5 ms·

Totally agree it's worth discovering how few employees it requires to keep the lights on. However harsh. Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and

Totally agree it's worth discovering how few employees it requires to keep the lights on. However harsh. Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and headcount reduction probably cuts that in half. Perhaps a sustainable business will emerge after all. Not exactly equivalent, but I think Craigslist has like 40 employees. It's doesn't make billions in revenue like Twitter did (does?) but seems like a relevant case study.

coldtea 4y ago
>Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!
- db48x 4y ago
  He doesn’t have NNN billion dollars, he as stock in companies he controls which is currently valued at NNN billion dollars (whatever his current net worth is). Those are very different things.
  - brntsllvn 4y ago
    Point taken. But he borrows against those assets. Call his margin 30%. That's still a decent chunk of time.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Not very different. Let's put it this way, even if he went crazy with it, he'd still die a billionaire even if he gets at a hundrend years old... Heck, Trump is still a billionaire, and he did several bunkrupties, bad investments, BS moves, and stupidity to hurt his public image there is. And he never had 1/100 of what Musk has to begin with...
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Not very different? It’s completely different. Imagine if I printed 1,000,000 shares of a fictional company I owned. Then my parents bought 1 share each for $1 each. I would have a market cap of one million dollars, even though the remaining 999,998 can’t be sold anywhere. Thus, Elon’s net worth only works if he could sell every share, for the share price it is right now. This is impossible - he would crash the stock and make a few billion dollars at most.
      - mwint 4y ago
        Even if the stock crashed 50%, it’d still be way more than a “few” billion.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        You are assuming he needs to cache everything and have 500 billion at hand at once. That's not how it works.
- brntsllvn 4y ago
  Yeah totally. Instead, he paid a premium rather than arguing for a discount via unsustainable cash burn.
derbOac 4y ago
It's easier to keep the light switch on than to put in the wiring and sockets to begin with. I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.

coldtea 4y ago

>Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!

db48x 4y ago
He doesn’t have NNN billion dollars, he as stock in companies he controls which is currently valued at NNN billion dollars (whatever his current net worth is). Those are very different things.
- brntsllvn 4y ago
  Point taken. But he borrows against those assets. Call his margin 30%. That's still a decent chunk of time.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Not very different. Let's put it this way, even if he went crazy with it, he'd still die a billionaire even if he gets at a hundrend years old... Heck, Trump is still a billionaire, and he did several bunkrupties, bad investments, BS moves, and stupidity to hurt his public image there is. And he never had 1/100 of what Musk has to begin with...
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Not very different? It’s completely different. Imagine if I printed 1,000,000 shares of a fictional company I owned. Then my parents bought 1 share each for $1 each. I would have a market cap of one million dollars, even though the remaining 999,998 can’t be sold anywhere. Thus, Elon’s net worth only works if he could sell every share, for the share price it is right now. This is impossible - he would crash the stock and make a few billion dollars at most.
    - mwint 4y ago
      Even if the stock crashed 50%, it’d still be way more than a “few” billion.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      You are assuming he needs to cache everything and have 500 billion at hand at once. That's not how it works.
brntsllvn 4y ago
Yeah totally. Instead, he paid a premium rather than arguing for a discount via unsustainable cash burn.

derbOac 4y ago

It's easier to keep the light switch on than to put in the wiring and sockets to begin with. I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.