5 ms·

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

114 points by aanet 4mo ago

FergusArgyll 4mo ago
[flagged]
iknowstuff 4mo ago
[flagged]
- imafish 4mo ago
  You're forgetting all the supervillain stuff.
- russ-curry 4mo ago
  What have the Romans ever done for us?
- kklisura 4mo ago
  Judging by his net worth he hasn’t done anything for us, he did it all for himself
  - apparent 4mo ago
    The reason he has money is because he built products and services that people willingly exchanged their money for.
    - WarmWash 4mo ago
      While true, his wealth is 99% speculative. Elon has a closed box that he has successfully convinced a lot of people that there is a lot of money inside, and sold them small stakes in the contents, and promised year after year for 10+ years that this will be the year he opens it.
      - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
        So the people who lament that he is a trillionaire have nothing to worry about then. It is just paper "wealth" that the market will pull back down to earth
        jjj123 4mo ago
        Even if his 1T is speculative and undeserved he still has extreme power from that wealth. And there’s no indication that the bottom will fall out any time soon, so I think the lamenting is justified.
    - budsniffer952 4mo ago
      Such a boring statement. Many people have built products used by far more people, that have generated far more utility, and accumulated far less personal wealth. These things aren't connected.
      - apparent 4mo ago
        It's possible that the first sentence is true. Open source software comes to mind. However, that doesn't undermine the point that the reason he has money is because he built things other people wanted to buy. The fact that other people chose to forgo monetary rewards for their creations, or gave away their money, is not relevant to the question of whether he provided value to others.
    - selectively 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - happytoexplain 4mo ago
      The most dangerous oversimplification facing the human species.
  - FergusArgyll 4mo ago
    It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
  - mc32 4mo ago
    He has created the second most millionaires out of direct employees behind Microsoft. Many, though not all, of those new millionaires have been blue-collar workers (not office workers), unlike the case for Microsoft produced millionaires. So, from that PoV, he's done good for his employees.
  - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
    How do you figure? Trying to understand and hoping you can walk through your logic
    - kklisura 4mo ago
      Not an native english speaker, but someone "doing something for me" is not (me buying products and services from that someone|selling products and services to me).
      - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
        So your main observation is that he never gave you anything for free. Okay.
- toomuchtodo 4mo ago
  China electrified the auto industry [1] [2] [3], not Tesla (mostly BYD). SpaceX is appreciated for proving that reusable vehicles are possible, which other nation states are building [4]. Musk is the management huckster who slaps his name on it, sells it, and reaps the benefits as opposed to the person grinding creating the actual results and innovation. "It is what it is." [1] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/china-car-exports-jump-73-in-may-as-high-fuel-prices-raise-interest-in-evs https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/china-car-exports-jump-73... [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-global-150000525.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... [4] https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/another-falcon-9-lookalike-joins-chinas-growing-roster-of-rockets/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/another-falcon-9-looka...
  - mrkstu 4mo ago
    This is conveniently forgetting that China used Tesla as a template on how to build out its electric car companies, as it is now using SpaceX as a template to get reusable rockets going...
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
      Actually, there's good evidence that it's the other way around. According to Elon, designing a car factory is 1000X harder than designing a car. According to Elon, the initial model 3 production was a big mess that almost bankrupted the company. How did they turn this around? By building a car factory in China using local knowledge, then building an duplicate of that factory in Germany, and then building a factory in Texas that incorporated knowledge learned.
      - iknowstuff 4mo ago
        sorry bud but you're misinformed and reaching for conclusions model 3 was successful and profitable long before shanghai started churning out model Ys years later
- throw0101c 4mo ago
  > I know right! Except for […] You mean like Krugman recognizes in this paragraph: > Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business. Krugman's hypothesis is in the very next paragraph: > But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius. followed by: > We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme. > Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.
  - volkk 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Flashtoo 4mo ago
      > It's literally the free market at work--it's really simple, if you don't believe in whatever he says, don't speculate! This, too, is actually addressed in the article - the whole point is that you're being forced to participate/speculate through this rapid inclusion in indices and mutual funds, because he's had the indices change the rules for him. So no, it's not that simple.
      - volkk 4mo ago
        The indexes/mutual funds have a 1 year limit. The company would've been introduced into them anyway. You think SpaceX is going to collapse within a year? They fast forwarded the inevitable. But I do conceded that is shady to do. But to me, that seems to be the _actual_ main complaint of the article. Everything else is "i don't really like Elon Musk and don't believe in his vision"
- teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
  TFA acknowledges this. Did you only read the title?
  - iknowstuff 4mo ago
    I think it wildly undersells/dismisses actual achievements delivered to form a narrative
- happytoexplain 4mo ago
  Don't underestimate the harm of being a hyper-rich asshole with government friends. It arguably outweighs all that even on pragmatic terms. Also, the article explicitly answers your sarcasm.
- bjtitus 4mo ago
  > internet available from every place on the globe I keep hearing this refrain that Starlink is going to connect everyone. LTE already covers 93% of the population globally [1]. There are obviously dead spots but I really don't see the economic case for Starlink coverage. I frequently travel with a mini and I appreciate the near certainty of connection but it seems like a luxury item. The vast majority of the time cell connection is fine. I suppose Starlink could eat all the telcos but it seems like they aren't too far behind and this connectivity will be commoditized. [1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-mobile-network-coverage/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25...
  - readthenotes1 4mo ago
    [flagged]
- tastyface 4mo ago
  Well, he also killed several hundred thousand people (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hun...) and started some race riots (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/06/13/musk-s-role-was-instrumental-in-the-belfast-riots-according-to-researchers_6754420_4.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/06/13/m...), but whatever. Bygones for some quick cash.
apparent 4mo ago
> But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.
- focusgroup0 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- TMWNN 4mo ago
  According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times. Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news. Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?
  - tastyface 4mo ago
    Yes, some great things happened in Belfast in response to that post. Boy, isn't it great that the totally centrist Twitter is still relevant. (History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)
    - TMWNN 4mo ago
      I apologize on Twitter's behalf for it no longer obliging in hiding events that go against The Narrative(TM). But, as we've been discussing, Bluesky is always happy to censor as much as you want.
WarmWash 4mo ago
If you listen to Elon speak, and you don't have much technical knowledge, or even maybe have some mild technical knowledge, Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it. He can very non-nonchalantly rattle off a plan to pull off the impossible like it's no big deal. And he does have some significant achievements under his belt, but quite a bit easier things than what he promises (and promised, often a decade ago) ahead. I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.
- jordanb 4mo ago
  It's funny he's only able to do that because he has so little real technical understanding. A real engineer wouldn't be so flippant.
  - tristanj 4mo ago
    > [Elon] has so little real technical understanding This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870
    - bigyabai 4mo ago
      Your response is also a common trope. What has Elon actually invented? What code did Elon write on-par with Carmack? We can judge him by technical merits very easily. But if you hold him to the standards of Carmack or Feynman, Elon's accomplishments are entirely benign.
      - tristanj 4mo ago
        The query in question is "Elon little real technical understanding", which is demonstrably false. Responding to that with the logical fallacy of Moving the Goalposts does not address it.
focusgroup0 4mo ago
guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop and whose career amounted to taking potshots from a paper calling one of the greatest capital allocators of all time a fraud https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
- throw0101c 4mo ago
  > guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop 1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time. 2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_bpea_krugman_dominquez_rogoff.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b... 3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC). 4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct: * https://archive.ph/DUDEw https://archive.ph/DUDEw * https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2... There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
  - starik36 4mo ago
    You should probably read the snopes article, because nowhere in it does it say that it was a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla. You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.
    - throw0101c 4mo ago
      The Snopes article has him saying, about the article, "I was clearly trying to be provocative…". I would interpret that as being humorously contrarian. He actually revisited the 1998 article in a 2023 NYT column: * https://archive.ph/3fidX https://archive.ph/3fidX * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... The productivity numbers show he wasn't as wrong, economically, as folks try to make him out to be, which point (4) goes into. The research on computers and productivity goes back decades: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox * https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-paradox-what-do-computers-do-to-productivity/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
goldenshale 4mo ago
I used to respect Krugman, but as time has gone on he seems like yet another New York Times style leftist monkey just whining about people they have disagreements with. Pushing the frontiers of science and technology is an unknowable endeavor for which accurate predictions can never be made unless they are not really pushing the limits. It's attitudes like this which restrict us from actually doing real R&D, and instead focusing on quarterly profits and simple stories that nincompoops can understand. Has he not seen how Tesla transformed the global perspective on EVs? Has he not driven in one in FSD mode? Has he not seen the constant launches and innovation happening at SpaceX, or the XAI leap from nothing to having hyperscaler class datacenters and near frontier models. Sure, they haven't gotten to the lead yet, but jesus christ, what's Krugman bringing into the world from zero. The world would be a far better place with 1,000 brilliant kids taking their inspiration from Musk than from taking this pessimistic, whining NYT perspective on science and technology.
- BoggleOhYeah 4mo ago
  “Hey kids. Morality doesn't exist as long as you make enough people money.” You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.
  - mrkstu 4mo ago
    Its hilarious that the left, the home of the Weathermen, masked Antifa terrorists, assassins cheered by their base, studiously ignoring rape by favored groups, and a list I could continue for paragraphs, so weakly grasps for morality as some kind of new Puritans. The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother. Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left. Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk? Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion.. Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.
mc32 4mo ago
You have to take Krugman with a big grain of salt. It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.
- throw0101c 4mo ago
  > It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. He was never in a policy position (perhaps one year under Feldstein in Reagan's CEA?). In a 2011 paper examining talking head / pundit prediction accuracies, Krugman came out on as most accurate: * https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accuracy-of-forecasts-in-the-political-media.pdf https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...
CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
Krugman's brushing off genuine engineering wins here. SpaceX got space launch costs down to unheard of levels and built Starlink. Tesla built and scaled EVs at a time when no one else was willing to really try. Musk has a habit of overpromising, but there is real output that we can measure as well. I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.
maxdo 4mo ago
He revolutionized car and rocket industry , internet industry , military industry in a very dramatic obvious way. Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Yeah they do deliver to you goods from China and help you to tend hardware with some decent soft on it . You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .
- zaat 4mo ago
  You can type in whatever sequence of keys you want, but Amazon preety much created and shaped that Cloud thing, if you ever heard of it. And that's just one of their side-projects. There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  > Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?
- mamonster 4mo ago
  >internet industry , military industry This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century. I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.
- myvoiceismypass 4mo ago
  AWS powers a significant portion of the websites in the world
bix6 4mo ago
It’s hard to imagine it all crashing down for him tbh. He has so many ways to conjure money and his mafia has immense resources. Why people love him so much I will never understand.
- tim333 4mo ago
  The tech is kind of cool - cars that do 0-60 in ~2 seconds, reusable rockets etc. And back to trying to make cool things. I was around during the Space Shuttle era when it seemed things had been reduced to stuff that sort of worked and cost 5x what it should due to all the companies and politicians wanting their profits. It was a bit depressing.
circadian 4mo ago
A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator. I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed? It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are. Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.
CodingJeebus 4mo ago
The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output. Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.
- tim333 4mo ago
  That's not quite right. TAM is the total addressable market so if SpaceX's share of that is 10% in means they'd have to give SpaceX $2.85K every year forever. To sane wash things a bit, the assumption, I guess, is AI will surpass human level and so increase world GDP.
Glyptodon 4mo ago
Musk is kind of fascinating. On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore. Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla... ...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it. For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines. ...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point. Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst. Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  "In this world some people born are like keys that move the world and exist having no connection to the social heirarchy established by man." - Kentaro Miura I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs. They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.
- Zigurd 4mo ago
ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
Enron Musk.
oska 4mo ago
Here was my parsing of the submission title : > With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX Yes, true, so why was it flagged ? > (paulkrugman.substack.com) Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).
albatross79 4mo ago
His innovation has been to show that you don't need to make a product that works or makes sense. You just need to make products that get oceans of fools excited and get 30% of the way there. By that point you've locked in their childish fantasies and their money comes with it. Institutional money follows and you're on your way to being the richest man in the world. The tech product fetishism that the iPhone brought about has enabled a lot of it. A lot of people are still looking for the high that a new phone used to bring.
- Zigurd 4mo ago
  You do need to put in the effort to turn the pool of potential fools into cult followers. Elon had a head start on creating a cult. He turned the Tesla social media campaign into a cult following. Credit where credit is due.

114 points by aanet 4mo ago

FergusArgyll 4mo ago

[flagged]

iknowstuff 4mo ago

[flagged]

imafish 4mo ago
You're forgetting all the supervillain stuff.
russ-curry 4mo ago
What have the Romans ever done for us?
kklisura 4mo ago
Judging by his net worth he hasn’t done anything for us, he did it all for himself
- apparent 4mo ago
  The reason he has money is because he built products and services that people willingly exchanged their money for.
  - WarmWash 4mo ago
    While true, his wealth is 99% speculative. Elon has a closed box that he has successfully convinced a lot of people that there is a lot of money inside, and sold them small stakes in the contents, and promised year after year for 10+ years that this will be the year he opens it.
    - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
      So the people who lament that he is a trillionaire have nothing to worry about then. It is just paper "wealth" that the market will pull back down to earth
      - jjj123 4mo ago
        Even if his 1T is speculative and undeserved he still has extreme power from that wealth. And there’s no indication that the bottom will fall out any time soon, so I think the lamenting is justified.
  - budsniffer952 4mo ago
    Such a boring statement. Many people have built products used by far more people, that have generated far more utility, and accumulated far less personal wealth. These things aren't connected.
    - apparent 4mo ago
      It's possible that the first sentence is true. Open source software comes to mind. However, that doesn't undermine the point that the reason he has money is because he built things other people wanted to buy. The fact that other people chose to forgo monetary rewards for their creations, or gave away their money, is not relevant to the question of whether he provided value to others.
  - selectively 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - happytoexplain 4mo ago
    The most dangerous oversimplification facing the human species.
- FergusArgyll 4mo ago
  It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
- mc32 4mo ago
  He has created the second most millionaires out of direct employees behind Microsoft. Many, though not all, of those new millionaires have been blue-collar workers (not office workers), unlike the case for Microsoft produced millionaires. So, from that PoV, he's done good for his employees.
- CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
  How do you figure? Trying to understand and hoping you can walk through your logic
  - kklisura 4mo ago
    Not an native english speaker, but someone "doing something for me" is not (me buying products and services from that someone|selling products and services to me).
    - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
      So your main observation is that he never gave you anything for free. Okay.
toomuchtodo 4mo ago
China electrified the auto industry [1] [2] [3], not Tesla (mostly BYD). SpaceX is appreciated for proving that reusable vehicles are possible, which other nation states are building [4]. Musk is the management huckster who slaps his name on it, sells it, and reaps the benefits as opposed to the person grinding creating the actual results and innovation. "It is what it is." [1] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/china-car-exports-jump-73-in-may-as-high-fuel-prices-raise-interest-in-evs https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/china-car-exports-jump-73... [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-global-150000525.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... [4] https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/another-falcon-9-lookalike-joins-chinas-growing-roster-of-rockets/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/another-falcon-9-looka...
- mrkstu 4mo ago
  This is conveniently forgetting that China used Tesla as a template on how to build out its electric car companies, as it is now using SpaceX as a template to get reusable rockets going...
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
    Actually, there's good evidence that it's the other way around. According to Elon, designing a car factory is 1000X harder than designing a car. According to Elon, the initial model 3 production was a big mess that almost bankrupted the company. How did they turn this around? By building a car factory in China using local knowledge, then building an duplicate of that factory in Germany, and then building a factory in Texas that incorporated knowledge learned.
    - iknowstuff 4mo ago
      sorry bud but you're misinformed and reaching for conclusions model 3 was successful and profitable long before shanghai started churning out model Ys years later
throw0101c 4mo ago
> I know right! Except for […] You mean like Krugman recognizes in this paragraph: > Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business. Krugman's hypothesis is in the very next paragraph: > But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius. followed by: > We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme. > Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.
- volkk 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Flashtoo 4mo ago
    > It's literally the free market at work--it's really simple, if you don't believe in whatever he says, don't speculate! This, too, is actually addressed in the article - the whole point is that you're being forced to participate/speculate through this rapid inclusion in indices and mutual funds, because he's had the indices change the rules for him. So no, it's not that simple.
    - volkk 4mo ago
      The indexes/mutual funds have a 1 year limit. The company would've been introduced into them anyway. You think SpaceX is going to collapse within a year? They fast forwarded the inevitable. But I do conceded that is shady to do. But to me, that seems to be the _actual_ main complaint of the article. Everything else is "i don't really like Elon Musk and don't believe in his vision"
teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
TFA acknowledges this. Did you only read the title?
- iknowstuff 4mo ago
  I think it wildly undersells/dismisses actual achievements delivered to form a narrative
happytoexplain 4mo ago
Don't underestimate the harm of being a hyper-rich asshole with government friends. It arguably outweighs all that even on pragmatic terms. Also, the article explicitly answers your sarcasm.
bjtitus 4mo ago
> internet available from every place on the globe I keep hearing this refrain that Starlink is going to connect everyone. LTE already covers 93% of the population globally [1]. There are obviously dead spots but I really don't see the economic case for Starlink coverage. I frequently travel with a mini and I appreciate the near certainty of connection but it seems like a luxury item. The vast majority of the time cell connection is fine. I suppose Starlink could eat all the telcos but it seems like they aren't too far behind and this connectivity will be commoditized. [1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25-mobile-network-coverage/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25...
- readthenotes1 4mo ago
  [flagged]
tastyface 4mo ago
Well, he also killed several hundred thousand people (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hundreds-of-thousands-of-people https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hun...) and started some race riots (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/06/13/musk-s-role-was-instrumental-in-the-belfast-riots-according-to-researchers_6754420_4.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/06/13/m...), but whatever. Bygones for some quick cash.

apparent 4mo ago

> But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.

focusgroup0 4mo ago
[flagged]
TMWNN 4mo ago
According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times. Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news. Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?
- tastyface 4mo ago
  Yes, some great things happened in Belfast in response to that post. Boy, isn't it great that the totally centrist Twitter is still relevant. (History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)
  - TMWNN 4mo ago
    I apologize on Twitter's behalf for it no longer obliging in hiding events that go against The Narrative(TM). But, as we've been discussing, Bluesky is always happy to censor as much as you want.

WarmWash 4mo ago

If you listen to Elon speak, and you don't have much technical knowledge, or even maybe have some mild technical knowledge, Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it. He can very non-nonchalantly rattle off a plan to pull off the impossible like it's no big deal. And he does have some significant achievements under his belt, but quite a bit easier things than what he promises (and promised, often a decade ago) ahead. I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.

jordanb 4mo ago
It's funny he's only able to do that because he has so little real technical understanding. A real engineer wouldn't be so flippant.
- tristanj 4mo ago
  > [Elon] has so little real technical understanding This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    Your response is also a common trope. What has Elon actually invented? What code did Elon write on-par with Carmack? We can judge him by technical merits very easily. But if you hold him to the standards of Carmack or Feynman, Elon's accomplishments are entirely benign.
    - tristanj 4mo ago
      The query in question is "Elon little real technical understanding", which is demonstrably false. Responding to that with the logical fallacy of Moving the Goalposts does not address it.

focusgroup0 4mo ago

guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop and whose career amounted to taking potshots from a paper calling one of the greatest capital allocators of all time a fraud https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

throw0101c 4mo ago
> guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop 1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time. 2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_bpea_krugman_dominquez_rogoff.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b... 3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC). 4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct: * https://archive.ph/DUDEw https://archive.ph/DUDEw * https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2... There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
- starik36 4mo ago
  You should probably read the snopes article, because nowhere in it does it say that it was a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla. You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.
  - throw0101c 4mo ago
    The Snopes article has him saying, about the article, "I was clearly trying to be provocative…". I would interpret that as being humorously contrarian. He actually revisited the 1998 article in a 2023 NYT column: * https://archive.ph/3fidX https://archive.ph/3fidX * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... The productivity numbers show he wasn't as wrong, economically, as folks try to make him out to be, which point (4) goes into. The research on computers and productivity goes back decades: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox * https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-paradox-what-do-computers-do-to-productivity/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

goldenshale 4mo ago

I used to respect Krugman, but as time has gone on he seems like yet another New York Times style leftist monkey just whining about people they have disagreements with. Pushing the frontiers of science and technology is an unknowable endeavor for which accurate predictions can never be made unless they are not really pushing the limits. It's attitudes like this which restrict us from actually doing real R&D, and instead focusing on quarterly profits and simple stories that nincompoops can understand. Has he not seen how Tesla transformed the global perspective on EVs? Has he not driven in one in FSD mode? Has he not seen the constant launches and innovation happening at SpaceX, or the XAI leap from nothing to having hyperscaler class datacenters and near frontier models. Sure, they haven't gotten to the lead yet, but jesus christ, what's Krugman bringing into the world from zero. The world would be a far better place with 1,000 brilliant kids taking their inspiration from Musk than from taking this pessimistic, whining NYT perspective on science and technology.

BoggleOhYeah 4mo ago
“Hey kids. Morality doesn't exist as long as you make enough people money.” You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.
- mrkstu 4mo ago
  Its hilarious that the left, the home of the Weathermen, masked Antifa terrorists, assassins cheered by their base, studiously ignoring rape by favored groups, and a list I could continue for paragraphs, so weakly grasps for morality as some kind of new Puritans. The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother. Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left. Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk? Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion.. Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.

mc32 4mo ago

You have to take Krugman with a big grain of salt. It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.

throw0101c 4mo ago
> It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. He was never in a policy position (perhaps one year under Feldstein in Reagan's CEA?). In a 2011 paper examining talking head / pundit prediction accuracies, Krugman came out on as most accurate: * https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accuracy-of-forecasts-in-the-political-media.pdf https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...

CGMthrowaway 4mo ago

Krugman's brushing off genuine engineering wins here. SpaceX got space launch costs down to unheard of levels and built Starlink. Tesla built and scaled EVs at a time when no one else was willing to really try. Musk has a habit of overpromising, but there is real output that we can measure as well. I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.

maxdo 4mo ago

He revolutionized car and rocket industry , internet industry , military industry in a very dramatic obvious way. Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Yeah they do deliver to you goods from China and help you to tend hardware with some decent soft on it . You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .

zaat 4mo ago
You can type in whatever sequence of keys you want, but Amazon preety much created and shaped that Cloud thing, if you ever heard of it. And that's just one of their side-projects. There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.
bigyabai 4mo ago
> Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?
mamonster 4mo ago
>internet industry , military industry This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century. I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.
myvoiceismypass 4mo ago
AWS powers a significant portion of the websites in the world

bix6 4mo ago

It’s hard to imagine it all crashing down for him tbh. He has so many ways to conjure money and his mafia has immense resources. Why people love him so much I will never understand.

tim333 4mo ago
The tech is kind of cool - cars that do 0-60 in ~2 seconds, reusable rockets etc. And back to trying to make cool things. I was around during the Space Shuttle era when it seemed things had been reduced to stuff that sort of worked and cost 5x what it should due to all the companies and politicians wanting their profits. It was a bit depressing.

circadian 4mo ago

A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator. I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed? It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are. Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.

CodingJeebus 4mo ago

The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output. Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.

tim333 4mo ago
That's not quite right. TAM is the total addressable market so if SpaceX's share of that is 10% in means they'd have to give SpaceX $2.85K every year forever. To sane wash things a bit, the assumption, I guess, is AI will surpass human level and so increase world GDP.

Glyptodon 4mo ago

Musk is kind of fascinating. On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore. Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla... ...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it. For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines. ...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point. Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst. Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.

bigyabai 4mo ago
"In this world some people born are like keys that move the world and exist having no connection to the social heirarchy established by man." - Kentaro Miura I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs. They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.
Zigurd 4mo ago

ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago

Enron Musk.

oska 4mo ago

Here was my parsing of the submission title : > With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX Yes, true, so why was it flagged ? > (paulkrugman.substack.com) Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

albatross79 4mo ago

His innovation has been to show that you don't need to make a product that works or makes sense. You just need to make products that get oceans of fools excited and get 30% of the way there. By that point you've locked in their childish fantasies and their money comes with it. Institutional money follows and you're on your way to being the richest man in the world. The tech product fetishism that the iPhone brought about has enabled a lot of it. A lot of people are still looking for the high that a new phone used to bring.

Zigurd 4mo ago
You do need to put in the effort to turn the pool of potential fools into cult followers. Elon had a head start on creating a cult. He turned the Tesla social media campaign into a cult following. Credit where credit is due.