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How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though? Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how

How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though? Sure, Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, but with how things are moving - It wouldn't surprise me that he's about the fall down the ranks. Let's see how much power he has once the "richest man in the world" aura fades away.

fujinghg 2y ago
I reckon Musk is so over extended that the only reason he’s doing what he’s doing is to basically rob what he can to cover it before a bigger fish comes along and he falls off a yacht like Madoff.
- fastball 2y ago
  How do you mean? There were major loans to buy Twitter, but AFAIK Musk brought on a bunch of other people so that's not entirely on him. Other than that what is he extended into?
  - sidibe 2y ago
    His companies are supporting each other in weird ways like xAi intercepting Tesla's GPUs, xAi being separate from X which is where it's used, Boring building one of its few tunnels in a Tesla factory for ???, the employees from one working at another, etc. there's probably a lot of shenanigans going on to make each company look OK at the right times. The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
    - tim333 2y ago
      Yeah, I can't find the link but apparently a lot of the improvement in x/twitters results are due to xAi paying x to advertise.
dustingetz 2y ago
was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake
- margalabargala 2y ago
  We'll see. After throwing out a few Nazi salutes, Tesla sales have been tanking in Europe.
  - pipes 2y ago
    Or the press pretending that it was a nazi salute, outrage sells.
    - MagnumOpus 2y ago
      Everyone who saw the speech, saw the three (!) Heil Hitlers and the ensuing smirk that said “whatcha gonna do, suckers?”. Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      If it was standalone event you could perhaps argue it was accidental. But the fact that he is supporting Afd who had done similar things in the past where they run a campaign, and make nazi symbolism in such a way that it would be barely legal, but at the same time obvious to everyone what they are referring to, it is pretty damning.
    - 6stringronin 2y ago
      I'm curious if you know what a Nazi salute looks like? Make a comparison by looking it up, he does the salute twice. Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
      - pipes 2y ago
wnc3141 2y ago
criminally overvalued is an interesting term to explore. I wonder when after all this shakes out in the courts, how much of his oligarchal access to government will be seen as illegal, therefore undermining any stock premium Tesla has from that access to government.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Musk owns 42% of the $350B SpaceX, so he would still be the 6th richest person in the world(tied with Sergey bring) if TSLA and all his other investments went to $0.
- rokoono 2y ago
  [dead]
godelski 2y ago
> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though? I don't know that, but I can say that he has an absurd amount liquidated. - Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html - Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17 - Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html - This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html So I would assume he has north of $30bn outside Tesla. Which that alone would make him near top 60 on Forbes's Billionaire list. I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0]. [0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  > “Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money.” I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side. A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it… You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years. $30Bn he could give every American $90.
WheatMillington 2y ago
I've been hearing about the inevitable decline of Tesla for about 10 years now.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  For how many of those did BYD exist in western markets and for how many was the Tesla brand toxic to the demographics that care about climate? New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
- TomK32 2y ago
  It has started long ago with the Cybertruck release delayed by two years and then not many wanted to buy it. The new roadster was originally announced for 2020, might come this year. The groundbreaking of Gigafactory Mexico has been delayed and I doubt the recent tariff madness helps. Level 5 FSD has been promised to be achieved in three years, that was 2013. With sales tanking, I do wonder if the $1 billion expected revenue in CO2-pooling[1] (from EU competition alone) will be at risk or if the EU can come up with some tariff in response to Trump's new attempt of tariffs on EU products. Also, after two failed attempts to get this massive compensation package as CEO approved by a court, will he try and fail again? Now that he's a squatter in some D.C. government building? [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stellantis-toyota-ford-mazda-subaru-plan-pool-co2-emissions-with-tesla-2025-01-07/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
- malthaus 2y ago
  "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Most of that was from Republican climate change deniers trying to make a culture war out of EVs. Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
  - cloverich 2y ago
theGnuMe 2y ago
So there is a plan here. One is to sue or stop the SEC. Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.
handsclean 2y ago
Nobody likes the guy, but I think a lot of people let their distaste for a person blind them to their strategy. Since Musk’s early days co-founding PayPal, his MO has been to start with a small fortune, bet it on a fortune 10x that, and repeat, abandoning each project after it serves its purpose. It’s clear at this point that his next step has been political power since at least the Twitter purchase, and that step just had its Tesla takeoff moment. I think there’s basically no chance he fails to leverage that into an even greater fortune than everything that came before, even while letting Tesla and the rest run on autopilot. Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last. Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.
akmarinov 2y ago
Still plenty - just look at your Zuckerbergs, Andressens, Horrowitzes, Soros, Gates, etc
londons_explore 2y ago
> Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Given that he owns a huge part of SpaceX that is also valued at many billions, that's highly unlikely.
TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
you think it's bad now... Wait till tesla starts selling optimus at scale and SpaceX starts controlling strategically valuable resources in LEO by space mining. Elon's not the one you need to worry about, it's his son X.

fujinghg 2y ago

I reckon Musk is so over extended that the only reason he’s doing what he’s doing is to basically rob what he can to cover it before a bigger fish comes along and he falls off a yacht like Madoff.

fastball 2y ago
How do you mean? There were major loans to buy Twitter, but AFAIK Musk brought on a bunch of other people so that's not entirely on him. Other than that what is he extended into?
- sidibe 2y ago
  His companies are supporting each other in weird ways like xAi intercepting Tesla's GPUs, xAi being separate from X which is where it's used, Boring building one of its few tunnels in a Tesla factory for ???, the employees from one working at another, etc. there's probably a lot of shenanigans going on to make each company look OK at the right times. The one that has to be somewhat transparent is looking pretty shaky
  - tim333 2y ago
    Yeah, I can't find the link but apparently a lot of the improvement in x/twitters results are due to xAi paying x to advertise.

dustingetz 2y ago

was looking for a musk margin call in 2023, no such luck, now he’s VP and markets are still fake

margalabargala 2y ago
We'll see. After throwing out a few Nazi salutes, Tesla sales have been tanking in Europe.
- pipes 2y ago
  Or the press pretending that it was a nazi salute, outrage sells.
  - MagnumOpus 2y ago
    Everyone who saw the speech, saw the three (!) Heil Hitlers and the ensuing smirk that said “whatcha gonna do, suckers?”. Pretending at equivocating just to troll will tank your own credibility.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    If it was standalone event you could perhaps argue it was accidental. But the fact that he is supporting Afd who had done similar things in the past where they run a campaign, and make nazi symbolism in such a way that it would be barely legal, but at the same time obvious to everyone what they are referring to, it is pretty damning.
  - 6stringronin 2y ago
    I'm curious if you know what a Nazi salute looks like? Make a comparison by looking it up, he does the salute twice. Of course you can argue in bad faith because it costs you nothing to be wrong but does that imply you are promoting this behavior? Seems like the obvious implication The media is outraged because a duck quacks like a duck
    - pipes 2y ago

wnc3141 2y ago

criminally overvalued is an interesting term to explore. I wonder when after all this shakes out in the courts, how much of his oligarchal access to government will be seen as illegal, therefore undermining any stock premium Tesla has from that access to government.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Musk owns 42% of the $350B SpaceX, so he would still be the 6th richest person in the world(tied with Sergey bring) if TSLA and all his other investments went to $0.

rokoono 2y ago
[dead]

godelski 2y ago

> How much of it is tied up to a criminally overvalued Tesla stock though? I don't know that, but I can say that he has an absurd amount liquidated. - Dec 15 2022: Sells 22m shares for $3.6bn https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/investing/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale/index.html - Nov 4-8 2022: Sells 19.5m shares for $4bn https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-climate-and-environment-9ab47198753931c7bea91f6e678f1d17 - Feb 2022: Elon has $11bn tax bill from a $23bn taxable income. Article discusses 2 sells https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html - This article says notes $1.52 billion between 2014-2018 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/20/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-over-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year.html So I would assume he has north of $30bn outside Tesla. Which that alone would make him near top 60 on Forbes's Billionaire list. I believe we can agree that this sum of money falls into the category of "never will be poor." Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money. Remember, we're talking about a sum of money where you could easily line up $100 bills all the way across California, from top to bottom[0]. [0] A bill is 155.956mm x 66.294mm (0.155956m x 0.066294m) and CA's dimensions are 400km x 1220km. So 1220000 / 0.066294 = 18.403e6. You need ~$18.4m to do this with singles, $368.01 with $20's, and $1.84bn with $100's. So $30bn is 16 rows (2.5 meters wide) and $391bn (current Forbes value) is 212.5 rows, or 33 meters wide. A bill is 0.11mm thick if you want to calculate height. Maybe someone can come up with another fun visualization, because this one is well beyond imaginable already.

jodrellblank 2y ago
> “Where it is nearly (if not entirely) impossible to spend such sums of money.” I’ve been looking at the idea of a tunnel between the UK and Ireland. Recent rough estimates were €15Bn and that probably didn’t include high speed trains on each side. A new city, a 500km/h maglev line, paying spacex to build a moon base, launching a billion dollar prize fund for room temperature superconductor or graphene space elevator material research, paying a geoengineering project like military jets releasing reflective vapour into the upper atmosphere (last time I saw that price estimate was 2Bn and that was years ago), building a vanity vehicle project from scratch like reigniting the ocean going Ekranoplans or the Fairey Rotodyne, building the Elon Musk solar power plants in Texas to “unleash American energy“ with his name on it… You would not casually spend that much on Lamborghinis and mansions in the Hollywood Hills, but if you wanted to do audacious or philanthropic things or get your name on mega-projects there are many countries with billion dollar projects one could fund. $30Bn would pay the city of Los Angeles budget for 2-3 years. $30Bn he could give every American $90.

WheatMillington 2y ago

I've been hearing about the inevitable decline of Tesla for about 10 years now.

llamaimperative 2y ago
For how many of those did BYD exist in western markets and for how many was the Tesla brand toxic to the demographics that care about climate? New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.
TomK32 2y ago
It has started long ago with the Cybertruck release delayed by two years and then not many wanted to buy it. The new roadster was originally announced for 2020, might come this year. The groundbreaking of Gigafactory Mexico has been delayed and I doubt the recent tariff madness helps. Level 5 FSD has been promised to be achieved in three years, that was 2013. With sales tanking, I do wonder if the $1 billion expected revenue in CO2-pooling[1] (from EU competition alone) will be at risk or if the EU can come up with some tariff in response to Trump's new attempt of tariffs on EU products. Also, after two failed attempts to get this massive compensation package as CEO approved by a court, will he try and fail again? Now that he's a squatter in some D.C. government building? [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stellantis-toyota-ford-mazda-subaru-plan-pool-co2-emissions-with-tesla-2025-01-07/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/stella...
malthaus 2y ago
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Most of that was from Republican climate change deniers trying to make a culture war out of EVs. Musk switching sides on that seems a good time to re-evaluate who is making the predictions now and why.
- cloverich 2y ago

theGnuMe 2y ago

So there is a plan here. One is to sue or stop the SEC. Tesla is a meme coin at this point. However there are these pesky shareholders to deal with.

handsclean 2y ago

Nobody likes the guy, but I think a lot of people let their distaste for a person blind them to their strategy. Since Musk’s early days co-founding PayPal, his MO has been to start with a small fortune, bet it on a fortune 10x that, and repeat, abandoning each project after it serves its purpose. It’s clear at this point that his next step has been political power since at least the Twitter purchase, and that step just had its Tesla takeoff moment. I think there’s basically no chance he fails to leverage that into an even greater fortune than everything that came before, even while letting Tesla and the rest run on autopilot. Fading global Tesla sales are consistent with this: it’s what happens when you go all in on one party in one nation, and Musk has always been willing to bet big on his next move. Also, I doubt it’ll last. Remember also that Trump is about to die and Musk is 53. What fortune is 10x greater than Musk’s current massive wealth and political power? The office of super-President that he’s now suddenly so engaged in helping create “for Trump”.

akmarinov 2y ago

Still plenty - just look at your Zuckerbergs, Andressens, Horrowitzes, Soros, Gates, etc

londons_explore 2y ago

> Tesla could go to zero and he'd still be a fabulously wealthy man, I suspect he has so many huge loans leveraged on that tesla stock that if Tesla went to zero, he'd be at bankruptcy court...

panick21_ 2y ago
Given that he owns a huge part of SpaceX that is also valued at many billions, that's highly unlikely.

TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago

you think it's bad now... Wait till tesla starts selling optimus at scale and SpaceX starts controlling strategically valuable resources in LEO by space mining. Elon's not the one you need to worry about, it's his son X.