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Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting: "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a ci
by AlanYx 2y ago
Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting:
"On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."
- pram 2y agoMeasured another way, just a bit under 2 Twitters.
- talldayo 2y agoThe fact that owning Twitter was worth half a Mars colony to him should give you an idea of how seriously he's taking this whole thing. It's up there next to "Full Self Driving" and "$25,000 EV" in the Big Jar of Promises Used To Raise Capital and Nothing Else.
- adabyron 2y agoHe bought Twitter for $40B. His Tesla stock was 0% ytd until the election. Post election it is up roughly 70% ytd & has paid for Twitter & the Mars colony multiple times. Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter.
- kingofheroes 2y agoThis. In hindsight, buying Twitter at a loss was well worth the long (though, more like medium) term results. As much as it disgusts me, I'm impressed.
- conception 2y agoNote he didn’t just buy Twitter. He was forced to buy twitter after trying to pump and dump the stock.
- chrisco255 2y agoThat's a mischaracterization. He tried to get out of the deal because the stock market overall had crashed significantly between 2021 and 2022 and Twitter was no longer worth $40B.
- mhh__ 2y agoHonestly not convinced it was about that. I'm sure he likes the stock going up but I think he is somewhat earnest about why he bought twitter, or at least what he wants to do with it when he got stuck with it. As per usual, he bet the house and won. The vibes are shifting, Trump won, etc
- TheGRS 2y agoAre we really giving Twitter that much credit these days? I feel like we gave it less credit when it was actually popular. I would give Elon jumping around on stage more credit than what Twitter/X did for this election.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- thefaux 2y agoIn no way do the election results justify that claim.
- jrflowers 2y ago> I know it is hard to imagine, but 1/2 the United States voters see it as the last free speech area of the internet It is very easy to imagine that. I can also imagine shuffling a bunch of cold cuts and slices of bread and making a sandwich like on Scooby Doo but that also has no reflection of reality
- Arkhaine_kupo 2y ago> Hard to say if that happens without him owning Twitter. Its fairly easy. In almost every western country the incumbent administration has been punished by voters due to inflation, this has been the case in the uk, germany, romania, france, mexico... list goes on. So Trump could have won without Elon buying twitter. Similarly he could have donated to Trump without buying Twitter, and been on stage and been all day on twitter saying nonsense without purchasing. So being close to Trump is possible without buying Twitter. The market would have reacted the same way, because the market is reacting to the fact that Trump is a corrupt leader and being close to him means the market will be skewed to benefit his cronies (in this case Elon). If im not wrong Trump has already mentioned creating "self driving car initiatives" that probably means boosting Tesla dangerous self driving mode, and also they have alluded to investigating rival companies to tesla and spacex or at least "reviewing their goverment contracts". Other industries without social media owners, like private prisions, also skyrocketed after trump won and those paid trump as much as Elon but were not on social media. The market would have reacted to Trump being corrupt regardless of Elon buying Twitter. So its easy to say that his stock would be up 70% without buying twitter, as long as he kept the 250 million investment in the Trump campaign, and then market assesed Trump admin as affecting market fairness, both of which would happen without his purchase.
- chrisco255 2y agoTwitter famously deplatformed Trump, as a sitting president. They were a captured institution and it was shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship. There was no other distribution channel available. Messaging is important. Counter narratives are important.
- monetus 2y ago> shown that corrupt intelligence agencies were directly influencing Twitter's censorship That is a hyperbolic way of saying the fbi used the report feature everyone has access to when worried about domestic terrorism along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing. Not exactly government censorship - not a potato potahto thing.
- elif 2y ago[flagged]
- ben_w 2y agoI've been hearing "nearly feature complete" for over a decade now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Predictions_for_Autonomous_Tesla_Vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Predictions_for_Autono...
- threeseed 2y ago> v13 is way better and safer than a great Uber driver, let alone average. Will need to see a source for this. Especially since NHTSA crash reporting data is not made public.
- bee_rider 2y agoI’m sure soon enough we won’t have to worry about NHTSA keeping that sort of data private (because that agency will simply be found inefficient and eliminated).
- threeseed 2y agoAlready happening: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musk-doesnt-want-tesla-to-have-to-do-car-crash-reporting-and-what-do-you-know-the-trump-transition-agrees?srsltid=AfmBOop9xp_FRIzA0F8UTzaw05LrIpX5TKE7wKIFtnQOaeFppAyP0thO https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musk-doesnt-want-...
- noncoml 2y agoWake me up when it stops having hard time recognizing when it’s raining to turn on the wipers reliably. Then we can talk about FSD
- bravetraveler 2y agoTown squares go a lot further than I imagined
- ShakataGaNai 2y agoWhen he bought it, sure? Probably more like 20 X's
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago[flagged]
- iaseiadit 2y agoOffset by the value of toppling a hostile administration that had him in its crosshairs. Is that worth $XXB? Maybe not, but it's worth something.
- ben_w 2y agoI'm not sure if X actually caused that, given that even 4 years ago people were suggesting dementia in both Biden and Trump, and that Harris was kinda just parachuted in rapidly and without sufficient preparation when the fear about Biden having dementia got too loud to ignore. And also that X was never as popular as Facebook. On the other hand, the polls seemed pretty close, so perhaps it made enough of a difference on the margin.
- NetOpWibby 2y agoThis made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"
- marcosdumay 2y agoLand on Mars is cheap... But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.
- kulahan 2y agoI imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot of company money into getting the city on Mars started, because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.
- linotype 2y agoDoing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?
- VectorLock 2y agoYeah and Mars is a shitty place to live. And will always be a shitty place to live. No amount of fantastical "terraforming" is going to create a magnetosphere.
- mlindner 2y agoWell actually... you can create a magnetic shield in front of the planet by putting a large nuclear reactor powered superconducting magnet at the Sun-Mars L1 point that would fully shield Mars from charged particles from the sun. No new technology is required besides making the thing relatively maintenance free. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
- beepbooptheory 2y agoI will always love Kim Stanley Robinson but I dont care: please, Musk, go to Mars, you can have it.
- vasco 2y agoOne of the best things I've ever read. I'm going to use this in my next salary negotiation. Oh you know I don't really care about the number, it's just that I'm working on this plan to desalinate all the water in the oceans.
- qingcharles 2y agoMade me think of this: https://glasstire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/288_Image1.jpg?x88956 https://glasstire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/288_Image1....
- UltraSane 2y ago$80 trillion would not be enough.
- lupire 2y agoElon Musk is nothing if not famous for astronomically over-promising and under-delivering.
- buzzerbetrayed 2y agoHe is overly optimistic about timelines, but he usually delivers. Or did I imagine his company catching a fucking rocket out of the air with chopsticks? Guess that was under delivering
- powderpig 2y agoRed Dragon? Falcon 9 Booster 24-hr turn around? The plethora of missed milestones required to land on the moon's surface?
- vasco 2y agoYou can see from the emails he outright does it just to "create a sense of urgency" and wants others to do the same. It does have its results but it churns through employees a lot as well. It's a good recipe to achieve great things but the problem is random middle managers of random SaaS b2b products thinking they need to do the same.