#investing #elonmusk #uspolitics
Fatal mistake. There will be an inevitable falling out of the Trump / Musk marriage of convenience. Nobody can stand next to Trump without getting a knife in the back.
My investment advice: short #TSLA. Everything Trump touches turns to shit.
@CheapPontoon keep in mind that the reason Musk is supporting Trump is in part because he's already had a knife in the back.
The whole Trump thing is based on bringing down a system that people feel has betrayed them. It really is about tearing down, not building up. And so at this point Musk has felt so spurned by the status quo that he might as well join in the table flipping.
So inevitable falling out isn't much of a threat for him. Yeah, Trump's going to screw him over, and I bet he knows that very well, but the powers that be are already screwing him over, so he might as well try to be screwed over by someone different in case it leads to something better down the road.
Trump is a system of a failed system, not a cause. It was entirely foreseeable. We should have, and we should, focus on fixing the system so that people don't resort to folks like Trump.
@HeavenlyPossum @CheapPontoon @volkris
Agree with much of what is said in this thread. The question is why Elon thinks the system is evil/broken because it sometimes creates some obstacles. In the end he he has created en enormous wealth within this system. As a very public CEO it would be wishful thinking to expect everyone will worship you. His current actions alienates a great part of his loyal supporters through a decade++.
Musk hasn’t created anything. He has captured revenue streams, but he does not actually make anything.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @CheapPontoon Any way you look at it, both SpaceX and Tesla was high risk companies. Both are now industry leading, which are both impressing and frightening at the same time,
And Musk built neither of them. He simply owns them.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @CheapPontoon This is abvoiusly not true. He did not found Tesla, but the achievement of making an EV maker a success is quite astonishing. Every new car manufacturer for almost 100 years have failed before that.
He did not make anything. He used wealth inherited from an apartheid emerald mine to purchase control of the labor of other people, lobby for regulatory capture, and con investors via an inflationary asset bubble. Musk has never built anything or usefully labored in his life.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @CheapPontoon This is an outright lie. Please stop it. It feeds the disinformation machine.
I have said nothing but the truth.
@HeavenlyPossum @CheapPontoon @dagb @volkris I think the disagreement is from the idea that ‘putting money into’ is equivalent to ‘actually making something’. Musk did NOT make anything, he put money in to stuff, and engineers made things.
Take SpaceX, which actually did some revolutionary engineering. Musk started it to try and live on mars. He’s a billionaire dipshit. It’s successful because he’s kept far the fuck away from ‘making things.’
@dagb @volkris @True_Heresy @CheapPontoon
Yes—owning money is not useful labor and it does not contribute to production. Musk owns in precisely the same way a feudal lord owned a manor and the labor of the serfs who worked it, and he contributes to production in precisely the same way as a feudal lord did: not at all.
@True_Heresy I mean the history shows that's factually incorrect. @HeavenlyPossum @CheapPontoon @dagb
@volkris @HeavenlyPossum @CheapPontoon @dagb Great point. Apart from the part where what I said were literally facts from history.
@dagb @True_Heresy @volkris @CheapPontoon
Imagine thinking that Elon Musk is capable of building anything but an asset bubble.
@HeavenlyPossum @dagb @volkris @CheapPontoon I actually empathise. I used to think he was doing cool stuff and didn’t get the wider context. I got caught up in the “science is so fucking cool, IRL Iron Man” stuff. But then I read more widely.
Some of the people, especially at SpaceX, are doing amazing work imo. But Musk is toxic.
The exploitation of credulous investors & government contracts would be funny if not so hugely dangerous & damaging.
@HeavenlyPossum I mean, the factual record shows that he did.
Imagine knowing history.
@True_Heresy @CheapPontoon @volkris @dagb
The factual record shows that Musk inherited apartheid emerald wealth which he used to purchase stakes in other people’s lucrative endeavors and, later, a series of scams, parasitic government contracts, asset bubbles, and regulatory capture.
@HeavenlyPossum so if you think about it none of that has anything to do with anything I said.
@dagb @CheapPontoon @True_Heresy @volkris
I thought about it and it turns out I’m still right
@True_Heresy @volkris @CheapPontoon @dagb
In the sense that Musk has literally not once in his life done anything productive or useful. Ownership is not productive.
@True_Heresy you are literally describing Musk making things.
What you describe is Musk making the environments that support those engineers. That's not nothing! Without workshops and funding and management the best engineers in the world are completely wasted.
It sounds like you really don't appreciate how the real world works when it comes to going from engineering talent to actual results.
The most capable machinist ever to have lived will get nothing done if he doesn't have tooling to operate. And that's what capitalism is all about, investing the resources to get the machinist what he needs.
@True_Heresy @volkris @CheapPontoon @dagb
Musk doesn’t make things. He doesn’t make workshops, he doesn’t make environments, he doesn’t make tooling, he doesn’t make management. He doesn’t even make money; he simply owns a coercive right to revenue streams generated by the labor of others.
@volkris @HeavenlyPossum @CheapPontoon @dagb The level of assumption it takes to tell a stranger they ‘don’t know what the real world is like in terms of engineering’ is amazing.
I understand you believe talent and skill can’t exist or have results without capitalists, but that’s simply untrue. Also most of the money came from taxpayers via government contracts.
But, I have no intention of arguing with assumptive strangers, so good luck to you.
@True_Heresy Hi. Welcome to reality.
Yes, he engaged in a lot of performative theater. What do you imagine he was doing, welding car frames? Wiring cars? He wasn’t actually performing labor. He’s not qualified or trained as an engineer, or a programmer, or a designer, or a tradesman. Every actual professional who has worked with him and reported about it has described him as a dilettante with outlandish and impractical ideas that have to be translated into something plausibly useful by people who actually know what they’re doing.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @dagb @CheapPontoon
All billionaires are frauds, i.e. haven't done anything to deserve their wealth (who could?). But Musk is a con-man among con-men. Everything about him is fake.
This isn't even up for debate. There's documented evidence for everything; including his illegal immigration to the US, his fake degrees, etc.
@mathew1927 @dagb @volkris @CheapPontoon
Our Norwegian friend is so desperately obsequious to Musk that he blocked me for noting these obvious facts.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @dagb @CheapPontoon I’ve heard this many times “In June 2009, Tesla was approved to receive $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the United States Department of Energy. The funding, part of the $8 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, supported the engineering and production of the Model S sedan, as well as the development of commercial powertrain technology. Tesla repaid >>
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @dagb @CheapPontoon >> the loan in May 2013, with $12 million in interest. (Wikipedia)” SpaceX, NASA and United States Armed Forces have a symbiotic relationship, bounded together by governmental contracts. (Wikipedia) What I know about these firms’ labor relations is that they have workers committed to the projects yet extremely exploited. For the safety of the planet, increasing worker governance is indicated.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @dagb @CheapPontoon It’s clear to me the US, and as a result, the world are suffering from the oligarchic whims of underregulated capitalism/industrialization, not the least those hoarders of common wealth who crave political power. Now appears an interesting opportunity to negotiate when so many workers and progressive international agencies have honed their skills in analysis, strategy and struggle. #wearethe99percent
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @dagb @CheapPontoon The king of performative theatre is Boris Johnson. Even his name is a performance, because Boris sounds more working-class than Alexander. He is rather famous for all the times he has appeared on televised events in his hi-vis and hard hat.
@HeavenlyPossum @volkris @CheapPontoon Ok, until he bought Twitter, he used to sleep in the factory during multiple existential crisis for Tesla. This more than most other CEO of any manufacturer would do.
As a side note I do think attacks on persons that are not factually correct is showing an agenda. There is already too much of that these days.
@CheapPontoon @volkris
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man. He controls 2/3 of the satellites in orbit. He casually purchased one of the world’s most important social media networks. He extracts vast wealth from the workers he controls and from the publics of states with which he has signed parasitic service contracts. He violates immigration, labor, drug, and electoral laws without consequence.
The idea that “Musk has felt…spurned by the status quo” is so trivially absurd that it’s hard to believe you’re doing anything but churning out low-rent propaganda for some employer. Who would seriously and unironically believe this? The entire global status quo exists to service him and his reactionary preferences.