All that stuff is fine.
It’s just not worth antlywhere near a trillion dollar net worth.
My 2 cents. 
Personal wealth as a reflection of the valuation of your companies is tied both to your ability to execute and the faith that institutional investors and Retail investors place in you based on your track record Plus what the future Trends are plus what businesses you are in. It is what the market says it is, personal wealth wise for those guys.
There’s plenty of really smart guys who have great vision who hold a greater percentage of the company stock in their own or their extended families Holdings yet whose net worths are orders of magnitude lower for the reason they’re in businesses that don’t create that kind of Revenue and or investment attraction.
The Walton family now that there are a couple Generations deep past the founder have diluted their Holdings across Generations but if you look at it as a whole, they’re still not anywhere close to Musk or Larry Ellison or Page and Brin etc etc and it’s because they’re in a really low margin business that is pretty mature that is pretty well finished with penetration.
Money makes money. You can be the best paperclip company that ever existed but no one gives a s***.
lol, and ours isn’t?
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Not saying it isn’t. But we aren’t the same as the rest of the world, neither is China. Difference between leaders and followers. And they aren’t short term temporsry reactions.
American exceptionalism went the way of the Macarena. And if the US doesn’t want to become Rome, Part Deux, we need to adjust.
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Elon is perhaps the best self promoter/capital raiser I’ve ever seen. He is also tremendously good at enriching himself. He has become tremendously wealthy because investors continually capitalize his future promises.
The “mountains of evidence” IMO show that Musk can attract capital and get extraordinarily ambitious projects built. I don’t dispute that. I was an investor. But mountains of accomplishments aren’t the same as mountains of profits.
I guess this is a more succinct take as an investor: has he shown that these projects can produce enough earnings to justify their valuations? Solar Roof, Boring, Neuralink, Cybertruck, FSD, robotaxis and Optimus certainly don’t constitute mountains of earnings at this point. Tesla’s battery storage businesses make real money, and SpaceX esp Starlink may be his strongest business - but Tesla shareholders don’t own SpaceX. And if the best that Tesla can do is battery storage and making money on batteries, it can’t justify the valuation. So then its speculation on some cool ideas but it seems like people could do better things with their money.
You turned it into disliking his personality..I’m assessing his judgment and credibility. When I watch him exaggerate, reason badly or behave opportunistically on political and “free speech” issues I understand, it affects how much trust I place in what he tells investors about subjects that are harder to independently evaluate. Me and millions of other people across the world. MDS is a political way to dismiss arguments, but regardless, yeah, being perhaps the most hated man on the planet is not good for business lol. And whereas once his face being so intertwined with Tesla was a reason to invest, now I see it as a negative
You may disagree with my political assessment of him, and that may be why you see it as ‘MDS’. And that’s fine, we don’t need to agree. Just giving my take.
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Been listening to some of Naval War College professor Sarah Paine’s lectures and interviews. She tends to see the world through maritime and continental lens. Its pretty interesting look at foreign policy and trade.
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This is all theoretically true but I do think for the time being valuations have detached from traditional methodology. In that Graham voting machine vs weighing machine sort of the way the former seems to have vanquished the latter in a way that you tend to see in long term speculative booms. The market heals itself over the long haul so I do think the pendulum will swing back towards a value stock pickers market when the tides go out. But Elon’s entire career as a public facing front man has been in this ZIRP environment and bc of that I do think the perception of the value of his companies has far outdistanced what a more rational modeling of known facts, risk factors and likelihood of realizing the grandiose promises would lead to.
But much of this is credit to him both in terms of vision but also being perhaps the greatest business storyteller and confidence man of all time. I truly do believe that is his greatest genius of all. Just an astoundingly brilliant promoter. He’s tech Don King in some ways.
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Its a good take. The personality and the MDS was more of a global view of this criticism and not individual though I didn’t pull that apart well enough to have that understood well so my bad
I just don’t know if we will ever be out of this environment. I read a long article last night making a very cogent case that we will never get out of this type of environment and the only way that we can even think to approach a normal economic environment again without some kind of very short violent disruption is turning to how Japan has done it over the last 50 years, which is start changing the rules so that all of the money soaked up into risk vehicles is by decree rerouted into government debt. Obviously that affects economic growth negatively so it’s this constant Push Pull between Debt Service and the need for growth to get out of this situation and we’re to the point where they may have to completely rethink their strategy.
Having read about this now for decades I thought one interesting take on it about 15 years ago was whoever devalues first may win or whowever devalues last may win but anyone in the middle surely will not
Perhaps you are right. Generally speaking, I remain a believer in business cycles and a pendulum effect from everything from political climates to fiscal policy regimes to preferred investment/speculative strategies. Regardless of how durable these nosebleed valuations prove to be my underlying point remains that the sky high valuations are more so a byproduct of man matching up with the moment rather than exemplifying the more traditional understanding of value which goes back centuries.
I also don’t believe that we are too late fiscally. It just requires the courage to lead us through a tough period of transition, an understanding that it may cause folks to be voted out of power by an impatient populace and resignation to the fact that the snap back may put us back on the unsustainable track.
Some examples: a pivot to Taiwan’s HC system would provide HC for all with an annual savings of 2.5 to 2.8T dollars. A return to an Eisenhower corporate tax regime combined with the closing in offshore corporate tax loopholes would generate another 600-900B annually in revenue. Those two changes alone get you to a 1.3T surplus. Legislate a regime of two escrow accounts of sorts. 1T per year is mandated for federal debt repayment which is combined with congressional oversight legislation to mold the Fed into more hawkish fiscal policy. The other account is invested and grown to be the emergency fund to throw at economic stimulus measures to address economic headwinds that would most certainly come our way in the midst of this transition. We could cut some defense spending to get that emergency fund up to a half T per year.
Life is about trade offs of course. The HC changes would cause a loss of close to 1M high paying HC administration positions. The Taiwanese method includes encrypted HC cards that brings down administrative cost burdens but would undoubtedly trigger big brother concerns amongst Americans. Getting congressional cooperation would be immensely difficult given the lobby succubus that is K street. There would undoubtedly be a recession from such a dramatic fiscal regime change. Asset classes would of course pull back and perhaps substantially in the near term.
But on the other side you have a thriving middle class, a return to a more stable era in terms of inflationary pressures and a renewed belief amongst hard working Americans that the train has in fact not left the station and that they do in fact own a ticket to prosperity.
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No that’s absolutely correct as far as valuations but we may have crossed a Rubicon where there’s no return Lane
And this is where Wayne and Garth’s dream sequence bee bee boo boo bee bee boo boo comes in (Taiwan HC).
Even the British model could save us half a Trillion annually. I think the entrenchment of big money makes all potential solutions difficult. I just don’t think that we are yet past the point of no return. In theory at least.
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