah current bet is the démocratisation of carbon neutral cars in massive volume will be via hydrogen, unless EV materials price find a solution.
  - adventured 4y ago
    Well for one thing you're downplaying several massive, global businesses. PayPal is a $25b sales, $4b operating income giant in the financial sector (payments / payment processing specifically). They have an $83b market cap and have sales equivalent to Germany's largest bank. Musk doesn't own a meaningful part of PayPal, it plays no role in his present wealth (other than he sold his ownership stake in PayPal to fund the early days of Tesla & SpaceX). Tesla is very obviously overvalued by a lot (by $400b-$600b at least), there's no rational argument against that. However being a major owner of BMW, which is perhaps what Tesla is best compared to in size and profitability now, is still a rather dramatic financial position to have (obviously). If we (when the market does) adjust Tesla to a more rational valuation, Musk would be a lot less rich, but still among the ~20-30 richest on the planet. Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on. SpaceX is a lot more than a very good rocket company. Their connectivity business will likely be worth tens of billions of dollars in the future. No other entity on Earth can presently match what they've accomplished in rocketry and satellites, that includes China, the US Government, Russia, or their corporate peers. The connectivity network they're building is exceptional and very, very difficult (and expensive) for others to compete with. The value of their ability to deploy zillions of satellites rapidly, will increase dramatically as more uses are figured out for such constellations (the US Government in particular).
    - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      > Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on. Every rational thinking person sees Musk and his behavior and throws any financial statement produced by Tesla straight into the bin. They are cooking the books 100%. Musk believes in manifestation, self-fulfilling prophecy and faking it till you make it. In the early days of PayPal he'd order to get parts of old fridges, paint them black in order to convince investors that PayPal had "supercomputers"
  - dekhn 4y ago
    It's confusing because wealth in this case is based on valuation, which in the case of Tesla is based entirely on what some people think the company will do, monetarily, in the future. In my mind, Bill Gates is truly richer than Elon, because he has a diversified portfolio and could convert more of his holdings into other, different holdings, with less friction.
    - lupire 4y ago
      Bill Gates would be straight up wealthier than Musk if he didn't donate half his wealth to his foundation. If you consider that part of his wealth (in the sense of total lifetime income so far, not figure spending power, so subtracting off personal consumption/spending), you don't have Musk being suprosinly more wealthy.
      - r00fus 4y ago
        Considering the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is essentially chaired by the two directly, why wouldn't you consider that wealth (that they get nice tax treatment for donating to) isn't theirs?
        SamBam 4y ago
        Once he has donated it to the foundation, it is no longer fully under his control. It is a charitable organization, and subject to many laws about how the money is spent. So it's never included in any measure of his total wealth. (GP's point is that if it were, and also all the past charitable spending was, then Gates works be richer. (
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The most successful payment company, the top car company on terms of valuation and the top rocket company. We've never seen that profile. Usually it's someone who had monopolized an industry like Gates or Bozo doing under one company.
    - lupire 4y ago
      That's kind of arbitrary because Microsoft is an OS, apps, computer, and peripherals company; and Amazon is a retail, logistics, and cloud services company. Tesla is a battery-based company, but could also have been a transportation company and included Boring and SpaceX. And Mastercard and Vida are both bigger in payments than PayPal. And PayPal was mostly Thiel's Confinity, which merged with Musk's X.com bank.
  - geotus 4y ago
    Elon Musk is nowhere near the richest person in history. Augustus Caesar and Mansa Musa IX were multi-trillionaires in comparative spending power.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      there is a great wikipedia page for this
- adventured 4y ago
  Bloomberg pegs him as having $9b in cash, $3b Twitter, $40b SpaceX, $3b Boring Company (silly valuation), $5b in misc liabilities, and the rest Tesla.
- Denvercoder9 4y ago
  Musk's share of SpaceX is worth more than an "extra few billions". SpaceX is valued at around $100B, and Elon Musk owns about 47% of it.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  One theory goes that the same people are invested in Tesla and Crypto. If their crypto holdings are wiped out they might have to sell their stock holdings to keep their roofs over their heads. Even if it's not that bad they might become more risk-adverse now one of their big bets has failed. Not endorsing that, not an expert. Just think it's not as absurd as you suggest.

You’re getting downvoted for no apparent reason, but there’s an argument to be made here that crypto crashing would cause retail investors to pull out of investments altogether, and meme stocks like Tesla would take a hit. Bloomberg, WSJ, etc. are all writing about this potential contagion effect today.

ben_w 4y ago

No, why would you think that? His wealth is mostly owning 20% of Tesla, plus some extra few billions from owning significant fractions of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Presumably there’s some cash in there as well, but on his scale a hundred million is a rounding error.

SamBam 4y ago
It still confuses me that being part-owner of an old dot-com payment company, part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold), and part-owner of a (very good) rocket company make a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet, but that's probably because I just haven't looked into it enough.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  I think Mr Musk will no longer be the world's richest man by end of 2023.
- paganel 4y ago
  That "mid-sized car company" has revolutionised an ~120-year industry while still managing to remain at the forefront, that's why its valuation is so high (even though I also do believe it's over-valued). I'm not saying this as a Tesla-lover nor as a fan of Musk, in fact, as a lover of gasoline engines and of cars in general I see this as a tragedy (I regard EVs as refrigerators with some wheels attached), but it is what it is.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    Where is the revolution? There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric. Even if tesla have an edge, it's evolutionary, not at all revolutionary.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      I assume revolutionary in that other companies have only really started taking EVs seriously due to the success of Tesla.
      - adventured 4y ago
        People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit. It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else). It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
        MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        So what? It's still a business and it is tiny compared to the big players. Tesla is only a slightly better value than crypto given how insanely overvalued the stock is. If the company had an $80B market cap, it would still be vastly overvalued.
        mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Tiny compared to ICE sales which will soon be regulated out of existence in many countries in the coming decades.
- FatalLogic 4y ago
  Probably the deciding factor is he owns a relative large portion of those: Almost 20% of Tesla and almost 50% of SpaceX Compare to Jeff Bezos, for example, who owns 10% of Amazon
- mattmaroon 4y ago
  A lot of the richest people in history (other than royalty) just owned one part of one company. Sometimes a car one. Why's that surprising?
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  It's all about the car company. This company only sell cars for a rich elite but the market bubble over it is the most remarkable of modern times.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I'm not sure if the target market will be even the elite, but upper middle class. Which happens to have gotten rich working in semi-associated markets.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      Yeah, I know a lot of "upper middle class" folks in the US who have bought Teslas. To be slightly more quantitative, we're talking about folks who make roughly $100K and up, particularly the ones who and don't have kids. So, roughly the top 15% of earners in America.
- chris11 4y ago
  > a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 106. I have no idea why Tesla is so expensive.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Tesla is currently valued at over 20x Ford even though Ford did 13x Tesla's revenue last year. That stock should have dropped through the floor a long time ago.
    - tricky777 4y ago
      It is because (some) people believe/have faith in Musk. To some, he is a icon/leader to follow blindly. They trust him a lot. Which is because, his work/impact as ceo is visible on company and industry levels. contrast that with mba shortsighted ceos and/or ceos who sit on their assess waiting for golden parachute to deploy (thats the sentiment, irrelevant if unfounded). Charisma and beeing somewhat casual/releatable person on tv also helps.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    Only makes sense if Tesla becomes something else other than a car manufacturer (robots, robotaxis, etc). If it's just about EVs they should soon be priced below Ford. Even self-driving is insufficient as long as a driver needs to pay attention. Other companies are catching up - who cares if they need more hardware and can't do just vision, it's becoming cheaper.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      Like a power company with a nation-wide charging network?
- tempestn 4y ago
  The majority is due to the fact that Tesla's valuation skyrocketed in 2020-2021. The second-largest car maker by market cap is Toyota at 217B. (They're about double VW group, the next-largest.) Tesla's market cap is now 740B. For a while there it was over 1T. Here's a fun visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQlsDHbl0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQlsDHbl0M
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    VW will produce more EV next year than tesla (800K)
    - omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago
      Hopefully they will produce 800k EVs. In 2020, they produced 263k EVs, so they'll roughly need to triple production. https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doubles_deliveries_of_all-electric_vehicles_in_2021.html https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doub... Tesla produced 936k cars last year, so VW will probably need to build more than 800k EVs to surpass Tesla in 2022. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-evs-worldwide-2021/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-ev...
      - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        Interesting. BTW they target 1.2 million in 2024
      - omgwtfbyobbq 4y ago
        *In 2021...
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  > part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold) Because the market doesn't, and shouldn't, value things solely based on a snapshot of current business, as opposed to a projection of future business, based only partially on the current snapshot. A phrasing that gets at the market's thinking looks more like "A car company that effectively created the electric car market, right before the entire industry started making credible commitments to switch primarily over to EVs, all while being the most successful company at getting some degree of automated driving into consumer hands and awareness". Your phrasing implies "pre-Cruise GM, but with less sales"; it's no wonder why you're confused. Note that I'm not claiming that Tesla is appropriately valued right now, and as someone who works in AV, I think their approach to self-driving is misleading and irresponsible. But it sounds like the bulk of your confusion comes from a significant misunderstanding of what the stock market _is_.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    The stock market is not about retributing merit though. When the EV market will be very significant, there will be no strong reason to choose a tesla over dozens of alternatives. There will be Huaweis/xiaomis equivalents for cars.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Not to forget much more strong brands outside the tech circles. It is not like all of Porche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, McLaren and so on just drop dead and stop producing cars. And these have much bigger brand value for traditional customers than Tesla will ever have.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      As I said, I don't think tesla is properly valued right now (though I haven't looked into their financials rigorously enough to have a strong opinion). The market is betting on Tesla being "Apple for EVs", with a combination of first-mover advantage and innovative secret sauce. Apple similarly had competitors but an Apple bull in 2008 is a very happy man today. I was narrowly responding to the parent comment's misunderstanding of what valuation is: specifically, the fact that it includes more than simply the current state of the business, incorporating future success as well. "Tesla's market prices relies on super optimistic assumptions" is a sound complaint. "Tesla is a midsized car company" is a nonsensical one.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  Corrected for inflation, John D. Rockefeller is probably the richest American ever.
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Hmm, according to this calculator [1], Rockefeller's net worth of $1.4B in 1937 would be worth $28B today. Elon's is around $240B, so it sounds like 10x the amount. Even by different calculations, it seems like an order of magnitude is a big difference. By GDP, they are both worth around 1% of the US GDP, but the US GDP is many times what it was then, particularly post-WWII. Musk's buying power seems significantly more than Rockefeller's by any metric. 1. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Tesla is also a worldwide company and trading around the world is significantly faster and easier than in Rockefeller's days.
    - auntienomen 4y ago
      I think Rockefeller probably wins when the contest is 'fraction of available wealth captured'. The world is far richer today than it was in his days. We have wealthier people, even inflation adjusted, but I don't think we've had any one since who owned so much of what existed.
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      Your figures are clearly correct. I accepted what an article said without checking into it myself. Thanks for doing the work I should have done.
- SamReidHughes 4y ago
  I'm really confused how you're confused. What is a better way to become the richest person than by owning and growing a series of hugely successful companies that provide products and services to people?
  - lumost 4y ago
    To my knowledge, none of these companies were run at a profit during Musk's involvement. While this is a normal part of growing a business, it leads to a bias on what people think could happen - rather than what does happen. How much money did musk really make? how much of it is an artifact of monetary policy.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      I think that's the big difference that causes confusion here: Musk is wealthy, not rich. The companies are worth a lot, but generally not producing dollar bills for him. His ownership in companies worth a lot is why he's valued so high, rather than strictly how much money or cash leverage he has.
    - lupire 4y ago
      80% of Musk's wealth is either confidence in Tesla's future, or memes, depnding on your perspective. It's not even pretending to be about completed work.
      - aaroninsf 4y ago
        Let's see if TSLA is over 500 two weeks from now...
        SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        It's on free fall. Btw I just did an overview of the current EV market and there isn't even one car maker that is able to make them under ~35K$ VW and a few others will sell in huge volume next year (VW 1.2 million in 2023 actually, much more than tesla) but I see currently no validation from the car makers that they will reduce the costs. The main bottleneck is apparently the price of the materials and I don't see why they would get lower considering demand is exploding. That's why I studied the hydrogen market and it looks like a lot of hydrogen cars are coming in the next two years, they will have greater range than EV and to be seen but are likely to be cheaper to significantly cheaper. It's true that the availability of hydrogen is an issue but it will progressively be solved, California is already covered for example. So yeah current bet is the démocratisation of carbon neutral cars in massive volume will be via hydrogen, unless EV materials price find a solution.
- adventured 4y ago
  Well for one thing you're downplaying several massive, global businesses. PayPal is a $25b sales, $4b operating income giant in the financial sector (payments / payment processing specifically). They have an $83b market cap and have sales equivalent to Germany's largest bank. Musk doesn't own a meaningful part of PayPal, it plays no role in his present wealth (other than he sold his ownership stake in PayPal to fund the early days of Tesla & SpaceX). Tesla is very obviously overvalued by a lot (by $400b-$600b at least), there's no rational argument against that. However being a major owner of BMW, which is perhaps what Tesla is best compared to in size and profitability now, is still a rather dramatic financial position to have (obviously). If we (when the market does) adjust Tesla to a more rational valuation, Musk would be a lot less rich, but still among the ~20-30 richest on the planet. Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on. SpaceX is a lot more than a very good rocket company. Their connectivity business will likely be worth tens of billions of dollars in the future. No other entity on Earth can presently match what they've accomplished in rocketry and satellites, that includes China, the US Government, Russia, or their corporate peers. The connectivity network they're building is exceptional and very, very difficult (and expensive) for others to compete with. The value of their ability to deploy zillions of satellites rapidly, will increase dramatically as more uses are figured out for such constellations (the US Government in particular).
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    > Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on. Every rational thinking person sees Musk and his behavior and throws any financial statement produced by Tesla straight into the bin. They are cooking the books 100%. Musk believes in manifestation, self-fulfilling prophecy and faking it till you make it. In the early days of PayPal he'd order to get parts of old fridges, paint them black in order to convince investors that PayPal had "supercomputers"
- dekhn 4y ago
  It's confusing because wealth in this case is based on valuation, which in the case of Tesla is based entirely on what some people think the company will do, monetarily, in the future. In my mind, Bill Gates is truly richer than Elon, because he has a diversified portfolio and could convert more of his holdings into other, different holdings, with less friction.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Bill Gates would be straight up wealthier than Musk if he didn't donate half his wealth to his foundation. If you consider that part of his wealth (in the sense of total lifetime income so far, not figure spending power, so subtracting off personal consumption/spending), you don't have Musk being suprosinly more wealthy.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      Considering the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is essentially chaired by the two directly, why wouldn't you consider that wealth (that they get nice tax treatment for donating to) isn't theirs?
      - SamBam 4y ago
        Once he has donated it to the foundation, it is no longer fully under his control. It is a charitable organization, and subject to many laws about how the money is spent. So it's never included in any measure of his total wealth. (GP's point is that if it were, and also all the past charitable spending was, then Gates works be richer. (
- ipaddr 4y ago
  The most successful payment company, the top car company on terms of valuation and the top rocket company. We've never seen that profile. Usually it's someone who had monopolized an industry like Gates or Bozo doing under one company.
  - lupire 4y ago
    That's kind of arbitrary because Microsoft is an OS, apps, computer, and peripherals company; and Amazon is a retail, logistics, and cloud services company. Tesla is a battery-based company, but could also have been a transportation company and included Boring and SpaceX. And Mastercard and Vida are both bigger in payments than PayPal. And PayPal was mostly Thiel's Confinity, which merged with Musk's X.com bank.
- geotus 4y ago
  Elon Musk is nowhere near the richest person in history. Augustus Caesar and Mansa Musa IX were multi-trillionaires in comparative spending power.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    there is a great wikipedia page for this
adventured 4y ago
Bloomberg pegs him as having $9b in cash, $3b Twitter, $40b SpaceX, $3b Boring Company (silly valuation), $5b in misc liabilities, and the rest Tesla.
Denvercoder9 4y ago
Musk's share of SpaceX is worth more than an "extra few billions". SpaceX is valued at around $100B, and Elon Musk owns about 47% of it.
iudqnolq 4y ago
One theory goes that the same people are invested in Tesla and Crypto. If their crypto holdings are wiped out they might have to sell their stock holdings to keep their roofs over their heads. Even if it's not that bad they might become more risk-adverse now one of their big bets has failed. Not endorsing that, not an expert. Just think it's not as absurd as you suggest.