[HN Gopher] xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B
___________________________________________________________________
xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B
Author : rvz
Score : 757 points
Date : 2025-03-28 21:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jprd wrote:
| This is the kind of crap we learned about when studying the
| "Robber Baron" era in the US public school system. Well, I mean,
| we were _supposed_ to learn it - evidently a lot of folks did
| not.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The Robber Baron era was more an instruction manual.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Inspiration for why to stay in school so that you too could
| become a robber baron. Like all history, learn the previous
| failings so that you can avoid them.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| I don't see any connection to what you're talking about to
| this. You have to explain.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Elon Musk is, essentially, bailing out himself using investor
| money from another company he runs by assigning a very
| highball evaluation to the company he's been destroying.
|
| I don't know how you can get closer to the robber baron ideal
| than being able to distort the market like that.
| silisili wrote:
| In fairness, a recent report put X's value at 44b, though I
| don't have access to FT to read the source material to know
| why.
|
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-
| musk-s-...
| jprd wrote:
| Thank you, that's a very fair point, and I apologize for my
| *-centric" viewpoint and such a short quip. That is not what
| we're aiming for in conversation on this site.
|
| I took a giant shortcut, without providing sources, that was
| meant to indicate that we are in a situation that closely
| resembles the "Gilded Age" or "Robber Baron" era in the
| United States.
|
| I was intending to point towards the actions of individuals
| in the analogous position of those "Robber Barons", in
| particular here, Elon Musk.
|
| This dude used the data from Twitter, fed it to xAI (xAI
| spent lots of CapEx from investment on GPUs). Mix mid-"AI"
| training on such a ridiculously valuable dataset for free ==
| cool models. Cool models + data stream of Doomscrolling ==
| Higher valuation.
|
| This just seems like a "nepo-baby" hit it big on some meme
| coin and bailed out Daddy.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| You're just using buzzwords. How is this analogous to
| robber barons at all?
| buzzert wrote:
| Who is stealing from whom in this scenario?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The SEC would likely have a field day with this, if there was
| still a functional SEC.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Does the SEC have any say over privately held companies?
| fredmingus wrote:
| In short, yes.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/resources-small-businesses/capital-
| raisi...
| Majromax wrote:
| I'm not sure the SEC would obviously have jurisdiction, since
| neither Twitter nor xAI were public companies. The FTC might
| care about such a merger, however, and I suppose minority
| investors in xAI would have some ability to file a lawsuit if
| they think that X was acquired over its fair value.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Xai and Twitter are not in any way competitors. What would
| the FTC do?
| propter_hoc wrote:
| This is a very mistaken impression, the SEC certainly is the
| regulator with jurisdiction over private share trades. The
| onus for reporting is just much higher for public companies.
|
| As a high-profile example, the SEC sued Theranos, a private
| company with only accredited investors, for making
| misrepresentations to their investors.
| https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018-41
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm not sure the SEC would obviously have jurisdiction,
| since neither Twitter nor xAI were public companies.
|
| The Securities and Exchange Commission deals with private
| securities, and also with public securities exchanges and the
| firms listed on them. Public firms have _more_ oversight from
| the SEC, but private securities are not outside of their
| purview.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The SEC DOGE was in today?
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-securities-exchange-comm...
| perihelions wrote:
| Ongoing thread here,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43510093
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Looks like Musk's dogs are out in force and had the thread
| flagged ...
| nerdponx wrote:
| Convenient timing!
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Meanwhile, Elon is taking over the SEC with his DOGE stooges as
| we speak
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Interestingly enough, I see a headline, pretty much in the same
| minute Musk tweeted about the deal:
|
| U.S. JUDGE REJECTS ELON MUSK'S BID TO DISMISS LAWSUIT ALLEGING
| HE DEFRAUDED TWITTER SHAREHOLDERS BY WAITING TOO LONG TO REVEAL
| STAKE
|
| What's going on ?? Because he very obviously is guilty of this.
|
| Here is the article - I get a feeling that this is very much
| related:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musk-must-face-fraud-laws...
| russdill wrote:
| It's either that or an East Texas judge.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| What do you mean, what's going on? The judge rejected Musk's
| motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Meaning that the suit against
| him is going forward. Which is the correct outcome, because
| yeah he's obviously guilty.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Yes, but what's the link between those 2 news ?
|
| They are most probably related, but I don't see how.
| pengaru wrote:
| What ever happened with the TSLA shareholders suing over xAI
| knocking the AI wind out of Tesla's sails?
| darkwater wrote:
| Kudos for the exit, Elon! /s
| adharmad wrote:
| What is the play here? Using money invested in xAI and its
| inflated valuation to bail out the X investors?
| poniko wrote:
| Yes same setup as when Tesla bought Solar city .. one playbook
| he pours out of.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It bails out Elon and means his Tesla shares (borrowed against
| to purchase Twitter) won't be liquidated as Tesla's share price
| continues to decline, using xAI investor funds. He uses hype
| and sentiment (inflating valuations) in the capital markets to
| always stay slightly ahead of consequences.
| rayiner wrote:
| Tesla shares are higher now than they were when he closed on
| Twitter in October 2022.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Heck, TSLA today is higher than on 5 November 2024, less
| than five months ago!
| timeon wrote:
| It is almost the same price.
| tedunangst wrote:
| But lower than on 6 November 2024, less than five months
| ago.
| dmix wrote:
| It's up 49% YOY https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA
| :NASDAQ?window=1Y
|
| This is a bit of a silly game, their stock is very meme-y
| so whenever you set the start of the time range the
| aggregate % can vary heavily.
| henry2023 wrote:
| And it's ~40% lower since the "roman" salute day. Anyone
| can pick random dates.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Maybe he knows something.
| kelnos wrote:
| And dropping. No one can tell the future; it might recover
| before it hits margin-call territory, and it might not.
| nly wrote:
| The company is imploding. BYD is eating their lunch on most
| real metrics except their absurd valuation.
| consteval wrote:
| Sure, but it's becoming increasingly obvious to everyone
| that the American car industry is in major trouble. In a
| decade, I'm confident in saying a lot of American car
| companies will not exist.
|
| We see it in our day-to-day lives. People aren't buying new
| cars. Cars on the road are getting older and older. Views
| of Tesla continue to dwindle. Anything Stellantis is on
| life support. I mean, Chrysler has literally one car. GM is
| clawing for any sort of relevancy. And Ford is only afloat
| because of toxic masculinity. We all know that it's bad in
| the US, and we know outside of the US it's 100x times worse
| for these companies. We also know the US car market as a
| market is getting overshadowed.
|
| It doesn't matter what stupid investors think. We can see
| the writing on the wall. These investors are delusional,
| period.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| Tesla shares are _higher_ than when Twitter was acquired.
| 'Continues to decline' sounds like weasel wording that the
| media likes to use to push a narrative that doesn't exist.
|
| Edit: Comment _flagged_ for pointing out inconvenient facts,
| it 's wild out there
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| _67% of Americans would not consider buying a Tesla, new
| poll says_ - https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-
| would-not-cons... - March 28th, 2025
|
| _Tesla (TSLA) Q1 delivery consensus: 377,000 EVs - worst
| performance in 2 years_ -
| https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/tesla-tsla-q1-delivery-
| consen... - March 28th, 2025
|
| _Tesla is banned from Canada EV rebate program, gov
| freezes suspicous $43 million in rebates_ -
| https://electrek.co/2025/03/25/tesla-banned-canada-ev-
| rebate... - March 25, 2025
|
| _Tesla sales fall by 49% in Europe even as the electric
| vehicle market grows_ - https://apnews.com/article/tesla-
| sales-recall-trump-byd-b6f5... - March 25, 2025
|
| _Tesla's fall from grace may have no equal, says JPMorgan:
| 'We struggle to think of anything analogous' [$120 price
| target]_ - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-fall-grace-
| may-no-18005... - March 13, 2025
|
| _Tesla's stock nosedives -- wiping out $700B in gains
| since Trump's election victory_ -
| https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/business/tesla-stock-drop-
| eras... - March 7, 2025
|
| _Australian Tesla sales plummet as owners rush to distance
| themselves from Elon Musk_ - https://www.theguardian.com/te
| chnology/2025/mar/06/australia... - March 6th, 2025
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/ (1YR)
|
| Facts you don't like aren't "weasel words."
| TMWNN wrote:
| ivewonyoung and raynier are still correct. TSLA today is
| higher than on 5 November 2024, less than five months
| ago.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| That's fine if that is the argument (11/5/2024 vs today)
| vs all the gains since that period lost, I'm not willing
| to argue the point to death, the brand value destruction
| will continue. The fundamentals will catch up to the
| price eventually with enough pressure.
| oskarkk wrote:
| It's true that Tesla shares recently declined, but the
| context is important: during 2022-2024 Tesla shares were
| trading between $100 and $300 (with high volatility), in
| October 2024 they were at $200-$250, then after elections
| they skyrocketed to the all time high of $488 (for no
| fundamental reason), and since then the stock is falling.
| It's $263 right now - after the latest declines the stock
| only returned to the price that's still higher than
| before the elections, and is higher than the 2022-2024
| average (which was already unreasonably high and totally
| disconnected from earnings). So these declines are
| nothing, at least not yet.
| crawsome wrote:
| We've only witnessed two months of this. Imagine four
| years of it.
| knicholes wrote:
| And the whole market is down, not just TSLA.
| immibis wrote:
| FWIW there _was_ a fundamental reason for shares to spike
| after the election: The elected regime was one that is
| very corrupt and self-serving, and was likely to do
| everything in its power to make money flow towards the
| companies it owns.
|
| By now, though, it's seeming more like they're too
| incompetent to do that. They'll probably still do it, but
| they'll crash the whole economy at the same time so the
| money that's flowing to Tesla won't be worth a whole lot.
| But it was a reasonable prediction at the time.
| threeseed wrote:
| It is not unreasonable to assume Tesla shares will continue
| to decline whilst:
|
| a) sales internationally are plummeting at such a rapid
| pace
|
| b) consumer confidence is down with predictions of a
| looming recession
|
| c) the brand continues to be tarnished by the association
| with Musk and Trump
|
| d) auto tariffs will increase the costs of parts and the
| likelihood of reciprocity
| dmurray wrote:
| Why would they continue to decline? If all that
| information is already known, why isn't it priced in and
| why isn't the best estimate of Tesla's price in 6 months
| equal to today's price plus the return of Treasuries?
| mullingitover wrote:
| The consequences of the _known_ mismanagement is priced
| in. The consequences of the _unknown_ mismanagement are
| tbd.
| bloppe wrote:
| Tesla's current P/E ratio is 134. To be a rational Tesla
| investor, you'd have to think it has almost 600% profit
| growth potential to reach the long-term American blue-
| chip average P/E of ~20.
|
| That kind of growth would be difficult for a new entrant,
| but for an incumbent that's been around a while and
| already seeing sales decline, it's a pipe dream. Of
| course, it's not all about cars for Tesla. They're
| betting big on humanoid robots and "full self-driving",
| although they've been stuck at Level-2 self-driving for
| years and the robots, well... Let's just say we don't
| hear much about them for a reason.
|
| Of course, Tesla has never been a company for rational
| investors. I used to hold a lot of Tesla stock back in
| 2017-19 when they had plenty of doubters. I remember
| seeing how Tesla owners would organize themselves grass-
| roots-style to show off their cars and convince others to
| go electric. The company was getting a ton of free
| marketing and had a very devoted customer base. My, how
| things have changed. Now, they have to shut down
| showrooms across the country due to "terrorism".
|
| So where is the upside? Well, protectionism could help
| them in the US market, but they're a global company with
| stagnant sales in the US, so it's hard to see tariffs
| helping more than they'd hurt. And that's pretty much it
| for upside AFAICT.
|
| Happy to hear from a bull that I'm wrong :)
| bloppe wrote:
| You forgot to mention that China, Vietnam, Thailand, and
| Indonesia are all betting big on EV production. China is
| of course the main competition, but it's telling just how
| stiff the competition is getting across the board. BYD is
| currently making more cars than Tesla, with more advanced
| battery technology and comparable build quality, for a
| fraction of the price of any Tesla.
|
| Meanwhile Elon is too busy rage-tweeting and K-holing to
| work on any of the things Tesla promised it would do this
| year, like release a model 2 or something with robots
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The auto tariffs are a present for Elon. Teslas are the
| most American of American cars, and while they do still
| use foreign parts they use the least out of everyone.
|
| On top of that, in the EV category, Tesla is pretty much
| the only one made in the US.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://rivian.com/
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/03/27/trump-auto-tariffs-
| vehicles...
| bloppe wrote:
| Tesla made 50% of its revenue in the US in 2024. It's a
| global company. Trade wars will not be the massive boon
| Tesla investors are hoping for.
|
| Remember that their current P/E ratio is ~134, so the
| stock price already has a _ton_ of growth priced in.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I jump off a building and you see me at the 10th floor,
| I was also 29.4 meters higher 3 seconds ago.
|
| Tesla sales are falling worldwide and losing market share
| angoragoats wrote:
| Not to be pedantic, but you've confused acceleration with
| velocity. How far you've traveled will depend on how long
| you've been falling, and what your starting velocity was.
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| The stock is up more than 18% in the last 18 days, so by
| your analogy you were 29.4 meters _lower_ 3 seconds ago.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Falling from a building isn't the right analogy, it's
| more like falling down a huge flight of stairs. You
| bounce on the way down.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| After the unprecedented move of the President of the
| United States anointing Musk as a made man and member of
| Donalds swamp, all from the White House. In additional
| multiple other highest members of Trump's government went
| on TV and said 'invest in Tesla'. That is not a healthy
| stock surge. It is a pure DC swamp play.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| The absolute state of Orange Reddit
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| What do you mean by this? Do you not agree these events
| happened in an attempt to bring the stock back up? That
| government officials gave stock advice on TV that would
| cost financial advisors their licenses, for the
| benefit/as a favor to Musk (a billionaire), the very
| definition of DC swamp behavior, government officials
| doing illegal/immoral favors for their rich sponsors.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| "Continues to decline" is a cushion for the next sentence
| "downgrade to sell" which cushions you from the ultimate,
| "new marketing leadership with Barron Trump and someone
| named Alien Brainrot".
| labster wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the management team will include Boris
| Badenov as the new DPO
| kypro wrote:
| Still, you have to give it to him, it works, and this has
| allowed him to do some incredible things beyond just hype.
|
| What he's pulled off with xAI more recently is really quite
| incredible. And obviously this isn't first time Elon proved
| he can execute better almost anyone else.
|
| I don't really have opinions on him as a person, but as a an
| entrepreneur you cant flaw him imo. He always finds a way to
| beat the odds.
| belter wrote:
| > What he's pulled off with xAI more recently is really
| quite incredible.
|
| What?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "He's a terrible human, but look at the model benchmarks!"
| We're different people I suppose.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Can you qualify the first part? I haven't met him.
| consteval wrote:
| You don't have to meet someone to know they're awful.
| I've never met Adolf Hitler - but I'm pretty confident
| he's an awful person.
|
| Elon Musk uses his immense wealth to cheat. He's
| infiltrated the government and uses his power to directly
| harm Americans, in order to further enrich himself. In
| addition, almost everyone who has worked for him has
| corroborated that he is an awful boss.
|
| He is also prone to dishonesty. When confronted with
| something that requires accountability, his strategy is
| to protect his lies with newer lies. FSD, the state of
| twitter, DOGE, and on and on. He is so dishonest that
| it's almost always safer to assume he is lying than to
| give the benefit of the doubt.
|
| But, even on a personal level, he struggles to stay
| afloat. He has impregnated multiple woman and is
| practically forming an army of illegitimate children.
| Those who were close to him either speak of him with
| extreme disdain or not at all. The only child he has any
| connection to is used as nothing more than a political
| pawn.
|
| The only reason anyone even thinks he might be okay is
| because he's rich. We tend to have an extreme bias in
| favor of the wealthy, almost akin to a brainwashing. The
| reality is being rich does not correlate with being moral
| or decent. It doesn't correlate with being intelligent
| either, but that's a separate conversation.
| gruez wrote:
| >"He's a terrible human, but look at the model
| benchmarks!"
|
| That's basically the response to deepseek? Aside from a
| few people pearl clutching about "chinese propaganda" or
| whatever, most people praised its efficiency and
| performance on benchmarks. Credit where credit is due.
| Also note that China is an authoritarian regime where
| there's no separation between the state and private
| enterprise. Every company of non-negligible size has a
| CCP committee inside of it.
| MegaButts wrote:
| > What he's pulled off with xAI more recently is really
| quite incredible.
|
| I genuinely have no idea what he's done that's incredible.
| I don't even know what xAI does apart from being a chatbot
| inside of twitter.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Grok was doing well on the LLM leaderboards
| (https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard), until dethroned very
| recently by the latest ChatGPT and Gemini.
| sitkack wrote:
| I think you are mixing up Grok with DeepSeek. Grok managed
| to make a mediocre model using way more resources. xAI has
| nothing.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| And now also uses government capture to dismantle regulatory
| agencies that would come after him for breaking the law.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| That and the data that is a part of X can be used by the xAI
| team. I expect it will be in the TOS if it isn't there already.
|
| "xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take
| the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and
| talent."
| sunaookami wrote:
| There is a setting (opt-out outside of EU, opt-in inside EU I
| think) that allows/forbids data sharing with X since Grok was
| released.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Oh yes, you can definitely be reassured that Elon and his
| openai dropouts working at xAI will follow that one to the
| tee.
| jsheard wrote:
| Weren't they already doing that? I recall before I bailed
| from X/Twitter they already added an AI training consent
| toggle, which silently defaulted to "I consent" for all
| existing users of course.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I recall before I bailed from X/Twitter they already
| added an AI training consent toggle, which silently
| defaulted to "I consent" for all existing users of course.
|
| There's a solution for that: build a Twitter bot that posts
| strange things.
| jsheard wrote:
| Are the porn bots still around? Maybe they were the
| heroes we needed after all.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I think any LLM that's not trained on X data comes out ahead.
| quest88 wrote:
| Why does that warrant an acquisition?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| It doesn't actually looks like another financial shifting
| chairs on the deck due to the xAI valuation being extremely
| high.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| I don't really see how X data, being riddled with spam and
| bots, is all that uniquely useful to an AI company. Even if
| it was, it's not all that clear that access to data is a
| defensible moat.
| javier2 wrote:
| I suppose xAI could already use the data from X, but anyway.
| X is a cesspool of vile hate and bots. Why would you want to
| train a AI on that?
| HappySweeney wrote:
| To me it appears to be a way to pay his lenders without
| liquidating or collateralizing more Tesla stock.
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| So he can use the funds he raised for xAI to pay out the
| lenders for the initial Twitter purchase? Otherwise the
| lenders are just getting xAI stock (all stock deal) which I
| assume is illiquid?
| gscott wrote:
| A stock ponzi scheme to keep him afloat? Soon he will start
| a new venture and use that venture to save the previous
| venture and so on. Maybe a robot clothing company because
| robots shouldn't be naked.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Next step is have SpaceX buy xai
| pm90 wrote:
| this here is the most logical step
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The debt goes to the merged company and so can be serviced
| or retired using the funds of the whole company.
| ajaimk wrote:
| Yes. He did it with Solarcity already.
| dashundchen wrote:
| Solar roofs was one of many scams.
|
| And he scammed the taxpayers of New York State for a billion
| dollar factory to build solar roofs. Factory built, stock was
| pumped, no solar roofs though.
|
| The puffery about waste and fraud is pure projection coming
| from a scammer like Musk.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I forgot all about the solar roof thing.
|
| In concept seems like a really interesting idea. I guess it
| never ended up working out.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Who also talks like Sam Altman that the human race will
| need to all be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) because
| of AI.
|
| I don't understand it all ...cut people's jobs who make
| multitudes of billions less (cut 25k probationary employees
| like ripping off a band-aid), want people to work like the
| Chinese do (day and night) so we are the leader in AI (?)
| and after AI starts replacing jobs we all need to be on a
| welfare system. Isn't a welfare system the biggest waste to
| the Republican party (independent here)?
|
| Does he even know his end game with all this or he's just
| having fun be the most powerful person?
| russdill wrote:
| Seems like anyone who has three "shares" of X now has 1 share
| of xAI+X, which by Musk's valuation is three times as valuable
| as X. Assuming the xAI share price is wildly inflated, it seems
| that the inflated valuation has devalued their actual holdings.
|
| Eg, for an extreme example, if xAI is worth zero, their actual
| holdings are now a third of what they were.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Makes recruiting easier, better for the X employees as well.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Can someone please explain this with more words?
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| My take is that its super obvious X is a rapidly failing social
| media platform that is reportedly very dangerously leveraged
| with Tesla stock value... but xAI still has that Zombo.com
| magic where anything is possible and the unattainable is
| unknown.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I was watching the US NCAAM basketball tournament last night,
| and all the announcers had their Twitter handles displayed
| under their names.
|
| I had a thought that Twitter will eventually become a group
| of: famous people, media, and bots all just tweeting at each
| other.
|
| Or people do still use the platform. I never have, so I can't
| say one way or the other.
| phatfish wrote:
| For celebrities it is a bullet point on their CV.
|
| - Control of high engagement Twitter account with 50
| bazillion followers.
|
| Like commits on Github for tech bros. All those spelling
| mistakes won't fix themselves.
| telotortium wrote:
| Clearly the $44B price was too high for what it was really
| worth as a platform - Musk tried to get out of the deal, or
| at least decrease the price, but was forced to buy it at his
| initial offer by the courts. But I don't think there's any
| basis to say it's rapidly failing, at least from an
| engagement perspective - if BlueSky or Threads were going to
| kill X, they would have done so by now, or at least be well
| on their way. Besides, the real value of X is to seize
| control of a powerful propaganda platform from progressives,
| and in that he succeeded, maybe even beyond his wildest
| dreams.
| junto wrote:
| What's the point though if more and more real people delete
| the app and their accounts? He owns the equivalent of Lake
| Aral.
|
| I gave up an early 5 letter word account on Twitter because
| I refuse to support a bully that has clear fascist
| intentions and the entire platform seemed to be turning
| into bots spouting racist Nazi tropes.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >rapidly failing social media platform
|
| What suggests that? It seems neutral to me. It gained a
| billion dollar valuation since the acquisition. Ad revenue is
| returning back to the levels it was at. There were other
| revenue streams added to more effectively monetize it.
| paxys wrote:
| Elon bought Twitter for $44B, with a combination of his own
| money, money raised from investors, and $12B worth of debt
| secured by his Tesla shares.
|
| Since that time Twitter's valuation continued to drop, and by
| late 2024 several investors (like Fidelity) had marked the
| company's overall value down to as little as $9B.
|
| Now with the recent stock market turmoil and Tesla's massive
| share price drop, his Twitter loan is in danger of getting
| margin called, and that would spell disaster for Tesla, Twitter
| and his own finances.
|
| Separately Elon also started xAI, which received $6B of funding
| at a $40B valuation, and is in talks to raise more.
|
| So now he is doing some financial engineering to "sell" Twitter
| (X) to xAI. This means (1) whoever owns shares in Twitter can
| mark up their books again and (2) he can raise more funding for
| the combined entity and use that to pay off the Twitter loan.
| dustingetz wrote:
| so twitter shares were converted to xai shares but where did
| the 12B debt go?
| paxys wrote:
| The debt still exists, but it is now xai's debt
| ra7 wrote:
| What was in it for existing xAI investors to agree to this?
| Haven't they lost value here?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Probably enough convincing math that trading 42% of stock
| for whole of Twitter is still good valuation play for
| future funding and maybe flipping it to someone else... Was
| xAI worth 57B at time of the sale?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I get a kick out of how the link in this story is "twitter.com"
| instead of "x.com".
|
| Personally, I think everyone should just continue to say
| "Twitter."
| mtmail wrote:
| I think Hackernews changes the link to twitter.com after
| submission to avoid duplicates.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I do and I always will. I refuse to play along with corporate
| rebrands, be it Twitter, Facebook, Comcast, Charter or anything
| else.
| dbreunig wrote:
| Don't forget Blackwater!
| sorokod wrote:
| Currently known as Constellis.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company)
| outer_web wrote:
| Did Elon buy the Xe name from them or something?
| fallingknife wrote:
| But you already are just by saying those names
| parkaboy wrote:
| *you mean "The Facebook" ;)
| IMTDb wrote:
| FYI; Comcast is a corporate rebrand of American Cable Systems
| tenpies wrote:
| I enjoyed reading your post on Startup News. ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News#History
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| And Facebook instead of Meta, although if I think of it, I'd
| rather not say any of those in any context.
| paxys wrote:
| Facebook is a product, Meta is a company. It was always weird
| to say Facebook in the context of Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus
| etc. Heck who even uses Facebook now?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Yeah, I call the company Facebook, I don't care enough to
| follow their terminology, and I don't keep track of their
| products.
| bag_boy wrote:
| People who use marketplace
| dvh wrote:
| The best way is IMHO to say "social media" that way you're not
| promoting either
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I really try to not use Google as a verb.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| Huh, why?
| lightlyused wrote:
| Personally, don't use it at all. Worst social media platform
| IMO.
| tomcam wrote:
| > Personally, I think everyone should just continue to say
| "Twitter."
|
| Because...?
| tzs wrote:
| I also continue to say Twitter and prefer others to also do
| so because X is a terrible name to search for. It has too
| many common uses besides as the new name for Twitter so there
| are way too many false positives.
|
| For example let's say you want to see all the times you've
| mentioned that site in your HN comment history. If you search
| for "author:tomcam twitter" in the search thingy at the
| bottom of most HN pages it turns up 34 comments and it looks
| like all of them are actually about that site or contained
| links to content on that site.
|
| Change that to "author:tomcam x" and there are 13 comments.
| Only 4 of those are using X to mean Twitter. The x in the
| others come from OS-X, X-rated (in two comments), 2796 x
| 1290, x.into(), X.js, X-Files (in two comments), 4 x 8.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Because I'm not about to hand over one of the 26 essential
| letters of our alphabet to corporate whims. "Twitter" emerged
| as a fresh term because people embraced it--not because a
| billionaire decreed it. Whether it's naming a service or
| renaming a gulf , words--and especially their letters--belong
| to the public, not to the power of a few billionaires..
| outer_web wrote:
| 'X' is cumbersome. Everybody knows what you're talking about
| when you say Twitter.
| dustingetz wrote:
| if this didn't happen, how much more would TSLA have to drop for
| the $12B debt to get margin called given it is collateralized by
| TSLA? IIUC what has happened here is the debt has been repaid by
| selling xAI equity? Wasn't xAI constructed in the first place to
| poof some magic money from thin air to give to unhappy Twitter
| investors and keep them happy?
| kccqzy wrote:
| You can take a look at the price of TSLA during the acquisition
| of Twitter as a reference.
| LPisGood wrote:
| It has dropped pretty low (relatively) at some points since the
| purchase - probably a fair bit under $100 to trigger any margin
| call.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| The loan is not collateralized with TSLA stock. He used
| Twitter's assets to collateralize it.
| palmotea wrote:
| So, what does this actually mean?
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Guessing it means Linda Yaccarino doesn't get to pretend to be
| CEO anymore.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if she's out in a few months.
| r1chardnl wrote:
| what
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| Ah yes. Now we know why those articles about X's valuation
| resurgence have been coming out lately. He "rescued the value" by
| selling it to another company he owns.
|
| Look, maybe the Twitter dataset and control over the algorithm is
| worth $45 billion. But I've seen the state of ads on Twitter
| these days and it is clearly not worth anything close to that
| from advertising income.
| bhouston wrote:
| He has done this move before with Tesla buying Solar City. When
| you do a deal with yourself you can assign any value you want to
| assets, it isn't a competitive process. In the previous case
| Solar City was dying but its acquisition by Tesla was pitched as
| a great synergy.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/solarcity-tesla-energy-belea...
|
| There were a few lawsuits from Tesla shareholders about the
| acquisition regarding self dealing but they didn't succeed:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
| mayneack wrote:
| Surely a theoretically disgruntled xAI shareholder is going to
| have a harder time here since they're both private companies
| and given Elon's proximity to any potential regulators.
| gruez wrote:
| Company directors are generally given wide latitude in what
| they can do without breaching fiduciary duty, so such
| lawsuits were always going to be an uphill battle.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| An acquisition is a special case (for the company being
| acquired) and the scrutiny is somewhat higher.
|
| At least in Delaware. I have no idea what corporate law is
| like in Texas.
| dmix wrote:
| Private companies buying private companies is not heavily
| scrutinized in general by states, even in Delaware,
| especially non-public deals with no antitrust issues. The
| primary risk is stakeholders going through a state court
| if the company didn't follow standard rules.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| No X shareholder in their right mind will object to
| getting a $45 billion valuation (including debt) when
| their latest valuations have the company at <$10 billion.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Twitter still has a lot of users and if they stopped
| being used by offensive at times racist and awful, then
| Twitter could get more users, sell advertising and make
| money probably. Now that's all gone because Twitter could
| investors need w own a small piece of the giant over
| inflated Xai, which has value because of AI hype but it's
| future actual value is questionable. There are so many
| other AI companies, so what is it that xai can do that
| justifies an $80 billion valuation?
| monkeywork wrote:
| >Twitter could get more users, sell advertising and make
| money probably
|
| How'd that work out in the past with the previous owners?
| acdha wrote:
| Well: with the exception of Q1 2020 they were profitable
| from 2017 until Musk bought the company. Their last year
| was lower due to a lawsuit settlement but they were
| making significant profits until his acquisition added
| huge debt service obligations and tanked revenue.
| monkeywork wrote:
| https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
| https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/twitter-
| facts-s... https://dazeinfo.com/2020/07/30/twitter-
| global-net-income-by...
|
| Long history of not being profitable - 2018 and 2019 feel
| like more of an anomaly than a trend.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, like a lot of tech companies they weren't focused on
| profits until their CEO prioritized it over growth but
| from that point on they were profitable from 2018 on,
| with the aforementioned bad quarter when everyone cut
| spending at the start of the pandemic. The one-time
| deferred lawsuit payout in 2021 masked what otherwise
| would have been several hundreds of millions in profit.
|
| The problem people had understanding them was that they
| weren't Facebook or Google. The expectations of a money-
| printing machine were unrealistic but they had a solid
| middle-tier business with a large number of solid
| customers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Well, they found someone who valued it at $44 billion.
| gg82 wrote:
| I think a great deal of that was because X owned a
| percentage of X.AI stock.
|
| https://www.teslarati.com/x-investors-winning-big-elon-
| musk-...
|
| https://archive.vn/F36yh
| econ wrote:
| Maybe hoarding gpus?
|
| https://sherwood.news/tech/companies-hoarding-nvidia-gpu-
| chi...
|
| If anyone makes it work (whatever that means) in software
| they could buy it?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _if they stopped being used by offensive at times
| racist and awful, then Twitter could get more users, sell
| advertising and make money probably._
|
| That's a big if, and I think most people would be pretty
| skeptical of the possibility of that happening. The fact
| that outside investors seem to value it at under $10B
| suggests that's a common enough opinion.
| psd1 wrote:
| To me, "make money" only implies financial
| sustainability. Do you take it to mean unicorn levels of
| cash?
|
| I had an employer taken over by PE and shredded, for the
| crime of only managing 10% profit margin. Apparently, to
| some, if 20% of revenue doesn't go into someone's pocket,
| your business is a corpse. I think the world needs to
| chuck that attitude in the bin.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Opportunity cost is what the business can earn by
| investing in something else, usually something less risky
| than what the business is doing. If the business cannot
| earn more than the opportunity cost, it's a losing
| investment.
|
| Businesses often use an opportunity cost of around 14%,
| so if the business is earning only 10%, then they are
| losing 4%.
|
| For example, if you start a risky venture that earns 2%,
| when you could invest the money safely in bonds at 5%, it
| doesn't make sense to do the risky venture.
|
| It's not an "attitude", it's maximizing the use of the
| money.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This thinking by American business is why tariffs will
| never bring back whole sectors of manufacturing to US
| shores. It's not business American companies want to get
| involved with.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Business wants to get involved in any endeavor that makes
| a profit larger than the opportunity cost.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'if you start a risky venture that earns 2%, when you
| could invest the money safely in bonds at 5%'
|
| The US invented flat screen technology. The return on
| manufacturing didn't fit American business profit levels
| so they sold the technology off to overseas companies.
| Tariff's aren't going to fix that. They might
| artificially boost the return short term, but unless we
| are going permanent protected markets this sort of low
| return manufacturing isn't coming back, because of
| American management style, not 'Canada bad', not 'trade
| deals bad'. If anything a better cause statement would be
| to say 'American MBAs bad'.
| usrusr wrote:
| > so what is it that xai can do that justifies an $80
| billion valuation?
|
| Crush every competitor through regulation?
| mcphage wrote:
| What about an xAI shareholder who just paid $45 billion
| for a bag of rotten turnips?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I don't think there are that many of them, and I think
| most of them are very much under the "Musk" spell. This
| would be the party to sue to block this deal, and it
| seems unlikely that they will.
| Alupis wrote:
| Those valuations are all bs though. They are hinged on
| traffic estimates and ad revenue.
|
| X is clearly worth a lot more than just it's revenue
| would indicate.
|
| What is the most influential social media site worth?
| Perhaps all of the money in the world...
| bdangubic wrote:
| X is now state-sponsored media, not social media. it
| provides political echochamber for some portion of the
| population and nothing more than that any longer
| wyclif wrote:
| Every social media platform is, to some degree, an echo
| chamber. See Bluesky or Mastodon.
| bdangubic wrote:
| neither is owned by a man deciding who can say what on
| the platform :)
| squarefoot wrote:
| And forces his posts also on people not wanting to follow
| him.
| motorest wrote:
| And whines/threats competing social networks when users
| post content critical of him and organize themselves to
| not share Twitter links.
| ck2 wrote:
| No other platform looks this bad
|
| https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:y5xy
| loy...
|
| Where are the advertising dollars coming from on that
| horror show
|
| Certainly not $45 BILLION of income over even a century
| bdangubic wrote:
| the one way you can look at $45bn is ability to buy
| election(s). as long as there are enough sheep orbiting
| that platform the value is there - in buying election(s)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| X is worth whatever a state backed media is worth. If
| fascism in america succeeds, yeah, sure it's zillions of
| dollars.
|
| But you'd have to be on the side of fascists to believe
| that.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Well, I would have suggested that you put your money
| where your mouth is and buy out Fidelity et al, but it
| looks like you're off the hook for that statement.
|
| However, secondary markets for these megacorps are
| relatively liquid, so the valuations are not actually
| completely baseless.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| This is a stock transaction, so the $45 billion valuation
| is irrelevant unless you also believe the x.ai valuation.
| Majromax wrote:
| > I have no idea what corporate law is like in Texas.
|
| Nobody does, really. Texas is relatively new to its
| 'corporate registration friendly' game, and at least on
| paper the statutory law is the same. Texas courts don't
| have to follow Delaware's case history, but it's also not
| a given that they will rule in a vastly more owner-
| friendly manner.
| no_wizard wrote:
| To add on to this, Texas as part of this pitch is the
| promise of less oversight and they not following
| Delaware's lead is a plus
| ISL wrote:
| The judges may or may not have the same take on that
| matter as the legislature.
| rvnx wrote:
| Is it realistic that Texas will decide to punish one of
| its most active companies ? Risking that they leave Texas
| for another state.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes but the owners of X are all elon sycophants so I
| doubt they will have an issue with this (and honestly xAI
| stock is better than x stock)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Given how much they're typically paid for their trouble,
| you'd think they'd carry an ounce of responsibility for
| their actions.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Surely a theoretically disgruntled xAI shareholder"
|
| they know what they buying when elon promotes his lmao, elon
| twitter deal is backed by saudi. elon himself come to saudi
| asking for an investment from royal prince saudi
|
| safe to say that if they want spent 40 billion for twitter,
| they would spent more with AI flavored company (they are
| saudi after all)
| sebazzz wrote:
| Do regulators still have teeth in the US?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| You mean the regulators threatened by DOGE?
| rayiner wrote:
| Tesla bought Solar City for $2.6 billion, and now it looks like
| the Tesla Energy division had about that much in net income
| last year alone.
| FreeRadical wrote:
| Tesla Energy existed before Tesla acquired Solar City
| refulgentis wrote:
| Solar City was a debacle, it died immediately. Tesla's story
| in court was they were about to go bankrupt, and it was a
| financial necessity to redeploy all Solar City assets,
| including all employees, to Model 3 production.
|
| It breaks my heart because my rust belt hometown got a
| substantial investment from the state they had been chasing
| for a couple decades.
|
| $700M of the Buffalo Billion went to a Solar City facility,
| Elon even said they were going to build the solar roofs
| there!
|
| New York State didn't dare pick a fight with him as the
| factory set empty for years.
|
| Full story via Bethany McLean, 2019:
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-elon-musk-
| gamble...
| foobarqux wrote:
| Putting aside the fact that you can't justify fraud by post-
| hoc outcomes (Shkreli and SBF also claimed that they didn't
| commit fraud because they would or did win it back), I doubt
| any of the Tesla Energy division income (even assuming the
| accounting is okay) is a result of businesses that can be
| traced back to Solar City.
|
| I suspect most of the business is battery storage and the
| Powerwall was introduced by Tesla before the acquisition.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| The vertically integrated Tesla strategy is to use
| batteries to arbitrage the value of stored energy. This is
| well described in the Tesla "Master Plan" documents. Solar
| is a huge part of this.
|
| According to the company filings the solar assets Tesla
| acquired are still generating revenue at the rates
| projected during the acquisition.
| foobarqux wrote:
| Well I trust Elon's statements (even the financial
| statements) as far as I can throw them but can you point
| out where it says that? I'm searching the 10-K and I
| don't see solar broken out.
|
| But even if it's true I assume they are including their
| utility-scale solar and battery packs, which has nothing
| to do with Solar City: the panels are generic, the
| customer lists are not residential, they don't use the
| fancy shingles. Solar City did not help them in any way
| with these getting or fulfilling these contracts.
| mdorazio wrote:
| And how much of that is solar instead of Powerwall and
| Megapack? They don't break it out in filings unless I missed
| it.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Exactly. So then why draw conclusions about how SolarCity
| was a bad deal for shareholders (see parent comments)?
|
| There's no substantiation of that either way.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We know the batteries are a lot of revenue. The
| substantiation is not zero.
| glenstein wrote:
| Exactly, and theres plenty of third party companies
| buying and installing these for customers and their
| economic activity testifies to the significant scale of
| the Tesla battery business.
| timewizard wrote:
| The burden of proof is on the publicly traded company.
| That they don't make this information clear and obvious
| speaks volumes.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Because Tesla abandoned the SolarCity model? Like,
| SolarCity was a bunch of sales people going door-to-door
| to sell questionable leases on solar systems and hawking
| off the junk bonds resulting.
| joquarky wrote:
| > questionable leases
|
| I have a SolarCity install that came with the house.
|
| The Power Purchase Agreement lease seemed shady at first,
| but ultimately I believe it's working out better for my
| family than for Tesla.
|
| I'm paying just under 11 cents per kWh and it can only go
| up a maximum of 3% per year for the next ~15 years.
| ok_computer wrote:
| I'm curious what the cumulative operating cost /
| financial repayment plan is relative to the capital
| installation cost. Funny enough if it is advantageous to
| you vs solar city that is one more argument in favor of
| them running a poor business model.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The general model has some intrinsic advantages. If you
| want to build out solar generation you normally have to
| buy land (expensive), but this way the customer is giving
| you space on their roof "for free". Then the price per
| kWh the customer pays to the power company includes a
| transmission cost, but the power is being consumed on
| site so you don't have to pay that.
|
| The result is that solar generally has a generation cost
| of ~$0.04/kWh (which includes the cost of the land) but
| meanwhile you have customers happy to be paying
| $0.11/kWh. The trade off is the one-time cost of
| installing it on individual roofs is more labor intensive
| than doing a large-scale installation in a field
| somewhere, but that just means it's competitive rather
| than having a massive advantage.
| gwern wrote:
| > Exactly. So then why draw conclusions about how
| SolarCity was a bad deal for shareholders (see parent
| comments)?
|
| You can absolutely draw adverse inferences from Tesla's
| refusal to report certain straightforward, useful
| numbers. For example, their refusal to publish any real
| safety statistics, to the point where Elon Musk himself
| has to invoke rubbish numbers like the 'community
| tracker'.
|
| If, after all the lawsuits and accusations of failure,
| and the reporting about the near-zero deliveries and
| idled factories, the Tesla Energy division is giving you
| no numbers on the solar roof, and is lumping them
| together with a totally different product like batteries,
| there is one thing and only one thing that that means:
| the numbers are awful.
| glenstein wrote:
| >There's no substantiation of that either way.
|
| I don't think that's the true at all. There's a vast and
| visible footprint we can see with batteries (pretty sure
| every major solar company in the U.S. that has a battery
| storage option does at least some Tesla) that has no
| equivalent with solar rooftops. The former are ubiquitous
| while the latter are so far as I can tell almost entirely
| non existent.
|
| And if that's too light on data I'll put it this way, I'm
| reasonably confident I can find 10 solar companies that
| install Tesla batteries for every one that does Solar
| City roofs.
| camhart wrote:
| How many solar city customers have added
| powerwall/megapack...?
|
| Even if its low for solar, it doesn't mean it was a bad
| deal. He acquired existing customers he could sell other
| products to.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| So what, Tesla energy is a separate division? Tesla solar
| products are basically dying in the solar roof failed. It's a
| great idea, who wouldn't want to buy it if it lasted and was
| practical.
| Zigurd wrote:
| None of that is solar roofs. That product never worked. It's
| nearly all batteries. The Solar City was worthless and it
| hasn't improved.
| grandempire wrote:
| How do you know which assets and people were useful on
| which projects?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| How does grand parent know solar city is responsible for
| the net income?
| grandempire wrote:
| That wasn't the claim. They just speculated that
| acquiring one solar company helped in their other solar
| ventures, which seems like a good default assumption.
|
| If you have evidence that's not the case, that would be
| interesting to share.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I wrote a comment 2 hours before the initial comment in
| this subthread that explains _Tesla held in court that
| Solar City ended up contributing nothing because it
| needed to be liquidated immediately lest Tesla go
| bankrupt_. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-
| elon-musk-gamble...
|
| For what it's worth, I don't even know what the inverse
| position would be, SolarCity was a solar panel maker, and
| famously, the idea after they realized they couldn't come
| close to China's prices, was solar roof tiles. They would
| be a major breakthrough project that would make Solar
| City a breakout financial hit.
|
| Do people think Tesla makes solar panels? Solar roofs?
|
| I don't blame them, I guess, this carnival has been going
| on for _years_.
|
| I'm somewhat surprised how dedicated you are to avoiding
| information and asking for someone, anyone, to give info.
| It's been 18 hours and 3 replies on your end, albeit
| without people taking the time to spell it out to you
| like this. Personally, I would have looked into it a bit
| myself.
| grandempire wrote:
| Im not interested in replies from someone who has alerts
| turned on for this topics.
|
| > It's been 18 hours and 3 replies on your end
|
| You appear nowhere in comments I replied to. Is this your
| alt account?
| rayiner wrote:
| You're burying the lede here, which is that the Delaware
| Chancery Court rules that Tesla had paid a fair price for Solar
| City: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-wins-solarcity-
| tes...
| marinmania wrote:
| OP mentions the lawsuits did not succeed
|
| Its not like the courts are investment banks with an
| evaluation arm. They are just judging if anything reaches the
| point where shareholders were legally harmed, which still
| gives a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.
| rayiner wrote:
| Lawsuits can fail for lots of reasons without a decision on
| the merits. It seems relevant that the reason the lawsuit
| failed is because the court looked at the fairness of the
| transaction and determined that Tesla paid a fair price.
| nmca wrote:
| This whole thread is true consistent statements that
| differ only in emphasis.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > differ only in emphasis
|
| The commenter you are responding to is explicitly
| intending to place more emphasis on the reason why the
| lawsuit failed. That is why they used the phrase "burying
| the lede" in their initial comment.
| srveale wrote:
| True!
| glenstein wrote:
| Hold on, I feel like everyone's missing that theres a
| real argument here. I think the key point was:
|
| >They are just judging if anything reaches the point
| where shareholders were legally harmed, which still gives
| a lot of gray area to the acquiring company.
|
| This distinguishes the lawsuit failing from the idea that
| a fair price was paid. The competing contentions are (a)
| fair price vs (b) unfair but beneath threshold of legally
| punishable harm.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| (c) no fair price can possibly be determined but the
| burden of proof lies with the claimant
|
| (d) a court has no idea what a fair price would look like
| but made a finding of fact based on expert testimony
| despite being poorly situated to evaluate it
| fedestair wrote:
| (e) the court in question answers to Delaware which is in
| the business of siding with any company that incorporates
| there.
| rayiner wrote:
| Note that this is a civil suit, so the concept of a
| "threshold of legally punishable harm" doesn't apply.
| There's no "punishment," and the plaintiff doesn't need
| to meet the high standards (proof beyond a reasonable
| doubt, etc.) for imposing a punishment.
|
| Under Delaware law, there's two standards for evaluating
| this kind of claim. When there is no conflict of
| interest, the court applies the "business judgment rule,"
| which is similar to what you seem to be thinking--it
| gives corporate officers wide latitude.
|
| But when there is a conflict of interest, the court
| applies the "entire fairness" standard, which requires
| both fair dealing and a fair price. And a fair price
| means what it sounds like--it's what an objective
| businessman would consider a fair price under the
| circumstances. It doesn't need to be the best price, but
| it must be within the range of fair. And to establish a
| fair price, the court relies on evidence from financial
| valuation experts. It's a rigorous standard that's hard
| to meet.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _And to establish a fair price, the court relies on
| evidence from financial valuation experts._
|
| I generally find expert testimony to be suspect. Anyone
| can be trotted forward as an expert, rattle off their
| credentials, and say whatever they feel like saying,
| depending on who is paying them to testify. And financial
| valuation is not a science; there is of course plenty of
| math involved that takes into account hard, objective
| numbers, but a good chunk of it is opinion, too, as no
| one an know the future.
|
| Having said that, the Delaware Chancery Court of course
| has more experience in these matters than any other
| state's courts, so I _am_ of the opinion that they 're
| less likely to be duped by "experts", but sill... it can
| and does happen.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The way to improved expert testimony would be to tie it
| to professional licensure in a stricter-than-practice
| way.
|
| Ofc, that wouldn't help for software... because no
| licensure.
| inetknght wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that software _should_ have licensure,
| given the degrading quality of software.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd say given the lack of professional consequences for
| unethical behavior. ;)
| bumby wrote:
| NCEES has brought back the controls systems professional
| engineering licensure. This is the same license that
| civil engineers use to stamp designs for example.
|
| Of course, the license doesn't mean anything if everyone
| falls under an industrial exemption. I'd be in favor of
| safety-critical software requiring a PE stamp.
| rayiner wrote:
| I agree with you to a degree about expert testimony. But
| I'd argue that a Delaware Chancery Judge reviewing expert
| opinions from major investment banks is more likely to
| come to an accurate assessment than many other people
| offering view on the transaction. The legal ruling isn't
| definitive for anything more than the case that was
| before the court, but I think it should be heavily
| weighted by anyone trying to inform their views about
| what happened.
|
| I'd also point out that, in the legal industry,
| Delaware's entire fairness standard is seen as a rigorous
| standard that typically results in victory for the
| plaintiff. The Chancery Court ruling resulted in various
| law firm updates using the case as an example of how the
| entire fairness standard isn't always a death sentence
| for defendants.
| gonzo wrote:
| "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is the legal standard in
| criminal cases. "Preponderance of the evidence" is the
| standard in civil cases.
| SilasX wrote:
| That's generous. One party is stubbornly missing that the
| Delaware court's ruling is weak evidence of a proper
| valuation having been done, but wants to parrot an
| irrelevant textbook understanding that obfuscates that
| conclusion.
| DannyBee wrote:
| It's worth pointing out (IMHO) given the other comments
| that it's actually more than that - the fairness standard
| requires they prove the process was fair as well (IE a
| fair process that generated a fair price), which the
| court found they did as well.
|
| (As you know, but others may not - this is not always the
| standard vs the business judgment rule, but is the
| standard here)
| facile3232 wrote:
| shareholder value maximization, shareholder value
| maximization uber alles
|
| I just wanna know where we can find these shareholders and
| evict them from earth because they're destroying
| everything.
| psd1 wrote:
| Sadly, my pension
|
| I have no holdings in armaments or instruments of
| torture, apparently. But that's about the most constraint
| I can apply, short of self-managing.
| facile3232 wrote:
| Easily-replaceable with the correctly shaped welfare-
| state, never fear!
| jjk166 wrote:
| Those tend to invest in armaments and instruments of
| torture though
| timewizard wrote:
| "did not act unlawfully"
|
| and
|
| "paid a fair price"
|
| are two entirely different things.
| jfarina wrote:
| Is that what a corporate lawyer would say?
| rayiner wrote:
| They are, but in the relevant Delaware law the latter point
| matters when there is a potential conflict of interest, so
| the Delaware court ruled on that.
| timewizard wrote:
| The "fair price" standard and ruling is about both the
| process and the price. And the standard is likely not
| what most people would assume it to be, particularly as
| stated by the OP, resting on matters such as "was and is
| the transaction synergistic to Tesla?" It's also notable
| that the court found several process flaws created by
| Musk but ultimately determined the Tesla board was
| independent enough that it was likely fair.
|
| Was it actually fair as evaluated by any outsider on
| first principles? Probably not. Was it criminally unfair?
| No.
| rayiner wrote:
| It wasn't a criminal case, and plaintiffs didn't need to
| meet a high burden of proof. And Delaware's entire
| fairness standard is a two-prong test that includes both
| fair dealing and fair price:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberger_v._UOP,_Inc.
|
| The court ruled:
|
| > Even assuming (without deciding) that Elon was Tesla's
| controlling stockholder, the Tesla Board was conflicted,
| and the vote of the majority Tesla's minority
| stockholders approving the Acquisition did not trigger
| business judgment review, such that entire fairness is
| the standard of review, the persuasive evidence reveals
| that the Acquisition was entirely fair...
|
| > Equally if not more important, the preponderance of the
| evidence reveals that Tesla paid a fair price--SolarCity
| was, at a minimum, worth what Tesla paid for it, and the
| Acquisition otherwise was highly beneficial to Tesla.
| Indeed, the Acquisition marked a vital step forward for a
| company that had for years made clear to the market and
| its stockholders that it intended to expand from an
| electric car manufacturer to an alternative energy
| company. The Court's verdict, therefore, is for the
| defense.
| timewizard wrote:
| "The court made 11 factual findings showing that Musk had
| participated in the deal process to a degree greater than
| he should have."
|
| "The trial court noted that these "process flaws flow[ed]
| principally from [Musk's] apparent inability to
| acknowledge his clear conflict of interest and separate
| himself from Tesla's consideration of the Acquisition."
|
| "Upon recognizing these process flaws, the court then
| turned to what it identified as the strengths. It found
| six."
|
| "Regarding fair dealing, the trial court noted that the
| road leading to the Acquisition was not entirely smooth.
| The court found, however,that the "Tesla Board
| meaningfully vetted the Acquisition" and Musk "did not
| impede the Tesla Board's pursuit of a fair
| price."Although Appellants assert that the court failed
| to make a finding of fair dealing, the court's opinion
| can only reasonably be read and understood as concluding
| that the flaws did not overcome the findings of the
| process strengths and that the process, overall, was the
| product of fair dealing."
|
| Read that as a ringing endorsement if you like.
| rayiner wrote:
| What's that got to do with the court's ruling that Tesla
| paid a fair price, which is what I said in my OP? This is
| the relevant part of the opinion:
|
| > In instances where there are process infirmities, the
| Court is obliged to study fair price even more carefully.
| I have done that here. After careful consideration, I am
| persuaded Elon presented credible evidence that Tesla
| paid a fair price for SolarCity. Plaintiffs answered by
| proffering incredible testimony that SolarCity was
| insolvent, and then provided some "also ran" theories on
| value that their experts did not ultimately endorse, or
| at least not persuasively so. Given this, I have no
| credible basis in the evidence to conclude that a "fairer
| price" was available, and therefore, no basis to conclude
| that the price paid was not entirely fair. Indeed, the
| price was, in my view, not "near the low end of a range
| of fairness," but "entirely" fair in the truest sense of
| the word.
| timewizard wrote:
| The ruling is based on price _and_ process by your own
| reference. You keep moving the goalposts. Which end do
| you want to play from? I thought not burying the lede was
| the scheme here?
| croes wrote:
| Doesn't mean it's also a fair price this time
| jfoster wrote:
| Any entity that can afford to invest billions of dollars
| can probably also afford to litigate if they see fit.
| charles_f wrote:
| Arguably we'll never know. A court ruling that it's a fair
| price isn't the same as letting the market decide
| trod1234 wrote:
| Even if there was a market, any market naturally requires
| adversarial decision making in the negotiation of a deal to
| have economic calculation (what we generally view the
| benefit we derive from a market in the first place).
|
| When the same people are making the ask as making the buy,
| you literally cannot decouple the decision-making in a way
| that objectively eliminates cooperation.
|
| A market cannot exist when the entities involved abandon
| adversarial decision-making and cooperate. One's priority
| is always suborned by one or the other.
| DannyBee wrote:
| This is true but it's not as far off as you think. In this
| case, the court doesn't have to just find it was a fair
| price, but a fair process as well.
|
| That is, the standard the defendants have to meet (not the
| plaintiffs, the burden is actually on tesla here despite
| having been sued) is that the transaction was entirely fair
| to the corporation and shareholders- the process was a fair
| one, the price was a fair one, etc.
|
| I have trouble thinking of a case where you can prove all
| this[1] but the market would have come up with something
| different. Almost by definition, if the market would have
| decided to pay a lower price, either the price or the
| process was probably not fair.
|
| [1] Which again, you have to do affirmatively. You aren't
| just rebutting plaintiff evidence, the burden is on you to
| show the fairness
| chairmansteve wrote:
| How's Solar City doing now?
|
| Not sure the court was capable of that judgement.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Scandalous ?
| cedws wrote:
| And what happened to Tesla solar roofs? Haven't heard about
| those since like 2020. Who actually has one? And Tesla
| trucks? And full self-driving? And robotaxis? And the
| private venture around the moon?
|
| It's like everyone just forgets Musk's announcements that
| never get delivered on.
| thordenmark wrote:
| Aren't Cyber trucks by Tesla? And FSD is basically here
| which means robotaxis are basically here. Now there are
| just regulatory hurdles and the long tail.
| watwut wrote:
| "Basically here" and "actually here" tend to be decades
| apart ... especially in Musks case. Tho, I think another
| company can be actually capable to make them actually
| working.
| ben_w wrote:
| He made much the same claim 6 years ago:
| https://www.inverse.com/science/55141-elon-musk-
| autonomous-d...
|
| """"I feel very confident predicting autonomous robo
| taxis for Tesla by next year. Not in all jurisdictions,
| because we won't have regulatory approval everywhere. But
| we will have regulatory approval at least at some point
| next year," Musk said toward the end of the presentation.
| "From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a
| year in three months, but next year for sure, we will
| have over a million robo taxis on the road."""" - Musk,
| April 2019
| dns_snek wrote:
| In what sense of the word "basically" are the FSD and
| robotaxis "basically" here? Tesla FSD is a level 2
| autonomic system that requires constant supervision,
| robotaxis would require level 4/5 autonomy. That's not
| even close to becoming reality.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| FSD ran a red light last week.
|
| But later today I'll be heading out in a Waymo robotaxi
| which will actually be here.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Quite a claim. FSD in practice is nowhere close to
| actually being able to do robotaxi operations. So its not
| really a regulatory burden, other then regulatory
| actually checking if it works.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Aren't Cyber trucks by Tesla?
|
| GP is referring to Tesla's promise to build electric semi
| trucks, not the pickup truck that Cybertruck is.
|
| > And FSD is basically here which means robotaxis are
| basically here. Now there are just regulatory hurdles and
| the long tail.
|
| AIUI, Tesla FSD is at best Level 3 automation (probably
| more like Level 2), which means it requires constant
| driver supervision to keep the car from committing
| suicide. That's pretty far from being "basically here",
| especially since Tesla seems extremely loth to accept any
| responsibility for FSD-related crashes.
| kube-system wrote:
| FSD is level 2, because the human driver is required to
| pay attention and intervene at all times.
|
| https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/gallery/cm/content/n
| ews...
| panick21_ wrote:
| What are you talking about? How about you spend like 2min
| doing research? Tesla solar roofs exist and are being
| deployed. Its just not the extreme growth market that
| Musk hopped for. And the trucks exist too.
|
| The private moon mission is off because the costumer
| pulled out. But Starship is still in development and is
| contract with NASA for a moon mission.
|
| Of course Robotaxi isn't close to existing.
| gonzo wrote:
| > Of course Robotaxi isn't close to existing.
|
| Musk announced in January that it was to launch in June,
| in Austin.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Solar roof installs are continuing to grow. Slower than
| they hoped, but growing.
|
| The semi factory will be finished late this year.
|
| FSD gets better each month. Obviously there is massive
| debate if it will be "done" in 1, 2, 5, 10 or never years
|
| Robotaxis were announced recently, the plan as announced
| is for them to be sold in 2026. That has not changed.
|
| Looks like they'll have some kind of driverless taxi
| service running this year with remote operators like
| Waymo.
|
| Private moon mission was canned.
|
| I think it's pretty strange to say Musks promises never
| get delivered on when Tesla sells the most popular car on
| the planet two years running, spacex launches more to
| orbit than the rest of the world combined and a ton of
| other stuff.
|
| Obviously he's utterly nuts, and doesn't deliver
| everything he talks about, and is very late on many
| things. But you have to be blind to say he never delivers
| anything.
| jandrese wrote:
| My understanding is that the solar roofs are basically
| dead. They're more of a vanity project than a real
| product. The total production of the tiles is enough to
| cover like 10-20 houses a week and the full system price
| is around 5 times what a regular solar install costs,
| even when you factor in replacing the entire roof before
| doing the solar install.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Obviously he's utterly nuts
|
| He takes risks very few others are willing to do, but he
| is not nuts by any reasonable definition.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| You're right. Not nuts. Utterly nuts. By any reasonable
| definition.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Explain.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| No. It's blindingly obvious. You can be utterly
| incredible at delegation. You can be incredibly
| productive. You can also be utterly nuts. The utterly
| nuts part is self-evident to people who aren't
| temporarily impoverished billionaires and don't want to
| kiss his ass and be him. In my experience, that tends to
| include people who need it "explained". No disrespect.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Re-asserting that he's nuts is not an explanation.
|
| > No disrespect.
|
| But you disrespected me anyway :-)
| brookst wrote:
| How many children with how many women? How many disowned?
| False accusations of pedophilia against people he doesn't
| know? Free speech absolutist who gleefully bans speech?
| Corporate acquirer who accidentally fires key people, and
| then makes the exact same mistake as a coup leader?
|
| He is batshit. He is also smart and has accomplished some
| impressive things. The two are not incompatible.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > How many children with how many women? How many
| disowned?
|
| That's common human behavior.
|
| > False accusations of pedophilia against people he
| doesn't know?
|
| Against a single person who had just called him "insane"
| on TV. Not nuts at all.
|
| > Free speech absolutist who gleefully bans speech?
|
| Not all speech is free speech - you cannot advocate for
| hits on people, for example. Besides, it's perfectly
| legal to censor speech on his platform. Not nuts at all.
| Musk has made no attempt to suppress speech on Bluesky,
| Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok, etc.
|
| > Corporate acquirer who accidentally fires key people
|
| That's not how it worked. Twitter was losing money at an
| astonishing rate, and he had to cut expenses immediately.
| It is the fastest way to determine who was actually
| needed and who wasn't. Then hire back the ones who were
| actually needed.
|
| > makes the exact same mistake as a coup leader?
|
| It's the only way to do it when time is critical. It's
| also the only way when the agencies are doing everything
| possible to not cooperate with DOGE.
|
| There's been no coup. Trump was lawfully elected.
| loxodrome wrote:
| Great answers! Couldn't agree more.
| brookst wrote:
| Well, I hope the kool aid is tasty at least.
|
| Do you ever stop and think it's an amazing coincidence
| that _every_ criticism of Musk is totally unfair?
| WalterBright wrote:
| When a criticism sounds like a substitute for the real
| reason a person hates Musk, it is totally unfair.
|
| For example, where was the disgust at the person who
| publicly called Musk insane first? A fair criticism would
| have included that. A fair person would also be aware
| that there is not a single person on the planet who has
| not called someone else a nasty name.
| pcwalton wrote:
| > Musk has made no attempt to suppress speech on Bluesky,
| Facebook, Reddit, Tiktok, etc.
|
| This is false if "etc." includes Wikipedia, on which Musk
| _has_ attempted to suppress speech critical of him [1].
|
| [1]: https://theweek.com/media/elon-musk-wikipedia-
| controversy
| WalterBright wrote:
| Musk made no attempt to use the courts or the law to
| bring down Wikipedia.
|
| He did denounce Wikipedia, and called for people to not
| support it. That's not an attack on free speech.
| bumby wrote:
| I'd argue he offsets his risks (but not profits) to the
| taxpayer. His high-risk bets have largely been buoyed by
| government contracts, subsidies, and borderline crony-
| capitalism. In many respects, that's not always bad for
| the taxpayer when he delivers, but it's not the same as
| being a free-market risk taker.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I recommend reading a biography of him. He did not offset
| risks to the taxpayer. SpaceX, for example, got contracts
| from NASA. He delivered on those contracts. If he hadn't,
| he would have gone bust, not the taxpayer.
|
| At one point with Tesla he was within hours of business
| and personal bankruptcy, before making a deal with an
| investor. The investor wasn't the government.
|
| The taxpayer never assumed a risk there.
|
| > but not profits) to the taxpayer
|
| He pays taxes on profits like anyone else.
| bumby wrote:
| You may want to familiarize yourself with counter
| examples from Musk biographers, like Seth Abramson.
|
| Musk said himself SpaceX would've gone bankrupt without
| NASA contracts. He needed those contracts because Spacex
| was too high of a risk at the time for private business.
| NASA is self-insured. This is the the way the government
| supports high-risk nascent industries, because they are
| the only institution capable of shouldering that risk.
|
| It's well-established that the solvency of his companies
| are tightly coupled, just like TFA. Further, Tesla is
| made competitive by subsidies for EVs and manufacturing.
| Not necessarily bad, but the success isn't occurring in a
| free-market vacuum. When companies accepting subsidies go
| under, the govt doesn't typically get that money back, at
| least not in full. (See the faux Solyndra "scandal")
|
| I know that doesn't fit the preferred narrative of the
| mythical free-market iconoclast succeeding in spite of
| the govt, but that's reality.
|
| On the profit side, I should have said he gets a
| disproportionate amount of profit and the taxpayer gets a
| disproportionate amount of risk.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Musk said himself SpaceX would've gone bankrupt without
| NASA contracts.
|
| And he wasn't paid until he delivered, like any contract
| with a business. The taxpayers were never at risk. It was
| not a subsidy.
|
| Yes, Tesla benefited from EV subsidies, like all the
| electric car makers. He'd be stupid not to take the
| subsidy.
|
| > You may want to familiarize yourself with counter
| examples from Musk biographers, like Seth Abramson.
|
| I read "Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance.
| bumby wrote:
| > _The taxpayers were never at risk_
|
| I'd implore you to research more about how the CCP is
| administered. There are payments before any astronaut
| gets a ride. Meaning if the company goes out of business
| beforehand, the taxpayers lost that money without
| receiving the actual service intended. That's also why
| NASA selected two CCP contractors, it distributes the
| risk. Maybe you think socializing risk to the taxpayer
| makes him a smart businessman, I just wish people would
| comes to terms with the fact that his wealth is
| inextricably linked to taxpayers. Like I said before,
| it's not even necessarily a bad thing but call it what it
| is. I personally think the hybrid public-private
| arrangement works well when it's not being abused.
|
| Regardless of all that, the point was that Musk is not a
| paragon of free-market capitalism. Nothing you've pointed
| out negates that point, yet people still cling to that
| narrative for...reasons. I suspect it has more to do with
| cognitive biases than reality.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My house was built to my specification. The general
| contractor required that I make progress payments. He
| wanted to be sure he wouldn't be left holding the bag for
| all of it after I moved in (and he also needed cash to
| buy supplies and hire subcontractors). I took a risk he
| didn't just disappear with the up front payment.
|
| When I had the roof replaced, I had to pay half up front.
|
| And so on. This is normal business practice.
|
| There is nothing not free market about progress payments.
|
| (Besides, if NASA was fronting all the money, SpaceX
| wouldn't have gone bankrupt if the rocket blew up. But
| what I've read was Musk bet the company on it not blowing
| up.)
|
| I decided to check one detail. The EV subsidy came in the
| form of a tax credit to the buyer, it is not paid to the
| car manufacturer. Musk had nothing to do with it.
|
| > I suspect it has more to do with cognitive biases than
| reality.
|
| Imagining oneself as dealing in reality rather than
| cognitive bias is yet another cognitive bias. Everything
| written about Musk is subject to cognitive bias one way
| or another.
| bumby wrote:
| You order an uber. You aren't expected to make
| progressive payments so the driver can buy the car, get
| gas, etc. That's the more appropriate analogy. As I said,
| CCP is a service contract, not a product. A house is a
| product so it even if the contractor goes out of
| business, you still have the foundations, studs, etc. ie
| your payments cover the partial product you are actually
| contracted to receive. A house is a misapplied analogy
| that belies some ignorance on the commercial crew
| program.
|
| Businesses can leverage POs to fund operations. That's
| why the NASA contract matters.
|
| Yes, the EV subsidy goes to the buyer. The point was it
| makes the product more competitive at its price point.
| That point still stands. Besides, Tesla also benefited
| from multiple other taxpayer benefits. For example, they
| get hundreds of millions in tax incentives for their
| factories. Again, their profitability is propped up by
| taxpayers.
|
| I've never claimed to be completely unbiased. However, we
| do have the benefit of testing out narratives with facts.
| The mental gymnastics needed to deny that these
| ventures/profits are somehow not related to taxpayers is,
| in a word, "nuts"
| rayiner wrote:
| > buoyed by government contracts, subsidies, and
| borderline crony-capitalism
|
| What you're describing is Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell
| Collins, etc. SpaceX is the opposite--it provided NASA a
| service that was necessary for NASA to operate, at a
| fraction of the cost of competitors:
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093.
|
| The fact that NASA makes interim payments on the
| contracts doesn't turn a purchase of services into a
| subsidy. "Free market" does not mean "off the shelf."
| It's extremely common in B2B settings for buyers to
| shoulder some up-front costs to develop products or
| services that aren't available in the market. For
| example, Apple made a large up-front payment to a
| supplier to speed up development of sapphire glass:
| https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/iphone-sapphire-
| glas....
|
| Buyers take-on some risk when they do that, but that
| doesn't make it a subsidy. In Apple's case, they take on
| the risk in return for the bet that a supplier can
| provide them with huge volumes at a low price. In NASA's
| case, it took on some development risk because SpaceX
| promised a large reduction in launch costs.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree it applies to other contractors. My point is that
| the success is tightly coupled to the willingness of
| taxpayers to fund the operations.
|
| You're muddling points. I'm not saying the NASA contract
| was a subsidy. Tesla is a better example of subsidies.
|
| No private capital was willing to contract to SpaceX
| until the risk was lowered. They've succeeded in doing so
| and deserve credit. However, they would have never gotten
| to that point without taxpayer dollars. Governments were
| the only institutions capable and willing of taking on
| that high initial risk. That point still stands. It's odd
| that your stance denies that when Musk himself has
| admitted it.
| VectorLock wrote:
| You're good at this. Tell me how the Nazi salute, twice,
| on a national stage, wasn't nuts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nobody hates Musk because he's a nazi. He is called a
| nazi because they hate him.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I hate him because he's a Nazi, because of the Nazi
| salute.
| therouwboat wrote:
| We were supposed to have full self driving, sleep while
| it drives you car by 2019, not "the most popular car".
| ehfeng wrote:
| He addressed this. Elon "doesn't deliver everything he
| talks about".
|
| His point is that Elon may promise more than he delivers,
| but he has still delivered on quite a lot.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| No, a self driving car can be either supervised or
| unsupervised.
|
| I'm required to supervise my car while it drives me to
| work, but it is by definition fully self driving,
| controlling all aspects of the vehicle while I sit with
| hands off the wheel watching
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Musk's announcements that never get delivered on
|
| And then there's the ones he did deliver on, like
| spectacular re-usable rockets, Starlink, Neuralink, etc.
| ralfd wrote:
| > And what happened to Tesla solar roofs? Who actually
| has one?
|
| Marques Brownlee:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJeSWbR6W04
|
| They are expensive though, but nice looking.
|
| > And Tesla trucks?
|
| https://www.dhl.com/global-
| en/delivered/responsibility/dhl-t...
|
| Tesla is currently building a dedicated factory in Nevada
| for the Semi Truck. Production is starting end of this
| year and ramping up in 2027.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2wjjWKj8Wo
| DannyBee wrote:
| Exactly why do you believe a court that does exactly this
| kind of judgement all the time is not capable of it?
|
| They issued a 127 page supporting decision on why they
| found it was a fair process that generated a fair price.
|
| Want to say which part you take issue with that shows it
| was not capable of the judgement?
|
| FWIW - I actually hate tesla, i just also hate the sort of
| drive by shitting on other fields that HN seems to do
| sometimes. If there are concrete reasons to believe they
| aren't capable, let's have that discussion. Otherwise,
| there's no need to denigrate others capabilities without
| evidence based on our feelings :)
| toolz wrote:
| you hate the company or the product? How does someone
| hate a company the open sourced all of their patents
| which resulted in creating a ton of competition in a
| previously dominated market?
| shkkmo wrote:
| I'm a fan of Tesla's patent strategy. However, calling it
| "open source" isn't strictly correct. Patents are only
| free to use as long as you also give Tesla rights to all
| your patents.
| dbdoskey wrote:
| That seems completely sane and fair
| bumby wrote:
| I agree it's fair, but I don't think it's "open-source".
| Open source means "free"; requiring me to give you
| something in return is transactional.
| toolz wrote:
| copy-left is referred to as open source and some even
| claim it's _more_ open source, but thanks for the
| information, I wasn't aware of the that detail.
|
| edit: oh it's not copyleft, but specifically quid pro quo
| so tesla gives you their patents if you give them yours
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yes, it seems we need some kind of designation like
| copyleft for the context of patents or maybe already
| exists one.
|
| Quid pro quo is well adjusted for the context.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Some people don't ignore the fraud, the terrible working
| conditions, the anti-competitive business practices, the
| unfulfilled promises, the stock price manipulation, and
| the cult of personality of a highly controversial leader
| just because of a marketing stunt from more than a decade
| ago which even Elon admits was not altruistic.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > is not capable of it?
|
| > They issued a 127 page
|
| I am sure they wrote a lot of words. But it kinda seems
| like they were wrong given the evidence.
|
| Solar city shut down. The evidence shows that it was a
| poor acquisition.
| eximius wrote:
| Why is your entire comment history defending Tesla, xAI,
| Musk, and Trump? Do you come here to participate in the
| community, the spirit of hacker news, or just respond to
| anything critical of those topics?
| vntok wrote:
| Pointing out disinformation is a valuable thing to do, and
| well in the spirit of hacker news.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I checked through their comment history. They are fixated
| on protecting oligarchs who are currently providing
| disinformation as a service to America's wealthy class.
| Let's please not kid ourselves.
| claytongulick wrote:
| When I read your comment, what I see is "I checked
| through their comment history. They disagree with my
| political viewpoint, so I'm going to use the popular
| talking points from my in-group to attack them."
|
| I glanced through your comment history as well, and I'm
| convinced that you are a lot smarter than that, and can
| add more to the conversation.
| throwawaygmbno wrote:
| Looking through your comment history it seems like you
| use a thesaurus on a few posts so that you can defend
| people like him in other posts.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What about my comment history?!
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > popular talking points from my in-group to attack them
|
| Pointing out that we're currently being de facto ruled by
| a circle of wealthy billionaires and millionaires is not
| a "talking point". This comes across as projection.
|
| > I'm convinced that you are a lot smarter than that
|
| Thank you. I'm not sure what you're looking for me to add
| to the conversation however, I just plainly said what I
| saw, which was them to bat for several oligarchs who are
| currently making a mockery of our country.
| Rexxar wrote:
| In his case, I would often call it "adding noise to the
| signal" and not "pointing out disinformation".
| acdha wrote:
| They've been here for ages but you can basically see what
| happens when you self-identify with a party rather than
| principles and put your intellect to work rationalizing
| positions selected by other people. I miss their
| contributions of a decade ago.
| claytongulick wrote:
| > what happens when you self-identify with a party rather
| than principles and put your intellect to work
| rationalizing positions selected by other people
|
| This is a problem for a lot of people, regardless of
| political spectrum.
|
| When your identity is tied to a political group,
| criticism of that group transfers to criticism of self,
| and there aren't many people that enjoy that.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| That has certainly been the case for the past few decades
| and I, personally, think we may have reached some sort of
| breaking point. The other day on a somewhat popular radio
| show catering to a specific group typically associated
| with one US party the calls to divest from political
| affiliation to a Party as a deciding factor were a lot
| more common and urgent in tone. I know what I think and I
| do think US 2 party system is part of its current set off
| issues, but it was odd to hear some of those thoughts
| expressed in the wild.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the tribe mentality is absolutely
| still there, but for the first time in a while I am
| hearing something akin to 'fuck it'.
| j4coh wrote:
| Wow that's incredible, is it some kind of bot or would a
| human do that for some reason?
| Larrikin wrote:
| There are a huge number of people on this site that are
| heavily invested in early Tesla stock. Their history is
| egregious and likely a sock puppet account like the one
| that flooded the car poll in Germany, but there were many
| people who would defend him to just keep the stock
| healthy
| parasubvert wrote:
| Found Elon's sock
| refurb wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Grandparent is not correct, you can't just assign "whatever"
| value in self-dealing transactions.
|
| The SEC and IRS weren't born yesterday. It reminds me of
| people who come up with basic self-dealing transactions with
| some tax benefit and act like the idea wasn't around 100
| years ago and that regulations aren't already in place.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| The solar city acquisition was for "only" $2.6 billion. This
| deal is way bigger. I'm not sure what the Tesla valuation was
| at the time of that deal, but I have to imagine it's
| proportionally way bigger too. A $45 billion acquisition when
| the acquirer, xAI, has an $80 billion valuation will threaten
| the integrity of xAI. Particularly because that's just a paper
| valuation and xAI doesn't have much of any revenue.
|
| If I were an investor in xAI I would be furious about this.
| They're almost certainly overpaying for Twitter and there's
| definitely going to be litigation.
|
| Edit: It sounds like the combined entity is taking on Twitter's
| $12 billion of debt from when it originally went private. As of
| last December xAI had raised "more than $12 billion" in total
| [1], so the deal attaches Twitter's debt to that ~12 billion
| pot of VC money. Unless I'm really misunderstanding something
| this deal looks like a bailout of Twitter and a huge new
| liability for xAI.
|
| It's definitely possible my hot take is wrong and the xAI
| investors support the transaction. I hope so because if not
| there's going to be some brutal lawsuits over this.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/technology/elon-musk-
| xai-...
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Just keep in mind this is all funny money !
|
| The valuation of those 2 companies combined should be < $10
| billions if we are very very generous.
|
| X is heavily in debt, diminishing user base, and bleeding
| money. 0 profits
|
| xAI is yet to make any actual revenues outside of ... X. Also
| bleeding money
|
| Although I would admit, that these companies are not valued
| based by their economics, but rather on political power they
| provide to the owner.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I'm guessing Tesla is paying xAI to train their FSD model?
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| That would be a shocking conflict of interest - a public
| company paying a private company, which is owned by the
| CEO of the public one ?
|
| All while the same CEO claims that the public company is
| the leader in the field ?
|
| Even by Tesla & Musk lawlessness standard that would be
| too wild.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Don't worry, the Tesla board is totally on top of things.
| ketzo wrote:
| We already have multiple news stories about xAI receiving
| 10,000s of GPUs that were originally meant for Tesla.
| That's about as close to "public company giving private
| company owned by CEO money" as you could possibly get
| without cartoon sacks of cash.
|
| > Even by Tesla & Musk lawlessness standard that would be
| too wild.
|
| Not to be overly snarky here, but, uh: what standard?
| They have proven over and over that they could not give
| less of a shit about either societal norms or the laws of
| the nation.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Now that you say that, Tesla is already paying the Boring
| Company, to build a highly advertised ... short tunnel
| for Tesla Giga factory.
|
| Which they spend 3 years or so building and which seem
| completely useless. The only big unknown would be how
| much Tesla did Boring Company for that.
|
| So yeah...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The entire stack is based on TSLA valuation, which is
| going to tank.
|
| IMO this is going to be meteoric in nature. As in the
| meteor hits the ground.
|
| If the world wasn't perceptibly irrational, I'd short.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Yep, I also believe that we will have a Minsky Moment on
| the entire Muskonomy.
|
| Given his political involvement, I would assume that the
| maximum end date for this house of cards is the date when
| Trump is no longer in power - which is less than 4 years
| away. The real date is probably much sooner, but who
| knows when ?
| strangelove026 wrote:
| For anyone else who wasn't familiar with a Minsky Moment
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/minskymoment.asp
| int_19h wrote:
| But that then means that Musk has a strong incentive to
| keep Trump (or some replacement that will similarly let
| him do whatever he wants) in power past these 4 years.
| usrusr wrote:
| Buying time to get the rocket finished that he will ride
| escaping his creditors to Mars. That would be a badly
| written plot even by the standard of cheesy comic books,
| but somehow it all makes sense from that angle. (no, I
| don't believe that he would ever get within explosion
| range of a rocket engine ignition)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| People do not last in Trump's orbit. I'm shocked Musk has
| lasted as long as he has. I though he'd practically be a
| Scaramucci.
|
| Every six months is a 50% chance of ejection.
| richardw wrote:
| A few hundred billion will buy you a lot of politicians
| in this climate.
| captainbland wrote:
| There is also the "first buddy" benefit. The whole thing
| is being actively rebuilt at a time when Musk has been
| heading a department which, amongst other things, openly
| backdoored the treasury. It's pretty uncharted waters.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Stock market graveyards are full of people that shorted
| TSLA. I remember reading about people who lost it all
| because of a TSLA short at least since 2020. The lesson
| here is that markets can remain irrational longer than we
| can remain solvent.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I remember all the other major shorts.
|
| In those cases, it usually revolved around Tesla
| releasing either the Model 3 or Y, and they were betting
| against Musk's execution in general. What wasn't really
| up for debate (in my mind) was the technological lead or
| the demand in the marketplace for the car.
|
| Essentially, Tesla was primed in both situations for a
| huge market they had to themselves: electrified
| transport.
|
| Now?
|
| - demand is tanking, and the brand is permanently
| damaged, well, as long as Musk is at the helm.
|
| - competitors are everywhere
|
| - technological moat (with respect to EV
| drivetrain/construction) is gone. I could argue their
| cylindrical cells are legacy/semi-obsolete in fact, since
| IMO pouch cells are superior for LFP/sodium ion, and who
| knows what solid state will optimally package.
|
| Anyway, things are VERY different in my opinion.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > The entire stack is based on TSLA valuation, which is
| going to tank.
|
| But it's not is it. Try looking at the trends long term,
| not just YTD. It's remarkably stable, trending upwards.
| Yes it gain a bunch of value from October to
| January/February, which is has lost. Investors seems to
| have traded on the "First Buddy" effect, that didn't
| actually do anything for Tesla, so that value has now
| been removed and we're back on the original trend line.
|
| How the hell drop in sales and lose of brand value hasn't
| caused to stock to absolutely tank is beyond me. Is
| someone artificially keeping the price stable? Do
| investors see something I don't, or they do just not
| care?
| coliveira wrote:
| That's what Tesla shareholders get for not giving Musk
| the $50B that he so much "deserved" to be fully
| "invested" in the company.
| bigtones wrote:
| No, Tesla has their own seperate training supercomputer
| called Dojo that it optimized for computer vision. Its
| one of the top 20 supercomputers in the world by compute.
| sroussey wrote:
| That's all marketing. They have had lots of issues
| getting it put together and working, and is more akin to
| really really really self driving in 2018 we were told.
|
| BTW: find it:
| https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2024/11/
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Yes - it's really really close to FSD as you say ! Here
| is also a nice chart they published 2 years ago:
|
| https://electrek.co/2023/06/21/tesla-dojo-supercomputer-
| is-f...
|
| Definitely on the FSD timeline right now - they are maybe
| at 1% of what they announced they would be today. But
| hey, it's Optimus now !
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| As best I can tell the deal includes paying off $12 billion
| of Twitter debt. So that's real money, though that seems
| like it's basically all of the cash that xAI has raised, so
| if that's the case that's pretty wild.
|
| Edit: I misread, Musk said it's an all-stock deal, so
| you're right, it's all funny money. I think that means the
| combined entity is taking on that debt. It's still great
| for Twitter and bad for xAI investors because the combined
| entity now has both the $12 billion debt and all the VC xAI
| raised.
| wraaath wrote:
| Definitely great for the Twitter investors to be able to
| convert. I think they took a haircut relative to the 42B
| that they came in on, as the 45B includes the 12B debt.
| (42 gets reduced to 33, so 21-22% haircut) xAI also
| raised 6B in December last year at a 45B valuation, and
| then in February, reporting was that xAI was trying to
| raise 10B more at the 75B valuation... so this is where
| the frothiness of AI helps to mask the fundamentals. Can
| gets kicked down the road.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Definitely, and a lot of that haircut actually happened
| in between when the deal was signed and when it closed,
| too. That was right when interest rates went up and Musk
| tried to wriggle out of the purchase agreement. So it's a
| great outcome for Twitter investors, assuming it sticks.
| j4coh wrote:
| And assuming the xAI stock they traded their X stock for
| is worth anything.
| wraaath wrote:
| Also - the wording on the deal: xAI being valued at 80B X
| being valued at 33B Is the xAI 80B number inclusive of
| the 33B (45B including debt)? That would back into xAI's
| valuation moving backwards since the December round.
| Usually when venture-backed companies tout a valuation
| after a capital raise, it's post-money... and they're not
| chest-thumping a 113B number (which they surely would
| have given 9 figures)
| wraaath wrote:
| And.. looks like there was an update on the valuation
| from Bloomberg: Aggregate over 100B, but less than 113B
| due to some mingled ownership.
|
| https://archive.is/esoEN
| pqtyw wrote:
| The are getting xAI stock instead of cash though and it's
| not really clear how liquid it will be.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Every time I see deals like this that are going to be
| such raw deals for the majority of those who invested it
| feels like a keen reminder that all the talk of market
| efficiency the pro caps in Washington talk about are full
| of it
|
| This is a terrible and inefficient use of money. It's
| inevitable that this paper house will fall over
| selectodude wrote:
| Markets are plenty efficient. They've just lit billions
| of dollars on fire that used to belong to people stupid
| enough to believe in Elon Musk.
| no_wizard wrote:
| That isn't efficient by any commonly understood
| definition of the word
| riffraff wrote:
| Tesla is still worth something like a forward PE of 90
| and a trailing PE of 130, among plummeting sales and
| market share.
|
| It's still wildly overvalued, and at it's unclear how
| long the market will stay irrational.
| Epa095 wrote:
| It's so hard to make predictions of Teslas value in
| today's political system! Musk is very very close to
| power, and it's impossible to say how that will play out.
| Will Tesla be the only car company without 25% tariffs?
| Will the government spend billions to buy Teslas? Or will
| Tesla die and Musk live of space-X?
| psd1 wrote:
| He's not "close to power". He's cutting your nation into
| shreds, unopposed.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Megacorp market valuations are extremely bizarre because
| they're in a sense self-fulfilling. If your company has a
| market cap in the hundreds of billions of dollars then it
| has lower capital costs than competitors. If you want to
| build another factory, you're paying less in interest.
| Which means you can undercut the competition on price, or
| expand into grid storage or data centers etc.
|
| Obviously you then have to actually do those things
| before the value crashes, so whether it works or not
| depends on whether investors continue to expect you to.
|
| The _current_ value fluctuations have more to do with
| politics than the company. The media is writing a lot of
| negative stories right now, but they also have the
| attention span of a goldfish and ultimately some new
| Current Thing will replace the existing one.
| daveguy wrote:
| Ahhh, I dunno, musk is pretty good at fucking his own
| companies with Nazi salutes and wreckless incompetent
| destruction. Doesn't really take any big bad media to see
| what a fucknut musk is.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The media is the thing that characterizes it as "Nazi
| salutes" and "wreckless incompetent destruction".
|
| The guy is an eccentric with autism, not an angel or the
| devil. He's not always right. But everything is so
| polarized right now that people are barely willing to
| concede that it's _possible_ for someone to be right
| _some of the time_.
|
| Teslas have the positive characteristics that they don't
| run on petroleum and have good safety ratings. They have
| the negative characteristics that they have privacy
| issues and you can't get parts or documentation to fix
| them yourself. A strong heuristic to tell if someone is
| using motivated reasoning is if the thing they're
| complaining about is an unrelated political hot button
| well-known to produce outrage (e.g. allegations of
| somehow simultaneously secret and open fascist ideology)
| as opposed to a way they're _actually_ screwing someone
| illegitimately but in a way that doesn 't cause most
| people to experience an immediate visceral response (e.g.
| mass surveillance, right to repair).
|
| You can also tell it's that when the target is actually
| doing a bad thing, but the people objecting only care
| about the target and not anyone else doing the same
| thing. This is extremely common with corruption
| allegations. All corruption is bad, you need systems in
| place to constrain government officials from bilking the
| taxpayer, but this is a process problem where you need
| stronger checks and balances to prevent the government
| from transferring money to cronies, not a "we need to
| somehow elect only infallible humans" problem where what
| people actually mean is that they just want their guy to
| get in so the money goes to their cronies instead.
| Rzor wrote:
| I fail to see the efficiency part. Care to elaborate?
| rambambram wrote:
| Garbage collection - although not pretty - is still
| necessary.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I smell margin call desperation. Musk got visibly worried
| with tanking Tesla stock and pulled out some crazy stops
| to keep Tesla afloat.
|
| Remember, these megabillionaires are due to stock
| valuations, and live rich lifestyles on the basis of
| lending against the value of stock. If that value drops
| and a margin call forces actual selling, then Musk loses
| shares in Tesla.
|
| I have to think this stunt is related to Musk needing
| some liquidity somehow, or being unable to cover private
| liquidity crunch with public assets.
|
| TSLA is ludicrously overvalued. P/E is 150, based on Q4
| earnings which were 1/3 "real" revenue, 1/3 mark-to-
| market-BTC (aka one shot), 1/3 CAFE/subsidies which Trump
| will nuke in 6 months.
|
| But the "real" earnings that were already flat in Q4 are
| seeing a huge drop in EU/CN and who knows in the US. If
| "real" revenue drops 20%, the "real" earnings might drop
| 70% or more.
|
| Anyway, that 150 p/e is ACTUALLY 450 in my mind, but
| after Q1 reports it will ACTUALLY be almost 1000 or
| worse.
|
| The only thing keeping the stock afloat is AI hype, but
| 1000 p/e ratios are for people with market dominance and
| fundamental leads on competitors. Tesla is arguably
| middle of the road in both self driving and robots.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Tesla is still worth more than it was 6 months ago. I
| don't think a margin call based on borrowing a few years
| ago is likely.
| immibis wrote:
| When is the first earnings call after everyone realized
| Musk was a Nazi?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Q1 sales call.
|
| I was trying to stay apolitical but a CEO doing Nazi
| salute and not being fired is uncharted waters, at least
| in the last 80-85 years.
|
| I keep going back to the horsemeat episodes on mad men,
| and the papa johns CEO getting booted. This is simply
| unprecedented in brand management. Brands take decades to
| build, and are especially important for car companies.
| mrweasel wrote:
| People tend to only look at the drop from January until
| now, but if you look back a little further it seems clear
| that the market was expecting some payout from Musks
| relationship to Trump. When that's didn't really amounted
| to anything, the stock price just dropped down to it's
| September 2024 level and continued from there, as if
| October - January didn't happen.
|
| What surprises me is that the drop in sales numbers seems
| to have zero effect on the stock price, at least not yet.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The earnings call for Q1 2025 hasn't happened yet. Those
| usually happen at the end of the first month of the
| subsequent quarter.
| j4coh wrote:
| If it's an all stock acquisition did it generate any
| liquidity?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Sort of: it put Twitter's LBO debt on X.ai's books. I
| strongly suspect Elon had been lending X money to cover
| interest payments. Both X.ai and X are privately held, so
| specifics will be hard to come by.
| chatmasta wrote:
| This doesn't strike me as an objective assessment of the
| state of affairs.
|
| You could make the same "bleeding money" comment about many
| historical social media acquisitions - at least Twitter has
| advertising and subscription revenue. And it's similarly
| suspect to argue that xAI is failing due to lack of
| revenue, without mentioning the astronomical valuations of
| its peers in the AI space, many of which are not only
| lacking revenue but also have no distribution channel
| comparable to the scale of Twitter/X.
|
| xAI has one of the leading models in terms of investment
| and user base, and it's rapidly improving on its evaluation
| metrics.
|
| Twitter/X is one of the Top 10, if not Top 5, social media
| properties worldwide. It has hundreds of millions of
| monthly active users and maintains the lead in public
| consciousness as the "go to" place for 1-N broadcasting of
| information. While Bluesky shows promise, it won't be
| dethroning Twitter any time soon. When has Bluesky been the
| source of breaking news?
|
| And you cannot separate these two businesses. Twitter/X and
| X.ai are fundamentally coupled to one another. Twitter is
| not only a data source for X.ai but also a distribution and
| retention channel. There is an "ask Grok" button under
| every Tweet. And it's not the only LLM that can be summoned
| via Tweet - with similar automations from companies like
| Perplexity proving there is value in the channel - but it
| _is_ the only LLM with a native integration into the
| interface and first dibs on freshly-generated user content
| and breaking news.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're missing the fact that Twitter has essentially 0
| advertising revenue compared to the other major social
| networks, as all major ad networks have stopped doing
| business with Twitter (this in turn being because of the
| very high likelihood that their ads would be shown next
| to content that their clients didn't want to be
| associated with, such as images of Hitler).
| ekianjo wrote:
| > diminishing user base
|
| Where are you getting this from? All numbers I see indicate
| the user base has been growing globally.
| https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
| cycomanic wrote:
| Mmh, that source is showing a 10% drop in users for
| September 2023 the last point, which was notably before
| alternatives like bluesky and others were starting off.
| Also note that since Musk took the company private we
| don't really know how accurate these numbers are.
|
| So I'd argue that the statement theat Twitter/X is
| bleeding users can't be conclusively decided, but it
| seems your statement that Twitter has been growing
| globally is incorrect at least for the last reported
| quarter.
| rockskon wrote:
| Elon made a post about user growth being stagnant.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| And how many of those are real people and not ever
| increasing numbers of bots?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Elon saying what the numbers are is the most unreliable
| thing.
| 1024core wrote:
| > and xAI doesn't have much of any revenue or assets.
|
| xAI does have some pretty massive datacenters with 200K+
| GPUs.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Fair enough, edited to just revenue. But those are just
| datacenters bought with VC money - my intent was to say
| that xAI's resources are basically just the investment
| they've received.
| User23 wrote:
| You can't just pull out the corporate Amex and buy a
| world class datacenter. There is considerable value add
| there.
| sroussey wrote:
| They used Tesla's Amex for that one.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| We don't know that it's a world class data center, we
| only know how many GPUs they bought. For all we know,
| half of them could be staying on shelvez, and the whole
| data center could run for 5 hours a day: there's no
| public info on how well they're doing.
| anon3459 wrote:
| Bro why are you so negative on every comment haha you
| really leak your negativity on musk companies.
|
| It is a fact that grok3 is a strong competitive model.
| Surely it had to be trained somewhere? They went from 0
| to what they have now in 1 year
| pqtyw wrote:
| Doesn't mean the company is worth $40 billion though...
| Or even a quarter of that.
| michaelwilson wrote:
| Wait, wasn't there a "sweetener" for recent X debt buyers
| that they'd get XAI stock?
|
| The levels of .. self-fertilizing transactions here boggles
| the mind. I guess that's the idea.
| knowriju wrote:
| xAI is a private company. I very much doubt that the current
| VC investors will ever litigate this. They are all waiting
| for some other favour for taking this on either explicitly or
| implicitly. Also, I would like to see a Venn diagram of the
| investors in xAI and SpaceX.
| samr71 wrote:
| They're gonna go public and the market cap will be at ~$300B
| within a year or two
| rozap wrote:
| My guess is that there's an added grift, er...benefit here;
| since the federal government is now (apparently) in the
| business of subsidizing AI companies, we'll effectively see the
| failing social media platform get subsidized by the federal
| government.
|
| I'm certain we'll see a pile of public funds handed over the
| xAI in the future.
| timewizard wrote:
| DOGE for thee but not for me!
| rozap wrote:
| I mean, that was always a grift to anyone with two brain
| cells to rub together .
| timewizard wrote:
| The government spends 1 out every 5 dollars of GDP. It
| probably does need a better mechanism for managing costs
| and outlays. Having one of the "richest men in the world"
| be in charge of it is ridiculous.
|
| That's Trump for you. Populism up front, oligarchy in the
| back.
| fastball wrote:
| Not sure that tracks.
|
| Oligarchy is generally how people who don't deserve
| wealth can get it. As pointed out by you, that doesn't
| exactly apply to the world's (already) richest man.
|
| And who exactly would you look for to help the federal
| government build "a better mechanism for managing costs
| and outlays", if not someone who has built multiple
| successful businesses (managing costs and outlays at
| impressive scale) in very different industries?
| timewizard wrote:
| > Oligarchy is generally how people who don't deserve
| wealth can get it.
|
| No that's just one of it's outcomes. The proper
| definition would be "a small group of people having
| control of a country, organization, or institution."
|
| > that doesn't exactly apply to the world's (already)
| richest man.
|
| Given the appropriate definition and his involvement in
| owning not only a social media company but also having a
| role in federal government policy and now apparently
| investigations I am completely baffled by your assertion.
|
| > And who exactly would you look for to help the federal
| government build
|
| I figured someone would summon this fallacy. He has
| acquired wealth. This does not demonstrate any skill in
| spending tax payer money efficiently in a regulated
| environment. This is particularly true if you're willing
| to assume that oligarchy played some part in his
| acquisition in the first place.
|
| > if not someone who has built multiple successful
| businesses
|
| He likes to call himself a founder. Of business that
| already existed and he purchases a controlling share in.
| It's amazing that people accept this distortion of
| reality.
|
| > managing costs and outlays at impressive scale
|
| Presumably he has people on the payroll who do this. I
| imagine that the entire financial success of these
| companies is not down to a single person. How does he
| find time to do anything in a day?
|
| I imagine the federal government could, you know, just do
| the same thing. Hire qualified professionals to do the
| job?
|
| > Not sure that tracks.
|
| Outside of the reality distortion field that some people
| willingly occupy it most certainly does.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Really is crazy to seriously say Elon is really good for
| the job
|
| > It's amazing that people accept this distortion of
| reality.
|
| Indeed
| skinnymuch wrote:
| That isn't what oligarchy means. It has never meant that
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The govt isn't a business. Do you really want the list of
| people who would be better than Elon fucking Musk? It
| would take forever. This has the same energy as believing
| what Doge says because they have a simple table saying so
| windexh8er wrote:
| The assertion that Musk built Tesla, SpaceX, and
| SolarCity is peak absurdity.
| Difwif wrote:
| What a bizarre thing to say.
| wesapien wrote:
| Peter Urchin says it is a plutocracy particular with the
| patch called Citizens United
| fastball wrote:
| Isn't X more profitable than Twitter was?
| kacesensitive wrote:
| Yeah it is more profitable but revenues are way down.
|
| In 2021, the last full year before Musk's acquisition,
| Twitter generated $5.08 billion in revenue.
|
| Under Musk's ownership, X's revenue has declined
| significantly. In 2024, X reported $2.7 billion in revenue,
| which is nearly half of its pre-acquisition level. For
| 2025, global ad revenue is projected to grow to $2.26
| billion, marking its first annual increase since the
| acquisition.
|
| So yes on paper, X is more profitable than Twitter was
| before the acquisition. Its 2024 adjusted EBITDA nearly
| doubled Twitter's best year, despite a much smaller revenue
| base. But whether that profitability is sustainable or
| comes at too high a cost--strategically, reputationally,
| and culturally--remains an open question.
| raydev wrote:
| You didn't actually show profitability here. I think if
| it were actually profitable, Musk would've hyped it up.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Lol, who did the adjusting!? ... Good old "adjusted
| EBITDA".
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I thought self dealing was usually illegal. I can't sell my
| family member my house for $1 for example. But you can do the
| same thing with companies?
| rayiner wrote:
| You can sell your house to a family member for $1. (There
| might be tax implications if you sell a $100,000 property for
| $1 to avoid gift tax limits or whatever, but that's a
| separate issue.) I sold my car to my sister in law for $1.
|
| Self dealing is also permissible with companies. Corporate
| officers and directors must still meet their fiduciary duties
| to shareholders. And the potential for conflict of interest
| changes how courts will evaluate the transaction if a
| shareholder complains about a breach of fiduciary duties.
| Ordinarily, in Delaware, operate transactions are protected
| by the "business judgment rule" that gives wide latitude to
| corporate officers and directors.
| https://plusblog.org/2023/11/28/the-business-judgement-
| rule-.... But if there is self dealing, courts will
| scrutinize the actual fairness of the transaction. But self
| dealing isn't per se impermissible.
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| This is why many states base the sales tax of used cars
| sales on the market value, not the actual sales price.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Sales tax was already paid when it was new, the state got
| its due. That kind of idiotic policy is how expensive and
| collector cars get owned under an LLC and the LLC changes
| hands rather than the title. Thus the rich bypass all
| that BS it's only for the gullible plebs.
| glial wrote:
| Sounds like tax evasion.
| ty6853 wrote:
| You mean avoidance.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > I can't sell my family member my house for $1 for example
|
| In most countries you absolutely can. The difference between
| market value and the sale price might be considered and taxed
| as a gift, but such a deal is generally not prohibited.
| xinan wrote:
| If I overpay for a house, shouldn't it be taxed as a gift
| too? :p
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Depends on the circumstances, but quite possibly?
| piokoch wrote:
| Obviously you can sell house for $1 to a family member, this
| will not help to avoid taxes though, as tax office for taxing
| purposes evaluates value of the house independently.
| pjdemers wrote:
| I know for certain that in Virginia you can sell a house for
| any price you want, because I transferred one to a family
| member for zero. Of course the county's assessor had other
| ideas about the value for tax purposes, but the official deed
| was recorded at $0.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Yes, self-dealing is illegal when taken to mean a precise
| legal term; a fiduciary using that position to carry out a
| transaction in their own self-interest and against the
| interests of their beneficiaries.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes, and just like anti-trust law doesn't make monopolies
| illegal, it's not the self-dealing that's illegal, it's the
| abuse of the process (as you say).
| WalterBright wrote:
| The only way to determine fair market value is by having a free
| market sale.
|
| For example, I had a run-in with the property tax assessor. He
| assessed my house at an unreasonably high price. I filed a
| protest, and then had a conversation with him. I offered to
| sell him the house at a considerably lower price, and he could
| then flip it for what he assessed it at.
|
| He refused.
|
| I eventually did sell it, for considerably less than the
| assessed value.
|
| As anyone following stocks knows, the fair market value of a
| company can vary dramatically minute by minute.
| mtmail wrote:
| Can we speculate if X's CTO didn't like the reorg? 3 days ago
| "X's director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company "
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43470613
| ein0p wrote:
| More likely Musk liked xAI's CTO more than X's CTO, and parted
| ways with one of them. Which is his prerogative, as the owner
| of both companies. I'm sure Haofei would love to be the CTO of
| one of the strongest AI models in existence. I would, if I were
| in his shoes.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| "strongest AI models in existence"
|
| [citation needed]
| llm_nerd wrote:
| To be fair they said one of the strongest models.
|
| We're at the point now where any heavily monetized player
| can build one of the strongest models. I mean, _especially_
| with all of the incredibly open Chinese companies releasing
| cutting edge research now that most American firms have
| gone quiet or only releasing their tailings.
| foobarian wrote:
| Technically my toy Markov chain I trained on Gutenberg
| books is one of the strongest models.
| ikiris wrote:
| If you used real chain it definitely has the most
| strength.
| ein0p wrote:
| See the leaderboard tab here: https://lmarena.ai. Or just
| try it. It's excellent. Usage is free of charge so far.
| Subjectively, on my prompts, it seems substantially
| stronger than GPT 4o and 4.5. I also like its more
| "informal" tone, and its willingness to discuss the more
| controversial topics.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| I think it's important to not support products by people
| who want to destroy democracy and who openly sieg heiling
| or claiming Hitler wasn't responsible for the Holocaust.
| gwern wrote:
| On the bright side, Google's new Gemini-2.5-pro comes
| with no Holocaust-denying issues, and is definitely a lot
| better than Grok, and is _also_ free and fast.
|
| (I've been using it the past 2 days and am pretty
| impressed - the first high-end Google model I'd willingly
| use instead of GPT-4.5 or Claude-3.7.)
| ein0p wrote:
| Meh. Google can keep its censorship and algorithmic
| narrative steering for itself, IMO. Quis custodiet ipsos
| custodes, or something like that.
| gwern wrote:
| The Gemini models have become notorious for being rather
| uncensored and unrestricted, with an oddly base-model-
| like feel, since at least last November.
| arandomusername wrote:
| > people who want to destroy democracy
|
| citation needed
|
| > claiming Hitler wasn't responsible for the Holocaust
|
| citation needed
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Just one of many news media reporting about it:
| https://usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/14/elon-
| mus...
|
| Elon is part of the government who are committed to carry
| out the project 2025 agenda which was devised by the
| heritage foundation. Their aim is to destroy democratic
| institutions.
|
| They are now trying to find how to let Trump have a third
| term.
|
| Look up what Elon is doing in Wisconsin, bribing voters
| to get a judge replaced.
|
| If you can't see the damage currently being done by the
| Trump admin, then please do your research.
|
| To be an informed citizen requires more than writing
| 'citation needed'.
| arandomusername wrote:
| > "Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn't murder millions of
| people. Their public sector employees did."
|
| Clearly disingenuous reporting. He's saying they didn't
| kill them directly (true), not that they are not
| responsible. Another way to read it, is that the people
| who carried out the killings are also to be blamed, not
| just the guy who gave the order.
|
| Also, why, out of that quote, did you only single out the
| holocaust? Stalin and Mao both have killed considerably
| more than the holocaust, so why did you only focus on
| "claiming Hitler wasn't responsible for the Holocaust"?
|
| > They are now trying to find how to let Trump have a
| third term.
|
| Bullshit and you know it. There's nothing to support
| this.
|
| > Look up what Elon is doing in Wisconsin, bribing voters
| to get a judge replaced.
|
| Is it that much different than what all the lobbying
| groups do? AIPAC or George Soros? Sure they may not bribe
| voters directly, but they spend billions on lobbying for
| their side, to a high degree of success.
|
| > If you can't see the damage currently being done by the
| Trump admin, then please do your research.
|
| Only damage I see is the one to my stocks and crypto.
|
| > To be an informed citizen requires more than writing
| 'citation needed'.
|
| If you are going to make a wild claim, it's on you to
| provide evidence.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| > Clearly disingenuous reporting. He's saying they didn't
| kill them directly (true), not that they are not
| responsible.
|
| Why is he comparing Fed workers to Hitler's minions in
| the first place? Is he trying to say Fed workers are
| complicit in a major crime committed against humanity.
|
| > Bullshit and you know it. There's nothing to support
| this.
|
| So Steve Bannon is lying?
|
| > Only damage I see is the one to my stocks and crypto
|
| What about cuts to the VA, impacting thousands of
| veterans?
|
| And don't you think ignoring the rule of law harms our
| democracy?
|
| Don't you think alienating our allies harms us.
|
| Don't you think cutting USAID funding and losing our soft
| power will
|
| Don't you think spreading lies after lies to divide the
| nation will harm democracy?
|
| Anyway, since you seem to be OK with how things are
| going, what would you say to folks who are worried about
| America's future - to calm them down?
|
| How will the life of Americans improve under Trump v2.0?
| arandomusername wrote:
| > Why is he comparing Fed workers to Hitler's minions in
| the first place? Is he trying to say Fed workers are
| complicit in a major crime committed against humanity.
|
| My interpretation of the tweet is that the workers are
| responsible for what they do and following orders is not
| a valid excuse. I have no idea why he would bring that up
| with in regards to fed workers. You have to really reach
| to think he meant Hitler wasn't responsible for the
| holocaust (again, why did you only bring up the holocaust
| out of the three names?).
|
| Not to mention that Elon is a puppet of the Jews. Ben
| Shapiro literally led him like a dog through auschwitz.
| Trump, the one he helped get elected, extremely pro
| Israel and is surrounded by pro-Israel/Jewish members.
|
| > So Steve Bannon is lying?
|
| Maybe? I don't care for what he says. His word is as
| valuable as dirt to me.
|
| > What about cuts to the VA, impacting thousands of
| veterans?
|
| Don't they only want to cut employees? And VA has 482k
| employees, unbelievable number.
|
| > And don't you think ignoring the rule of law harms our
| democracy?
|
| I think blocking the democratically elected president
| from enacting the things he run on, harms your democracy.
|
| > Don't you think alienating our allies harms us.
|
| Short term hurt, long term benefit to all. As an EU
| citizen, I will be glad to get rid of US influence here,
| as it's nothing but DEI, wokism and pro-Israel agenda.
|
| > Don't you think spreading lies after lies to divide the
| nation will harm democracy?
|
| Like the 51 officials that signed the biden laptop thing?
| Both sides lie through their teeth consistently.
|
| > Anyway, since you seem to be OK with how things are
| going, what would you say to folks who are worried about
| America's future - to calm them down?
|
| Touch grass.
|
| > How will the life of Americans improve under Trump
| v2.0?
|
| Realistically, it won't change for shit. Just like it
| barely did under Trump v1.0, or Biden, or Obama.
|
| If you are an Israeli though, your life might improve.
| kelnos wrote:
| Agreed, but that's not really related to the question at
| hand.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| In normal times I wouldn't have done this.
|
| But we are at a point in history where everyone who
| believes in upholding democratic values needs to call out
| those in power who are actively trying to destroy it.
|
| Vote with your wallet.
|
| And it's risky to build your product on top of Grok's
| platform, because its owner is totally unstable and you
| don't want to be exposed to ketamine fuelled decision
| making that could negatively impact your business.
| int_19h wrote:
| If you use the free version, you're basically draining
| his money.
| purpleidea wrote:
| Ask any mainstream U.S. model anything remotely sexual
| and they all abort. Musk et al. claim they want free
| speech and no censorship, yet the U.S. evangelicals have
| their teeth so deep into the tech, that they block it or
| debank anyone who even remotely suggests women should
| have a pleasurable sexual experience.
| croes wrote:
| Yep, it's pretty smart
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-
| donal...
| rsoto2 wrote:
| no thanks
| legitster wrote:
| As a reminder, the people who held X's debt had written down the
| company's value to less than $10 billion. So selling your company
| to yourself for $45 billion dollars is hilarious chicanery.
|
| Musk used his extremely overvalued company to bail out his other
| way overvalued company that he ran into the ground. It's a
| thinly-veiled, self dealing ponzi scheme. (It also echos the
| final fate of Solar City).
| tim333 wrote:
| Another interesting bit of finance is X's last earnings were
| quite good but if you looked at what the sales consisted of I
| think about $500m was XAi paying to advertise/have Grok on X
| which seemed a bit iffy.
| verytrivial wrote:
| I for one hope this all ends really, really badly for him and his
| backers.
| fixprix wrote:
| I hope like the previous 20 years, his companies just get more
| and more successful. I like electric cars, and rockets, and AI,
| and tunnels, and brain implants, and less government spending,
| and real people with flaws.
| verytrivial wrote:
| At least the trains will run on time.
| karparov wrote:
| "... seeking the truth ..."
|
| Hahaha, ha ha, ha...
|
| Maybe more accurate to say "spreading _my_ truth ".
| maxlin wrote:
| Summer child you don't really know how CN's work now do you
| saaaaaam wrote:
| So he just sold himself a company he already owns for a valuation
| that he himself assigned to that company but that was less than
| what he paid for it, and he paid entirely using "money" that has
| a made up value and which he issues himself?
|
| Wild.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| Welcome to very-late-stage capitalism.
|
| And if you can get the right people to believe in the
| arbitrarily large numbers you invented out of thin air you can
| get away with just about anything because the wealthy don't
| have any real consequences.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| > very-late-stage
|
| The cope is alive and well.
|
| "aaaany time now it will all fall apart"
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| Capitalism will fall in 2 more weeks comrade, trust the plan
| mingus88 wrote:
| Yeah these fantasies where musk would somehow go bankrupt by
| tanking Tesla and overpaying for Twitter were also wild
|
| He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known.
| He's never going to suffer financially. He has countless levers
| of power he can pull.
|
| The same fantasy applies to any past or current president ever
| spending a day in jail. He literally commands the most powerful
| military apparatus the world has ever seen. Even a sliver of
| that capability and influence ensures nobody will ever dare to
| try and slap some cuffs on him
| LanceJones wrote:
| He only holds ~15% of Tesla. His real money is in SpaceX...
| 50% ownership there. I wish people would think just a little
| before parroting the "hit Musk where it hurts" drivel.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| My quick search is showing Tesla is worth some $800B. 15%
| of that is real money.
| kelnos wrote:
| 15% of that is paper money, heavily levered against. If
| he tries to sell even 2% of that in order to turn it into
| _actual_ real money, the remaining 13% will be worth
| less, because a sell-off will lower the stock price.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Of course, just selling a single stock will lower the
| price of other stocks. But the dropoff is nowhere close
| to what you are implying. He has sold lots of stock over
| the years and somehow Tesla stock price didn't drop that
| much.
|
| I feel like you used 'worth less' to imply 'worthless'.
| But this is far from the case, 13% would still be a
| gigantic pile of 'money'.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| At the rate he's going, SpaceX is probably on its way to
| being nationalized within the next few elections.
|
| And that would make sense totally aside from punitive
| response: it is pretty dangerous to have such vital defense
| infrastructure controlled by such a mercurial personality.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes let's just have a fascist government that can seize
| private property because they declare it "dangerous." I
| see no way that could go bad.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Some research may be warranted on your part before you
| have a kneejerk reaction. The US has nationalized
| businesses in the past even when those business were
| solvent [1]. SpaceX would of course be a larger case and
| much more politically fraught, but I don't think
| nationalizing SpaceX automatically makes it a fascist
| government.
|
| Oh, and you may want to look up eminent domain. The
| government regularly seizes private property and even
| does so effectively on behalf of other private entities.
| If you're actually consistent on your framing then you'd
| have to admit you've lived your whole life under what you
| consider a fascist government regardless of political
| affiliation. For example, here's [2] Trump using the
| government's eminent domain power (before he was
| president) to take property from another private entity.
| And here he is doing the same thing [3] as president.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-
| owned_enterprises_of_the...
|
| [2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/donald-trumps-
| eminent-domain...
|
| [3] https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol84/iss2/3/
| fallingknife wrote:
| Your source states that the nationalization was done
| either in the case where the government was owed a debt
| by the nationalized company or in the case of the
| railroads, where they were seized to ensure the
| continuation of a vital service where the company
| providing it was insolvent. Neither of these conditions
| apply to any of Elon Musk's companies.
|
| Eminent domain is a process where the private property is
| seized (with the government required to pay fair market
| value) in order to use that land for some public purpose
| that it is not currently being used for. This could
| potentially be done to property owned by Elon Musk, but
| not for the justification that he has too much power. And
| also it must be specifically land that is seized, not
| equity in a company.
|
| If congress passed a law seizing his property, or the
| government initiated eminent domain against all of his
| company's properties, it would be obvious that it was
| Elon Musk being targeted and not any legitimate public
| need for a piece of land. This is a called a bill of
| attainder and is unconstitutional.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
| rl3 wrote:
| Massive conflicts of interest exist between him and
| foreign adversaries of the US:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-
| conversat...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-envoy-says-
| russia...
|
| If this were the Cold War, we'd have already seen USG
| freak out and move to nationalize.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The US government's behavior when freaking out during the
| cold war reads like a list of things that governments
| shouldn't do.
| wavefunction wrote:
| Musk can be fairly compensated and US national security
| preserved via nationalization.
| nomel wrote:
| How much is SpaceX worth? How do you even calculate that,
| knowing that a long term plan includes Mars colonization,
| astroid mining, etc, with it having a near monopoly on
| space transport, at the moment?
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Some multiple on the last funding round (perhaps a
| multiple <1) would be perfectly sufficient.
|
| Declaring my company has plans to build a Dyson sphere
| doesn't make it suddenly worth infinity money, and even
| if you believe it does, that belief won't stop the US
| government from seizing it.
| nomel wrote:
| You're irrational. They had $13B revenue in 2024, and
| profit > $4B, with the profit of the previous two years
| covering ~60% of their _total accumulated funding to
| date_.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Let's replay this.
|
| You: how would you even value SpaceX?
|
| Me: Some multiple of their last funding round
|
| You: You're irrational. They made money last year.
|
| What?
|
| Do you think earning a profit makes your company
| uncountably valuable? Or earning a profit and adding some
| promises on top? Neither is true!
|
| These aren't real problems in _any_ scenario and
| _certainly_ not in the scenario of "hello the United
| States of America is seizing your company, here's a check
| we think is fair."
| nomel wrote:
| I responded to what you _actually_ wrote in your previous
| comment:
|
| > Some multiple on the last funding round (perhaps a
| multiple <1)
|
| The irrational part is that it could possibly be a
| fraction of their last round of funding. Do you agree it
| would have to be a multiple _much_ greater than 1, since
| their last round of funding (750 million) was a small
| fraction of their profit last year, and they are on the
| path of exceeding their _total accumulated funding for
| all rounds_ in another two years?
|
| I've _never_ seen a profiting company valued based on
| their last round of funding, especially a fraction of it.
| Do you have any examples of this, in the real world?
| kelnos wrote:
| Well now you're just quibbling about the amount; it seems
| you _do_ agree that SpaceX _can_ be valued. You just don
| 't agree with the <1 multiple the GP suggested. So ok,
| how about a 4x multiple? 8x? Whatever! Private companies
| can be valued; it's done every day. SpaceX is not an
| exception here.
|
| Musk can say he's going to colonize Mars or mine
| asteroids, but the markets are perfectly capable of
| deciding on how likely (or unlikely) it is that he'll
| succeed, and price accordingly.
|
| Colonizing Mars is a money-loser. It could completely
| tank the company. What business model involves colonizing
| Mars and then making a profit off that?
|
| Mining asteroids is something we're so far away from that
| it's not worth baking in at that point. With current
| technology, it's far, far, far cheaper just to mine on
| Earth, even for things that are relatively rare.
| tombert wrote:
| I know that they claim their long term plan is Mars
| colonization and asteroid mining, but frankly I think
| those are lies.
|
| It cost the Diablo cheater nothing to simply lie about
| this, they have no concrete plans on how to get to Mars
| or establish a colony, they still can't even get to the
| moon, with the deadlines being pushed back years at a
| time and getting increasingly more convoluted.
|
| I'd be happy enough to be wrong, if we can get people on
| Mars in our lifetime that would be pretty cool, but Elon
| lies and embellishes nearly everything, and there's
| basically no consequence to lying or embellishing "plans"
| to colonize Mars.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| The Mars colonization thing is worth so little that it'd
| eclipse everything else and make the company worth
| negative dollars, if he ever really puts them all in on
| it. It's pure fantasy. Mars sucks. It sucks very, very,
| very much. It sucks more than a nuclear-holocausted Earth
| that's also had a decent size (but not crust-liquefying)
| impact and an insanely bad climate disaster, at once.
| It's an awful place.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| I would be much more sympathetic to this argument if we
| hadn't seen Musk and the other oligarchs get away with
| anything and everything over the past two decades.
| Especially now that Musk holds a position of very
| considerable power in the administration, and without the
| approval of congress.
|
| It seems to me that Musk may very well spend the next 4
| years cutting everything he can from NASA, NOAA, the Post
| Office, and other federal agencies. Those capabilities
| will still be needed, and it is clear from the stated
| goals of those steering this administration [1] that they
| intend to steer as much as possible into private
| enterprises. Many of those enterprises are owned by Musk
| himself.
|
| I don't know about you, but I see a major conflict of
| interest with one person both guiding the privatization
| process and profiting from it. If we do see a case where
| he steers federal funds from government agencies into a
| private company - at the cost of the ability of our
| government to execute critical functions without
| enriching Musk himself - then I have absolutely no issue
| with reclaiming those capabilities.
|
| [1] https://qz.com/donald-trump-privatize-us-government-
| project-...
| kelnos wrote:
| Yup, I agree that this is the playbook here.
|
| Some of the cuts will just be cuts, and those services
| will be gone, in case where Trump's and Musk's cronies
| don't think they can build a profitable business around
| them. Others will just get pushed into private hands, and
| then when progressive administrations come into power,
| any attempt to bring those functions back into the
| federal government will get lobbied out of existence.
|
| If lobbyists can do comparatively low-stakes stuff like
| keep the IRS from sending people pre-filled tax returns,
| you better believe lobbyists can keep NASA, NOAA, USPS,
| etc. privatized once they're dismantled.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I agree on the conflict of interest part, but that
| conflict can be removed by winning elections and not some
| authoritarian seizure of private property. If Democrats
| controlled the government to the point that they can
| seize private property, he wouldn't be in government in
| the first place and there would be no conflict.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| This whole narrative of "big government with lots of
| power = bad" doesn't really apply anymore. US has shown
| the citizens no longer deserve the freedom that they had,
| because we can't be responsible with it.
|
| We do need a big powerful government full of Democrats to
| run things. US economy grew under democratic agenda, and
| Democrats have proven that they actually do give a fuck
| about the country, so they should have more power to
| unilaterally exact laws and legislation without trying to
| appeal to the Republican voter base.
|
| Because if you want to make the argument that this will
| tank the economy as free market capitalism is reigned in,
| that also doesn't fly considering the economy is being
| tanked right now. The difference is, under Dems, once
| things stabilize, everyone will be better off.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You are why I vote Republican
| kelnos wrote:
| Ah yes, the classic "your rhetoric annoys me so I'll
| instead vote to burn everything down and I don't care who
| gets hurt in the process". Good reasoning, there.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Annoyance has nothing to do with it. It is the
| authoritarian morally superior attitude expressed by this
| statement that is so prevalent among Democrats.
|
| > they should have more power to unilaterally exact laws
| and legislation without trying to appeal to the
| Republican voter base
|
| > US has shown the citizens no longer deserve the freedom
| that they had,
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Im glad you do.
|
| Here is the thing though - nobody can predict the future.
| Statistically, going by historical examples and
| knowledge, everything that Musk and Trump are doing is
| wrong in regards to economy, but there is a chance that
| they are actually right and everyone else has the "woke
| mind virus".
|
| The thing you need to understand is that if you vote
| Republican, you aren't aligned with actual reality. The
| problem is that you see things as black and white -
| anything that has a sign of the woke mind virus has to be
| gutted and restructured. This kind of thinking is a case
| of the classic human bias where you chose to pay
| attention to the information that fits your narrative,
| while ignoring the information that does.
|
| This in turn makes makes you less likely to predict the
| outcome of politics, much less prepare for it.
|
| So if you want to place your bets on Republicans, just
| know that you can lose very hard, while people like me
| who are in tune with reality end up being better of.
|
| Honestly, next election (if we even have one) Ill
| ironically be voting Republican as well, for the reason
| that I believe in accelerating US downfall. EU seems to
| be the better system going forward, and they need a nudge
| in the right direction to pick up the slack, and also
| institute more stringent society policing to prevent the
| same from happening to their countries.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Judging by the result of the 2024 election it is the
| Democrats who are much less in touch with reality and
| less able to predict the outcome of politics or prepare
| for it. Let's face it. You guys were completely
| blindsided by Trump twice, and the second time you had 8
| years to prepare.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >This whole narrative of "big government with lots of
| power = bad" doesn't really apply anymore.
|
| >US has shown the citizens no longer deserve the freedom
| that they had
|
| >We do need a big powerful government full of Democrats
| to run things.
|
| >Democrats have proven that they actually do give a fuck
| about the country, so they should have more power to
| unilaterally exact laws and legislation without trying to
| appeal to the Republican voter base.
|
| And after that they say that it is the Trump who is the
| fascist.
| kelnos wrote:
| Is it a "fascist government seizing private property" if
| Congress votes to nationalize a company, as is laid out
| in law, and the president signs the resulting bill into
| law?
| Ray20 wrote:
| I mean yeas, that is a typical fascist strategy.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Also a typical strategy in every other form of
| government, oddly enough.
| telotortium wrote:
| According to existing Supreme Court precedent[1],
| nationalization of companies requires approval by
| Congress, not just the President, so that would make it
| more difficult.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tu
| be_Co._...
| D-Coder wrote:
| Precedent, with this Supreme Court, is meaningless.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| According to existing Supreme Court precedent, the
| president isn't able to impound funds which had been
| allotted by Congress (line item veto) [1], or fire the
| head of an independent agency for reasons other than
| allowed by Congress [2], it doesn't really seem like
| precedent has much weight amongst those in power today.
|
| [1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/524/417/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_Executor_v
| ._Unite...
| shit_game wrote:
| The current administration has shared favorable views on
| "public-private partnership", which suggests that
| outright nationalization isn't the goal; I'd imagine the
| more likely scenario is that national assets will be
| dismantled and their functions will instead be contracted
| out to private operations with horrendously corrupt
| deals.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| "within a few elections" = not this administration
| panick21_ wrote:
| > And that would make sense totally aside from punitive
| response
|
| So the government has spend the last nearly 50 years
| completely failing in building rockets or sats the way
| SpaceX did. SpaceX with little money did it in less then
| 20 years.
|
| And now you think its smart to have have the government
| taking over again? Do you want the government to run the
| global Starlink network, dealing with costumer complains?
|
| What part of NASA or any part of the government in the
| last 20 years convinced you that they could operate
| SpaceX?
|
| DoD tried to make space good and literally created ULA
| and after 10 years they often paid 300+ million for a
| launch?
|
| And just FYI, Starshield is Starlink for the government
| and the government already controls those themselves.
| philistine wrote:
| The US government could buy out Musk, keep the company
| public while owning a majority of the shares and do
| nothing with them unless the company does something
| incredibly stupid.
|
| That's how China does it.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's also how Europe does it and its even worse then
| the US. And China rockets aren't all that impressive.
|
| Also, the US has little history of this and the history
| it does have is utterly terrible. Go look up the
| performance of US own weapons factories threw history,
| basically just a long list of failure that lead to real
| issues in wars.
|
| The US does not need to own the company to be able to
| prevent them doing something they don't want.
| AppleAtCha wrote:
| SpaceX is worth less than 10% of what Tesla is valued at,
| so 15% is still a larger holding and very much "where it
| hurts". You should consider pausing before calling the
| popular position drivel.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is correct, but there are plenty of Tesla dealerships
| to protest outside and cars for people to remember they
| don't like him. People could protest outside a SpaceX
| facility but it's unlikely they would garner any attention
| by doing so.
| kelnos wrote:
| His 15% of Tesla is heavily borrowed against, and if
| Tesla's share price drops too far, he's gonna get margin
| calls. That will both destroy his wealth, and hurt Tesla's
| stock price even more.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That military apparatus is sworn to uphold the Constitution,
| not support the current president.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| This only matters if people care enough to act
| appropriately when that is broken.
| krapp wrote:
| I guess we'll see what matters when Trump orders the
| tanks to roll into Canada.
| erkt wrote:
| /s? Otherwise this is hysterical.
| UltraSane wrote:
| With Trump you can never be sure. His is very very
| stupid.
| boredatoms wrote:
| Im pretty sure Canada isn't treating it like a joke
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Yes. For 10 years now, we've been hearing how hysterical
| the predictions about Trump's actions are. And then he
| does them. And goal posts are moved, frogs are boiled,
| whatever analogy you prefer. Dude's, right now,
| disappearing people against court orders to forced labor
| camps in other countries with no due process. He's
| talking about taking over Canada and Greenland. What
| makes you think this is unrealistic? Why do you believe
| what you believe?
| kelnos wrote:
| At best -- at _best_ -- the rhetoric about Canada and
| Greenland is just yet another distraction from all the
| other domestic crap he and Musk are pulling. At slightly
| less than best, he wants to scare other countries into
| making concessions favorable to the US (or at even less
| than best, favorable to Trump and his cronies).
|
| But yes, I would not be terribly surprised if Trump were
| to use boots on the ground -- or at least the threat of
| such -- to expand the US's territory in some way.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Underestimating your enemy, or buying into all these
| media talking points about his will-they-won't-they
| energy and "epic trolling", will have disastrous effects.
| The most culpable person down the list after the
| apathetic are those who refuse to take tragedy and
| security threats seriously.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A curse of the youth is that they desire living in
| interesting times. They'll work themselves up into a
| lather over it.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| A curse of the old is that they are doomed to see the
| world only as they have always known it, to always be
| "right," leaving them at best to die bitter; at worst,
| confused.
| thih9 wrote:
| This wouldn't happen today. Today there is talk about
| Canada becoming 51st state; there is relatively little
| opposition to that - on the contrary, the perception of
| Canada as a US ally drops in the US[1]. Four more years
| of this and I could see people similarly accepting tanks.
| And if you want to prevent this, the time to act is now.
|
| [1]: https://apnews.com/article/trump-poll-allies-
| enemies-friends...
| fweimer wrote:
| Surely no one currently in power wants Canadians to vote
| in U.S. Federal elections? So it has to be a setup like
| Puerto Rico (U.S. citizenship without representation in
| Washington) or even American Samoa (no U.S. citizenship).
| The 51st state thing does not make sense at all.
| zerd wrote:
| 90% oppose the idea. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/u-s-
| eh-who-are-the-canadians-...
| berdon wrote:
| From what I have been told (specific to the US army):
|
| - Enlisted swear oaths to the constitution and President
|
| - Officers swear an oath to the constitution
|
| I've only been told this, I don't claim to know.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| They swear that they will obey lawful orders from their
| commanders, all the way up to the President.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Who decides whether order is lawful or not?
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| A soldier comes to their own assessment then a court
| martial decides later on if they agree. Just like every
| other form of action: do what you believe is within
| bounds, then find out later if the courts agree
| Yoric wrote:
| There are military lawyers for this. I seem to recall
| that Trump fired them last month.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You don't have lawyer in the trenches. You have an order,
| if you don't obey, you might be executed at place.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| > You have an order, if you don't obey, you might be
| executed at place.
|
| Uhhhh... not in the US (or any western) military you
| won't.
| olyjohn wrote:
| But if you're a soldier of the Klingon Empire, you might.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Real life is not like the movies. You aren't executed for
| disobeying or refusing an order in the US military.
| curt15 wrote:
| Lawyers provide legal advice but are not judges.
| Yoric wrote:
| By lawyer, I meant that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud
| ge_Advocate_General%27s_Cor... . They also serve as
| judges, as far as I understand.
| jfengel wrote:
| If the order is wrong, it's your fault for failing to
| know that.
|
| If the order is valid, it's your fault for questioning
| it.
| Tepix wrote:
| You're supposed to evaluate it in order to determine
| whether it's wrong or not.
| kelnos wrote:
| I believe that's exactly what the GP was saying.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Who decides whether order is lawful or not?_
|
| The individual. If your boss orders you to do something
| illegal, it's up to you to be sceptical and do your
| research. That's the only way it can work without
| converting a part of the population to drones.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| So why post it?
| ncallaway wrote:
| You can just google the oaths that people take.
|
| - enlisted: https://www.army.mil/values/oath.html
|
| > I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will
| support and defend the Constitution of the United States
| against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will
| bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I
| will obey the orders of the President of the United
| States and the orders of the officers appointed over me,
| according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military
| Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May
| 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with
| amendment effective 5 October 1962).
|
| - officers: https://www.army.mil/values/officers.html
|
| > I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will
| support and defend the Constitution of the United States
| against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will
| bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take
| this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or
| purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully
| discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to
| enter. So help me God. (Title 5 U.S. Code 3331, an
| individual, except the President, elected or appointed to
| an office of honor or profit in the civil service or
| uniformed services)
| wongarsu wrote:
| Which does match what GP said. Enlisted swear to defend
| the constitution _and_ obey the president. No limitation
| to lawful orders or stated precedence between the too.
| Commissioned officers don 't swear to obey the president
| stonogo wrote:
| What do you mean "no limitation to lawful orders"? That's
| what "according to regulations and the Uniform Code of
| Military Justice" means. Article 92 is pretty explicit
| about what constitutes a lawful order.
| ncallaway wrote:
| It's explicit about following orders according to the
| UCMJ, and the UCMJ clearly defines what constitutes a
| lawful order that must be followed.
|
| So, it's transitive, but the enlisted oath is limited to
| lawful orders.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Take a look at the Oath Keepers or the 3%ers and let me
| know if you think they are going to do the right thing
| here.
|
| They took an oath to protect their interests. That's it
| and that's all.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'll grant you that these militias are well-armed and
| have sketchy loyalties, but if the US military decided
| they were honor-bound to defend the Constitution, against
| Trump, they'd crush the Oath Keepers and their ilk.
| int_19h wrote:
| Many of the members of those militias are themselves
| military or ex-military. Which already tells you volumes
| about how likely it is that _all_ of the US military
| would "decide they were honor-bound to defend the
| Constitution". Besides, those guys don't think of what
| they are doing as contradicting the constitution - quite
| the opposite! They are very obviously wrong, but that has
| never stopped fanatics from believing in their creed.
|
| The real question, anyway, is not whether the military
| will obey Trump's illegal orders, should he issue them.
| It's whether the military would do something to stop the
| militias if Trump lets them off the leash with an
| explicit mandate.
|
| And my concern is that most of the lower-ranking officers
| and people below them will prefer to sit it out. Because
| if they do something, and it's not enough, they are all
| looking at actual treason charges and likely death
| sentences.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Do you really believe that these lower-ranking soldiers
| are going to sit idly by while they watch their family
| members get raped and executed (because that's what
| lawless paramilitaries do) on the nightly news?
|
| Some light reading -->
| https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/deploying-soldiers-
| on-a...
| moogly wrote:
| The Constitution isn't worth much right now, and it's up
| for sale, no less.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I wonder if Elon will acquire it with shares.
| riffraff wrote:
| I mean, he did pay people directly for voting in the last
| round of primaries and he's doing it again for that judge
| election in Wisconsin, and all his money is Tesla shares
| so.. yes, he's already doing it.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Even though the world is turning upside down, the fact
| that this is possible without facing immediate arrest is
| still surprising. I don't think this is possible in any
| other democracy.
| gg82 wrote:
| He didn't pay them to vote. He paid them for signing a
| pledge. He had no way to determine who they voted for.
| te_chris wrote:
| Sure, Elon, sure.
| Smeevy wrote:
| I believe that the person you're responding to also
| passionately argues that "I'm not touching you!" is an
| acceptable defense to the charge of sibling harassment.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| The commenter also included past presidents, which is
| silly. Once a president is a past president, he no longer
| controls that military apparatus.
| mingus88 wrote:
| The U.S. will never allow any former president to get
| prosecuted because the precedent is too severe.
|
| By all reasonable accounts, GW Bush should have been
| prosecuted for war crimes. Trump should have been
| prosecuted the moment he left office for a spectrum of
| crimes. There is even a strong argument that Obama should
| have been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen
| combatants.
|
| But power protects power, and the moment that seal is
| broken all hell breaks loose amongst the ruling class.
|
| How many people were held accountable for the 2008 crash?
| Zero. That would mean everyone else has to stop their
| criming too.
|
| Who knows, maybe Trump is stupid and petty enough to take
| revenge on his enemies. If he does, no doubt his entire
| administration is the next against the wall as soon as
| the winds change.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Nixon certainly would've been prosecuted if he hadn't
| been pardoned.
|
| > There is even a strong argument that Obama should have
| been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen combatants.
|
| I don't think this is very strong at all. There is zero
| evidence that Obama intentionally targeted civilians
| outside of al-Awlaki. Suggesting that he did, and that he
| should be prosecuted for war crimes, puts him in the same
| moral category as those who ordered actual torture on
| enemy combatants and launched wars on fabricated
| evidence. It's preposterous.
| int_19h wrote:
| War crimes are a very broad category, so no, it's not
| preposterous to claim that different people are both
| guilty of them even if the scope varies significantly.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Obama pardoned all the torturers and their instigators.
| He is in the same category.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I strongly disagree with that equivalency. Obama should
| have pursued accountability instead of pardoning them
| like he did, but I do not agree that it puts him in the
| same moral category. Your framing shifts the argument
| from "Obama maybe deserves some scrutiny here" to "Obama
| belongs in the same cells with the torturers."
|
| You're collapsing several degrees of responsibility with
| this lazy equivalence, and minimizing the heinousness of
| the people who actually designed and executed torture
| programs.
| masfuerte wrote:
| The world has no shortage of evil bastards. The only
| thing that restrains them is the knowledge that they may
| be held to account. Obama undermined that.
|
| "Don't worry, we've got your back. If your country asks
| you to do evil, we won't hold you to account. So go right
| ahead."
|
| Who is worse? The criminal or the corrupt judge?
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > There is zero evidence that Obama intentionally
| targeted civilians outside of al-Awlaki.
|
| So... there is evidence he intentionally targeted a
| civilian?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Sorry, I actually meant to write that al-Awlaki was a
| citizen, as in an American citizen. Obama didn't
| intentionally target civilians, and he didn't
| intentionally target "citizens" as OP stated outside of
| al-Awlaki who was an American citizen turned insurgent.
| riffraff wrote:
| But trump _was_ prosecuted. He was found guilty.
|
| It's just that in the meantime the rule of law in the US
| died and he was elected again.
|
| If there are elections in 2028 and MAGA loses he's toast.
| Big if.
| cavisne wrote:
| You'll get him this time! After 9 years of failing.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Dammit, all we need is just one more chance!
| fabioborellini wrote:
| The American justice system deserves to cease existing if
| 4 years isn't enough to process people for possibly
| capital crimes (J6 coup attempt). No state can afford
| that.
| kelnos wrote:
| Even if MAGA loses in 2028, I have very low confidence
| that Trump will see any consequences for his crimes.
| There's also the fun self-pardon-by-proxy trick: on the
| morning of the last day of his administration, he
| resigns. Vance is sworn in, pardons Trump for anything
| he's done, and then passes the presidency on to the next
| one.
|
| Regardless, Trump is old. Even if he's convicted of
| something in 2030 or whenever, he probably won't go to
| prison. He may even be dead by then; he'll be nearly 85,
| and no matter what his doctors have been told to say
| publicly, it's hard to believe the man is in super great
| health.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I think the "big if" in the parent comment was about
| whether there would be elections in 2028, not whether
| Trump might lose them...
| philwelch wrote:
| Trump _was_ prosecuted.
| bmitc wrote:
| They meant criminally prosecuted, which he was not.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure he was. He is a convicted felon, with 34 guilty
| counts under his belt[0]. You can't get convicted of
| felonies in a civil case. That was a criminal
| prosecution.
|
| [0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-
| jury-te...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Trump was criminally prosecuted on both state (New York
| and Georgia) and federal charges, and convicted on New
| York state charges, before being re-elected. Because
| prosecution is an executive power exercised by the
| President, his re-election made it so that he would be
| President and thus unprosecutable by the time of trial on
| the federal charges for which there were still active
| prosecutions, resulting in them being dismissed without
| prejudice. (Technically, they could be refiled after he
| leaves office again.)
|
| Concerns about Constitutional issues with state penalties
| interfering with federal duties also led the judge in the
| New York state case, where he was convicted of 34 felony
| charges, to sentence him to "unconditional discharge" --
| essentially, he remains a convict, but faced no penalty
| beyond the fact of officially being a felony convict.
|
| Issues relating to prosecutorial behavior have stalled
| Trump's prosecution on state criminal charges in Georgia,
| but those charges remain active (whether the prosecutor's
| office that was handling the case can continue to do so
| is an issue currently subject to appeal, and may not be
| decided for several months.)
| bmitc wrote:
| You're right. I'm honestly not sure what I thinking.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| ... How did you miss the last year or so? I'm jealous.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > By all reasonable accounts, GW Bush should have been
| prosecuted for war crimes.
|
| According to the rules we put in place at Nuremburg,
| EVERY US President since World War 2 has committed war
| crimes.
| vkou wrote:
| When there's no alternative nexus of power to rally around,
| they'll have no choice but to do whatever illegal thing
| they are told.
| coliveira wrote:
| Let's be realistic: Congress has given away its power for
| decades. It is nowadays a Congress permanently divided and
| pretty much non-functional.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Congress has never had the power to command the military,
| that's not one of the powers granted to it in the
| constitution.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Congress has the power to declare a war, which was
| _supposed_ to prevent the Executive from taking any
| military action that was not purely defensive, without
| their approval. There was even a requirement about how
| long the President had to give an accounting to Congress
| about any action they did take. So yes, Congress was
| supposed to have the ability to "command" the military
| insomuch as they could choose whether the Executive could
| utilize them or not. Saying "no, you're not going to do
| that" is an authoritative command.
|
| Hamilton, Washington, and Madison _all_ separately wrote
| that Section 8 's War Declaration clause was intended to
| be a substantial limit on the President's power. Even the
| small, mini-conflicts in the 1800s required Congressional
| approval to initiate, it wasn't until the 1950s that the
| Executive branch destroyed that check on Executive power.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| By command I meant that Congress cannot tell the military
| "go arrest the president" or "go quell the unrest in that
| state." I agree that Congress has ceded too much power to
| the Executive in regard to declaration of war/military
| action in foreign countries after 9/11 though.
| kelnos wrote:
| Trump may be Commander in Chief, but he cannot start a
| war without Congress' approval.
|
| Unfortunately, they've essentially given more or less
| blanket approval for various wars and war-like actions
| since before 9/11, and that approval keeps getting
| renewed every year.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| He can't start a war, but what about special military
| operations?
| xhevahir wrote:
| The advent of nuclear weapons arguably negated Congress's
| power to withhold approval for war. Garry Wills writes
| about this in his book Bomb Power.
| coliveira wrote:
| No, this is a rationalization.
| kylestlb wrote:
| Funny.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I really wish for this theory to be tested TBH. Martial law
| in US would be a great thing. US economy tanks, rest of the
| world like Europe is forced to pick up the slack, the world
| gets a refresh on what conservative "small government"
| brainrot does to countries.
| anon3459 wrote:
| Got some good examples from the past?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| WWII?
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| It won't be like that. You'll slide further towards
| Putin/Erdogan state management and oligarchy. Hints of it
| already in how AP and The Atlantic are being treated, and
| the hints about what a future judicial system might look
| like.
| kelnos wrote:
| That only works until Trump finishes purging the upper
| ranks of the military, and then gets the Senate to promote
| Trump loyalists to take their place.
| lazyeye wrote:
| What is a "loyalist"? What president has not put in place
| people that are loyal to him?
| kristjansson wrote:
| A loyalist privileges their leader over their principles.
| A patriot is a leader that subordinates themselves to the
| principles shared with their followers.
| int_19h wrote:
| In the context of this conversation, a loyalist is
| obviously someone who will disregard the law and the
| constitution if Trump orders them to do so.
| rockskon wrote:
| That's a fantasy military leaders like to tell troops.
|
| Let's hope we won't how that plays out against against the
| reality of having bills to pay and family members to take
| care of after enough layers of leadership has been
| replaced.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the owner of the monopoly board game company
| is the richest person ever.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I don't want to downplay your point, I basically agree, but
| in real terms I believe there have been several people richer
| than him, and it is hard to judge the relative wealth of
| people long ago.
| bhouston wrote:
| Elon was uniquely rich is US history but his wealthy
| fluctuates wildly:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rockefeller-rich-elon-
| musks-w...
| ksec wrote:
| I don't like this market cap against GDP measurement. The
| multiples in Market Cap in those era would be
| significantly lower. If we look at P/E of S&P 500 [1],
| what used to be peak PE of 20 a century ago are now
| considered normal.
|
| So adjusting for all that Rockefeller would still be
| richer than Elon.
|
| [1] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Even a sliver of that capability and influence ensures
| nobody will ever dare to try and slap some cuffs on him
|
| After 2028 elections, all of that umbrella cover will go
| away. Optimistically speaking it could happen as soon as
| after Nov of 2026 (midterms).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Optimistically speaking it could happen as soon as after
| Nov of 2026 (midterms).
|
| The midterms could have some meaningful effect a lot sooner
| than that if we start seeing across-the-board primary
| challenges of pro-Trump Republicans. Of course, all of this
| is assuming that the broad Republican constituency have to
| some extent gone anti-Trump, and I really don't know how
| much basis there is for that assumption.
| SonOfKyuss wrote:
| More likely is that competitive districts flip blue.
| Republican primary voters don't seem to be upset. They're
| getting what they wanted. It's independents/undecideds
| that flip flop every election that could sway back
| against the GOP after getting tired of democrats in 2024
| mandeepj wrote:
| > all of this is assuming that the broad Republican
| constituency have to some extent gone anti-Trump, and I
| really don't know how much basis there is for that
| assumption.
|
| > Republican primary voters don't seem to be upset.
|
| Replying to both of you. It has started ->
| https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5214236-democrat-
| james...
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| So you're saying there's a chance that democracy can
| hold?
| arandomusername wrote:
| democracy has been holding. The democratically elected
| president is in charge.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| I don't think it's really pushing things to say that
| President Trump is taking actions to destroy democracy in
| America. Basically he's step by step attacking the
| institutions that might be able to stand against him or
| resist him. He attacks judges that rule against him, he
| attacks congressman on the Republican side if they look
| like they might go against him. That's anti-democratic
| kelnos wrote:
| True, but I don't think you're really arguing against
| what GP and above said. Sure, he's taking those actions,
| but it's far from clear whether or not he'll succeed.
| Those judges are so far standing up to him. Even _Chief
| Justice Roberts_ publicly pushed back, something highly
| unusual.
|
| The attacks members of Congress are troubling, but in a
| way don't matter _too_ much: the deciders for control of
| the Senate or House are swing voters in swing states and
| districts. Whether or not the Republicans in Congress are
| MAGA adherents or older-school reasonable Republicans
| matters less than you 'd think (and less than I'd like).
|
| The one wrinkle in that is the Senate filibuster: if
| Democrats regain control there, depending on their
| margin, they could need up to 10 reasonable Republicans
| in order to make progress on most things. 60 Democratic
| Senators is unlikely.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The filibuster is a Senate rule, which can be changed
| with a simple majority.
| arandomusername wrote:
| Trump was elected by the whole US population. Why does a
| judge, who was not elected by the entire US population,
| is able to block the democratically elected president? To
| me, it sounds like the judges are the ones "destroying
| democracy" as they are blocking the will of the people.
|
| What has Trump done to take away votes from people? Every
| election is still happening. US citizens are still able
| to vote.
| ptsneves wrote:
| What you are describing is not a constitutional
| democracy. It is a kind of mob rule.
| notahacker wrote:
| > all of this is assuming that the broad Republican
| constituency have to some extent gone anti-Trump, and I
| really don't know how much basis there is for that
| assumption.
|
| Seems to be absolutely no basis for that assumption. His
| approval ratings are in the mid 40s, and the people that
| vote in primaries aren't exactly the waverers and
| independents that just wanted a change from Biden.
|
| It could change when he properly tanks the economy, but
| association with Trump isn't likely to be a problem in
| _primaries_ when you 've got more than half a party's
| membership so immune to reality they'll insist that not
| only was Trump doing a good job of running the country in
| 2020, but he also won that election...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If Trump is on a path to tank the economy, the asset
| markets will react immediately to that prediction and
| everyone will know it. This may well be the most tightly
| binding constraint on Trump and Musk's actual behavior
| right now. Right now markets are doing worse than was
| predicted after the election but they're not _that_
| terrible. This seems to predict that Trump will muddle
| through somehow, as the most likely outcome.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| On what basis do you think 2028 elections will be free and
| fair? Congress is going to try to mass-disenfranchise women
| before the 2026 midterms. They've stated this on the
| record. Dems aren't going to gain control of congress in
| the upcoming special elections. We're totally fucked
| economically and otherwise unless Democrats in congress --
| mainly the Senate -- can get a fucking grip, pay attention
| to what's happening, and be the opposition party we need.
| User23 wrote:
| > Congress is going to try to mass-disenfranchise women
| before the 2026 midterms. They've stated this on the
| record.
|
| What on Earth are you talking about?
| afavour wrote:
| I assume they are talking about the SAVE act:
|
| https://19thnews.org/2025/03/save-act-voting-married-
| women/
|
| > An estimated 69 million American women and 4 million
| men do not have a birth certificate that matches their
| current legal name, according to the liberal Center for
| American Progress.
| arandomusername wrote:
| Isn't an ID, like a driving license/passport, enough to
| vote?
| afavour wrote:
| Driving license, no, because non citizens can get one.
| Passport, yes. But plenty of Americans don't have a
| passport.
|
| The OP would say these people are being deliberately
| disenfranchised. Personally I've long since given up
| judging these things based on what I think may or may not
| be in the hearts of those writing it. We don't know so it
| just becomes an endless back and forth. Instead I look to
| the facts: the SAVE act would make it more difficult for
| many people to vote, with an aim of stopping those who
| are unauthorized to vote from doing so. There's never
| really been any solid evidence of the latter happening in
| notable numbers so to me the trade off doesn't feel worth
| it.
|
| IMO something like the SAVE Act needs to also legislate
| the process by which a citizen can easily get an ID in
| order to vote. But it doesn't, it just says that states
| would manage it. Given that some states used "literacy
| tests" to disenfranchise black people not so long ago I
| personally don't trust they would all approach ID access
| in a fair and equal way.
| int_19h wrote:
| Slight correction: there's a thing called "enhanced
| driver license" that some states issue that complies with
| the relevant federal standards and can serve as proof of
| citizenship (they are only issued to citizens). It is, in
| effect, a passport card combined with a driver license on
| a single card.
| arandomusername wrote:
| According to https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/real-id-faqs
|
| > Yes. All states, the District of Columbia, and the 5
| territories are REAL ID compliant and issuing REAL ID
| compliant driver's licenses and IDs.
|
| I have a DL in US and I'm not a citizen. It says on the
| license that it's only for driving and not for employment
| or voter registration.
|
| > IMO something like the SAVE Act needs to also legislate
| the process by which a citizen can easily get an ID in
| order to vote
|
| That sounds like real id to me?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It depends on the state as far as I understand it.
|
| You need to be registered as a voter, which requires that
| you be a citizen. How that is enforced varies.
|
| There are also ID requirements at the poll site. Again,
| those vary.
|
| In every state I've lived in voting was in some way
| (optionally) tied to your driver's license. But the body
| issuing the license has always known whether or not I was
| a US citizen so it boils down to the same thing.
| saxonww wrote:
| Not to worry! Per the "Preserving and Protecting the
| Integrity of American Elections" executive order, birth
| certificates are not valid proof of citizenship for the
| purposes of voting in a federal election anyway.
| willy_k wrote:
| I believe they are talking about the SAVE act, which
| would apparently introduce new requirements for voter
| registration, supposedly making it so that identification
| and legal birth names would need to match in order to
| register to vote which could impact married women. I am
| not taking a position on the correct interpretation of
| the act, just stating initial search results.
| arandomusername wrote:
| I looked at the act and I don't see anything claiming
| that ID and legal birth names have to match. Birth
| certificate only has to be provided if you have no ID
| showing you were born in US
| alabastervlog wrote:
| ... what ID shows you were born in the US? I was born
| here, am a citizen, have a passport, but don't have such
| a thing. Aside from my birth certificate. What else is
| there?
| antiframe wrote:
| I don't know about your passport, but my passport has a
| field for country of birth.
| kelnos wrote:
| My passport says I was born in New Jersey. I suspect
| yours lists your state of birth as well.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Yeah, you and the sibling are probably right and I'm just
| unobservant (if I could remember where the hell it is at
| the moment I'd verify, but probably it's in there)
| arandomusername wrote:
| Your passport does.
|
| According to https://www.dhs.gov/real-id/real-id-faqs
| "Yes. All states, the District of Columbia, and the 5
| territories are REAL ID compliant and issuing REAL ID
| compliant driver's licenses and IDs."
|
| So from my understanding all DLs would qualify too
| (Except maybe older ones that were issued before real
| id?)
| ActorNightly wrote:
| That example is poor justification.
|
| Let me give you a better one.
|
| Trump can arrest the electoral college members from the
| blue districts under the guise of election fraud. And if
| that doesn't work, Vance can just pick his own set of
| electors. Remember, the Supreme court made it legal for
| Trump to literally drone strike US citizens without legal
| recourse.
|
| Of course this will cause a bunch of Tumroil, which is
| good for Trump, because he can just holdon to power.
|
| If you think that has no chance in happening, I envy your
| optimism.
| moregrist wrote:
| There are many scenarios that are possible, but this one
| wouldn't work for the 2026 midterms.
|
| The midterms are Congressional elections. There is no
| Electoral College. The Electoral College only functions
| when electing a President.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Congress is going to try to mass-disenfranchise women
| before the 2026 midterms._
|
| That's only if the SAVE Act passes, or whatever else they
| dream up passes. The House can pass whatever MAGA wants,
| but the Senate needs votes from Democrats to clear the
| filibuster.
|
| Unless of course the GOP yet again does what they say
| they'll never do, and drop the filibuster.
| int_19h wrote:
| The filibuster is a simple rule, and can be removed by a
| simple majority vote.
|
| I actually expect Republicans to do so soon enough now
| that their control of the Senate is virtually guaranteed
| for the foreseeable future, and they are reaping all of
| the disadvantages of the filibuster without the benefits.
| defrost wrote:
| The elections are already being taken over .. in newspeak
| of course.
|
| _PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN
| ELECTIONS_
|
| ~ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-
| actions/2025/03/pres... The sweeping
| 12-page order contains a number of provisions, including a
| documentary proof of citizenship requirement to vote in
| federal elections as well as a requirement that all ballots
| be received by Election Day - both of which fall outside of
| the executive branch's authority to mandate.
| But, there's also a section, buried deeper in the order,
| that, if implemented, would give Trump's Justice Department
| the authority to pick and choose what states get federal
| funding for election administration. It would require
| states to loop the DOJ in on supposed violations of
| election law that it encounters. But it also mandates that
| basic information about voter roll maintenance be shared
| with the DOJ as well. If states are unwilling
| to enter into what is referred to as an "information-
| sharing agreement" with the Attorney General regarding
| "suspected violations of state and federal elections laws,"
| the Attorney General is allowed to withhold grants and
| other funds from those states, the executive order says.
|
| source~ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-order-
| includes-prov...
|
| There are several commentaries at length going into the
| hidden traps and pitfalls of this latest executive order
| kicking about, so far it looks loaded.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| He already said if he won you would never have to vote
| again but for some reason people didn't take him
| seriously.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Is that true/source?
| Rzor wrote:
| >Trump said: "Christians, get out and vote, just this
| time. "You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years,
| you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you
| won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
|
| >He added: "I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I
| love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four
| years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed
| so good you're not going to have to vote," Trump said.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=gE7xoHJkgvE
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-
| they...
| jocaal wrote:
| In the video, trump urges people to go out and vote, in
| which case telling them "just this time" and "you won't
| have to do it anymore, 4 more years, it will be fixed, it
| will be fine"
|
| When I watched the video, I saw no malice.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7xoHJkgvE&pp=ygUqdHJ1bXAg
| c2F...
| jijijijij wrote:
| Coincidentally, you omitted the spicy addendum
| transcribing your own source, making his statement sound
| ambiguous. Here is what he said after your oddly
| selective excerpt:
|
| "In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have
| it fixed so good, you'll not gonna have to vote."
|
| https://youtu.be/gE7xoHJkgvE?t=40
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Telling people that it will be "fixed" so they "won't
| need to vote" was enough for me
|
| Unlike with Musk's "heart goes to you", if there is some
| context that can turn this into a benign remark it would
| have to be truly radical. Any takers?
| kelnos wrote:
| Fortunately that EO is completely illegal and
| unenforceable, as the president has essentially zero say
| on how state elections are conducted.
| int_19h wrote:
| It doesn't have to be enforceable at the point where
| voting actually occurs. It's just a prepared excuse to
| disqualify electors. Let's say Republicans in Congress
| circle the wagons around Trump and refuse to admit any
| new members from states that ignore the EO, like,
| physically. What then?
| saxonww wrote:
| Re: 2026, it's possible Democrats could take back the
| House, and then be able to impeach the President. But it
| looks like they would need to win 32 of the 33 seats up for
| grabs in the Senate - 20 of which are currently held by
| Republicans in solidly red states - to guarantee the 66
| votes necessary to convict. That seems unlikely.
|
| And think about what would need to happen if you'd like to
| see actual change in leadership of the executive branch.
| You'd need the House comfortably controlled by Democrats,
| with the Senate controlled by a supermajority of Democrats.
| I think that you'd need both the President and Vice
| President impeached, convicted, and removed from office,
| while preventing the current/acting President from having a
| new VP nominated and confirmed, so that the Speaker of the
| House became acting President. This seems even less likely.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > But it looks like they would need to win 32 of the 33
| seats up for grabs in the Senate - 20 of which are
| currently held by Republicans in solidly red states - to
| guarantee the 66 votes necessary to convict. That seems
| unlikely.
|
| Your numbers are on point. But, there's another Math that
| could take us on that path leading to the same goal: A
| lot of republican lawmakers aren't happy currently.
| Although it's a long shot, some of them could join
| Democrats in impeaching those two clowns.
| Applejinx wrote:
| It happened over Nixon, whose crimes were much less
| serious... relatively trivial, even.
| matteotom wrote:
| The next test of this will be the WI Supreme Court
| election - if the Musk-backed candidate loses (after Musk
| spends millions of dollars on the campaign, possibly
| illegally), it might start to break the hold Musk+Trump
| have over Republican elected officials.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Wasn't Trump impeached twice already last term without
| any consequences?
| mlindner wrote:
| Impeachments without a two thirds majority are largely
| exercises in political playing around. You can use them
| to expose information that people are keeping hidden
| through subpoenas, but you can't convict in an
| impeachment without a two-thirds majority, which is
| definitely not happening.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Which is precisely why there won't be 2026 and 2028
| elections. I dunno why people are pretending this is just 4
| years of Trump. He tried to overthrow the results before,
| and this time around, he has support of all 3 branches and
| players like Elon Musk.
|
| US is going to do the same thing Russia did with Putin.
|
| If we end up having elections, its actually gonna be worse
| of long term, because despite tanking economy, most people
| aren't going to suffer that much, which means the pattern
| of Dems inheriting a shit economy, everything getting
| blamed on them again like with Biden, and then a smarter
| Republican comes along and its a repeat again in 2032.
| kelnos wrote:
| The main difference between the US and Russia in this
| regard is that the US federal government has very little
| say or control over what are state-run elections.
|
| Solidly red states don't need election interference;
| they're going to vote red. Solidly blue states aren't
| going to tolerate interference. The handful or so of
| swing states will be watched _incredibly_ closely by
| everyone else for even a hint of interference.
|
| > _and then a smarter Republican comes along and its a
| repeat again in 2032._
|
| I mean, this is just how American politics works now, and
| has worked since extreme political polarization took
| root. That's what happens when you have FPTP voting and a
| two-party system, where members of each party show
| complete disdain (justified or not) of members of the
| other party.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Ok and what are states gonna do when Trump arrests the
| electors? Secede?
|
| Look at what Dems are doing now. AoC and Bernie are
| hosting rallies - i.e being worthless.
|
| States will roll over, because day to day business is
| gotta continue.
| jocaal wrote:
| > Trump arrests the electors?
|
| These types of speculative remarks insinuating trump is a
| dictatorial nazi is very lazy. If you disagree with his
| policies, debate the policies.
| Epa095 wrote:
| It's completely reasonable to think and plan ahead,
| especially when we are dealing with someone who is
| refusing to acknowledged a democratic loss. This is not
| theoretical, we know how he reacts when he looses a
| election.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >reasonable to think and plan ahead, especially when we
| are dealing with someone who is refusing to acknowledged
| a democratic loss.
|
| >This is not theoretical, we know how he reacts when he
| looses a election.
|
| It sounds like from your perspective, the sequence of
| actions should be pretty obvious: create a market on
| polymarket or something for Trump to not acknowledged a
| loss, put up some money on it, and at the expense of
| people who perceive this question as theoretical you
| should easily get your x20-x30 insurance if something
| like that happening and can go to live in Europe in your
| own mansion (or even castle, there are many of them in
| Europe).
| Epa095 wrote:
| I guess it's telling that faced with the prospect of the
| fall of American democracy, the obvious thing is to start
| gambling on it.
|
| I don't know how much I would gamle in such a case. There
| are many outcomes compatible with his previous actions.
| Maybe he gets a heartattack. Maybe there is no election.
| Maybe the election process is manipulated so he wins.
| Maybe he actually wins, fairly or 'fairly'. Maybe they
| find a way for him to run, maybe it's Vance. Maybe
| someone else.
|
| The important thing is that we should prepare that shitt
| will happen, and democracy don't survive automatically.
| We literally have him on tape, pressuring Georgia
| secretary of state to "find 11,780 votes" and overturn
| the state's election results. And it is not 'lazy' to
| prepare (intellectualy and physically), and when it
| happens it's too late to 'discuss the politics'.
| int_19h wrote:
| FWIW, the first thing Putin did after he got elected
| wasn't to mess with the elections; rather, he
| methodically strangled all remaining free press in the
| country above a certain threshold. Basically no
| opposition TV at all, only a couple of radio stations and
| newspapers. Massive electoral fraud orchestrated from
| Kremlin only really began post-2008.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Which is precisely why there won't be 2026 and 2028
| elections.
|
| Care to place a wager on it? I precisely bet you will
| ignore this offer though.
| kbelder wrote:
| If we have an election in 2026 and 2028, will you
| reassess your convictions? Or just carry them forward
| without re-evaluation?
| nprateem wrote:
| If you don't believe he'll find a way to get a third term
| like every other dictator, you're living in a fantasy.
| crackrook wrote:
| Do you truly believe this will happen? I know these are
| crazy times but the idea of a then-82 year old man
| realizing a third term for himself seems a little absurd
| to me. Or do you mean this in a less literal sense, e.g.
| in the sense that he'll get a figurative "third term" by
| handing the reigns over to someone in his club without a
| fair election?
| nprateem wrote:
| No I mean literally. Or he'll do what putin did and find
| a puppet to take the reigns for a term.
|
| He knows without presidential immunity he risks prison.
| And he has previous for trying to steal an election.
|
| I have no doubt he'll see to it that he never faces the
| risk of prison, and this is the most obvious way to go.
| That and he's clearly a power hungry megalomaniac.
|
| I think it'd be more informative to ask why he wouldn't
| try to get this.
| ben_w wrote:
| > He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known.
| He's never going to suffer financially. He has countless
| levers of power he can pull.
|
| Just being rich doesn't mean he's got all the power to stop
| that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
|
| Him being a Trump associate is a lever, but not a financial
| one... unless and until they have a falling-out. I'd be
| surprised if that's any less than 6 months away, or more than
| 3 years away.
|
| > The same fantasy applies to any past or current president
| ever spending a day in jail. He literally commands the most
| powerful military apparatus the world has ever seen. Even a
| sliver of that capability and influence ensures nobody will
| ever dare to try and slap some cuffs on him
|
| Depends if he dies in office (~10% all causes, he's old
| etc.), and if the dems regain congress in two years.
|
| Trump was already _very close_ to getting one day in jail due
| to inability to behave himself in the trial where he got all
| those felony convictions, and he did get impeached twice.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _unless and until they have a falling-out. I 'd be
| surprised if that's any less than 6 months away, or more
| than 3 years away._
|
| That's the other thing: Trump's tastes and whims are super
| fickle. Trump and Musk have already clashed on a bunch of
| things, and there's no reason to believe that won't
| continue and/or get worse. And Trump's priorities could
| change, without a corresponding shift in Musk's.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known
|
| This is arguable in real terms.
| brians wrote:
| Yeah. He's not even the richest African emmigrant...
| because Mansa Musa tipped so heavily he broke
| intercontinental trade dynamics.
| FabHK wrote:
| Thanks for that factoid, interesting piece of history.
| jijijijij wrote:
| > Mansa Musa tipped so heavily he broke intercontinental
| trade dynamics
|
| Thank you for dropping this fun fact. Pretty telling of
| my "western" education, I have never been taught anything
| about this guy. Quite memorable years of reign too!
| literalAardvark wrote:
| 350b USD buys 350kT of gold.
|
| I suspect that many zeros were unheard of in pre
| industrial times, making most hundred billionaires richer
| than Mansa Musa even in absolute terms.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > 350b USD buys 350kT of gold
|
| No it doesn't - that much gold hasn't been mined in the
| history of humanity. Gold is not a good metric for
| comparing this across history.
| croes wrote:
| > He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known.
|
| That's disputable
|
| > He literally commands the most powerful military apparatus
| the world has ever seen.
|
| That's also disputable
| echoangle wrote:
| >> He literally commands the most powerful military
| apparatus the world has ever seen.
|
| > That's also disputable
|
| Why? Which military has ever existed that would have a
| chance against the current US military?
| croes wrote:
| Taliban.
|
| Conventional armies have a hard stand against partisans.
|
| The US in Vietnam and Russia and the US in Afghanistan.
| echoangle wrote:
| So the taliban or the Vietcong were more powerful than
| the US military? They won because they were defending
| their own country which gives them higher motivation and
| an advantage as defenders. If you look at the military
| itself, the US was always much more powerful.
| croes wrote:
| If you lose nobody cares about how powerful you are.
|
| The Russian army is more powerful than Ukraine's, still
| no win. Same with Russia in Afghanistan.
| echoangle wrote:
| Ok, but they still are more powerful. That's what the
| discussion was about. Having a disadvantage and losing
| doesn't mean it's not the most powerful military that
| ever existed.
| croes wrote:
| But it a useless measure if the results aren't as
| expected.
|
| That's like saying I have the most expensive car in
| Formula 1.
|
| Powerful is associated with winning that's the whole
| point of pointing it out.
| echoangle wrote:
| No, it's like doing a drag race with a formula 1 car
| against a mini but the mini is on a street and the
| formula 1 car is on a dirt strip. If you want to compare
| military power, you would have to look at "Who would win
| in equal situations", not "Who won a 1 vs 1 with
| different starting situations".
|
| If you had to perform a military action and had to pick
| either the taliban or the US military to be your military
| to use, would you ever pick the taliban?
|
| The only reason they had a chance was because of external
| factors, not the power of the military itself.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are joking or not, but anybody who
| measures military power doesn't actually looks at things
| like ability to do something. Talbian and co simply
| survive and don't give up. But they are totally incapable
| of anything else beyond that.
|
| > Conventional armies have a hard stand against
| partisans.
|
| No they don't. Its just not worth doing in the long run.
|
| And whatever you may think of the US military forces,
| they have the ability to do lots of things.
| croes wrote:
| Anybody who cares looks at the results.
|
| Result beats potential.
|
| And most of the US military except the special forces
| need time of from work and visit the army shop.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Anybody who actually cares, you know actual
| professionals, looks at things beyond a very limited set
| of real world results in very restrictive circumstance.
|
| That's like saying, this NBA team after a 5d journey, and
| no sleep played a basketball game against a local team,
| with the whole crowd hostile, a complete broke court and
| a totally different ball.
|
| And even then they would win for 20 years straight and
| the other team is only annoying to deal with. Until the
| owner decide there is no point in it.
|
| And from this you conclude that that NBA team is bad at
| basketball because 'real-world results'.
| philistine wrote:
| So the Taliban have ten aircraft carriers and the ability
| to bomb any target on Earth without losing the plane?
| jijijijij wrote:
| You are delusional, if you think the USAF can bomb any
| target in any airspace without losing the plane. If
| losing the plane is allowed, you have to admit, the
| Taliban have been exceptionally successful, too.
| echoangle wrote:
| > You are delusional, if you think the USAF can bomb any
| target in any airspace without losing the plane.
|
| You're delusional if you don't think that. You could just
| launch a few dozen cruise missiles at the target and at
| least one will make it through.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Depending on the target your cruise missiles are out of
| range and your fancy aircraft will have to face air
| defense systems. (Especially, since you moved your fat
| ass carrier close-by...)
|
| So, does your magical aircraft carry those _dozens_ of
| cruise missiles, immune to every modern anti-air missile
| it will encounter? You know, instead of spending all that
| money on aircraft carriers, some countries have spent
| their money on air defense instead. Try to fly an F35 to
| Moscow.
|
| Sorry, but this is laughable. If what you said was true,
| geopolitics would look very different. The US would break
| the whole nuclear deterrence game, since you could
| eliminate all nuclear launch sites, conventionally,
| before a strike. Why even have nukes then?!
| echoangle wrote:
| > Depending on the target your cruise missiles are out of
| range and your fancy aircraft will have to face air
| defense systems. (Especially, since you moved your fat
| ass carrier close-by...)
|
| Right, but the scenario was unspecified enough that I
| assumes peace time and the planes can retreat before the
| enemy notices the attack and shoots them down.
|
| > Try to fly an F35 to Moscow.
|
| I won't fly my F-35 to Moscow, I will drop some AGM-158
| JASSM-ER over eastern poland and the pilots will probably
| be back on the ground before the russian air defense has
| even tracked the missiles.
|
| > Sorry, but this is laughable. If what you said was
| true, geopolitics would look very different. The US would
| break the whole nuclear deterrence game, since you could
| eliminate all nuclear launch sites, conventionally,
| before a strike. Why even have nukes then?!
|
| No, I don't get why people think that. That's the exact
| reason why countries have Nuclear missile subs. So they
| can retaliate, even after a first strike.
|
| But even if they hadn't, what you said wouldn't follow.
| Because having the ability to strike whatever you want
| doesn't mean you can prevent a second strike. If you
| launch cruise missiles, the target can detect them and
| send a retaliatory nuclear strike before the cruise
| missiles arrive and destroy the silos.
| lz400 wrote:
| IMHO the US is turning into an oligarchy / autocracy like
| Russia. Musk is one of the oligarchs. We all know what
| happens to oligarchs when they get too close to eclipse the
| top dog and go near a window.
| bawolff wrote:
| > He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known.
|
| Rich people become poor people all the time. Its hardly
| unheard of.
| nmisty920 wrote:
| I have no opinion about Musk or Trump. I just want to give
| counter-examples to your claims: Saddam Hussain, Mussoloni,
| Ceausescu. At the peak of their power, they all seemed
| untouchable. Would they even have thought, when they were
| ruling their countries, that one day their fortunes would
| turn?
|
| Quoting Gandhi: "There have been tyrants and murderers, and
| for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they
| always fall. Always."
| kelnos wrote:
| I think if we look around the world we can find plenty of
| counterexamples to Ganhi's quote.
|
| Sure, they always "fall" in the sense that they're not
| immortal and they'll eventually die, but it's often
| (usually?) the case that a family member or some sort of
| protege steps up to fill their shoes.
| muragekibicho wrote:
| The first counteraxample that comes to mid is Idi Amin,
| the Ugandan dictator. He murdered, pillaged and lived out
| the rest of his years (happily and luxuriously) in Saudi
| Arabia.
|
| He lived "in a villa rented for him by the government of
| Saudi Arabia in the posh Al Hamra district".
| https://www.dawn.com/news/135283/idi-amin-led-quiet-life-
| in-...
| bmitc wrote:
| Is he really rich? He started a car company, one that is
| known to make shit cars. All of their big bets failed. So
| what was supposed to be "not just a car comoany", which is
| what all the insane valuations were based on, is now "just a
| car comoany" and a shit one at that. So why is this car
| comoany still valuated at such insane hype levels? Is his
| wealth not entirely tied to the hyper-valuation of this car
| company?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Except for the Cybertruck the cars are pretty good. The
| overvaluation is because Musk wants everybody to think
| Tesla is an AI company that makes self-driving cars, which
| by now everybody realizes is bullshit.
|
| Tesla makes pretty nice cars if you're willing to drive
| them yourself and you only occasionally use autopilot as a
| kind of smarter cruise control. Never use FSD unless you're
| willing to pay through the nose for a system that only
| works in select locations and otherwise tries to kill you
| every few minutes.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _He started a car company, one that is known to make shit
| cars._
|
| No he didn't. He was an early investor in a car company,
| eight month after it was founded, and later history-revised
| his way into a founder title.
|
| Not that this should be surprising, considering the
| childish ego on that man.
| bmitc wrote:
| You're right. This is always something I've pointed out
| myself. Just got sloppy with language here.
| solean wrote:
| Is spelling "company" really that hard?
| jraph wrote:
| It's probably just a typo, O is next to P on keyboards,
| mistakes happen.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >He's literally the richest person the earth has ever known.
|
| Putin might well be richer.
|
| Also it is hard to compare his wealth to historical figures,
| such as Mansa Musa.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
| MoonGhost wrote:
| We know how it ended for Rasputin.
| piyuv wrote:
| South Korean president is jailed for trying to coup, no? So
| there's precedent.
| Ray20 wrote:
| I mean this is exactly the reason why they won't want to
| put Trump in jail - so that it doesn't turn out like in
| Korea. After all, where you can put one president in jail,
| you can put a next one in jail too.
| piyuv wrote:
| I mean, yes? Where you can put one president in jail (for
| trying to demolish democracy and establish
| oligarchy/autocracy), you can put a next one in jail too
| (if they try to do the same)
|
| This is called upholding the constitution and it's
| fundamental for a democracy. If you say president is
| immune, you get current US.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >If you say president is immune, you get current US
|
| And even most leftist woke socialist president between
| probability of a prison for himself and the current US
| will choose current US.
| arp242 wrote:
| Past presidents don't hold command over any military. France
| sent a former president to jail just a few months ago. Brazil
| and South Korea are in the process of putting a former
| president on trial. El Chapo was billionaire _and_ had a
| private army of murderers - he 's currently in prison.
|
| The main reason Trump hasn't been impeached and (possibly)
| jailed is because the political system in the US is
| dysfunctional. Party because it's not a great system to start
| with, and partly because a critical section of people made
| the decision to intentionally break it for selfish gain. But
| there is nothing that says it needs to be like this.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > He's never going to suffer financially
|
| Well his wealth can decrease by 200x and no sane person could
| claim that he's "suffering" financially with what he has
| left.
|
| > somehow go bankrupt .. were also wild
|
| That depended entirely on how Tesla's stock performed. If he
| had to liquidate $20 billion of his stocks to pay back the
| Twitter loans his wealth would have decreased by much, much
| more than that.
| enslavedrobot wrote:
| The value of Twitter was set when the bonds used to finance the
| purchase were sold recently for 97cents on the dollar.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Musk threw in xAI ownership to sell those bonds, which
| themselves have an _11%_ rate. Musk basically backstopped the
| bonds by giving a heads up of _this_.
|
| No, that was absolute _fantasy_ numbers, and in no universe
| did it verify any value of Twitter.
|
| Musk really, really knows how to play people. He deserves
| that credit.
|
| And I mean, bond discounts or not have nothing to do with the
| value of a company. The discount on a bond is based upon the
| likelihood they'll ever be paid off, and after it was clear
| that Musk would save the failure of X by using one of his
| other companies and AI hype to do so (as others have said,
| just like SolarCity), the bond lost its discount. X's value
| could be $1, but if the bonds are going to be repaid they'll
| sell at no discount.
| FabHK wrote:
| ?
|
| When debt is worth near par that only means that equity is
| very likely positive (not null). Doesn't tell you anything
| about how positive.
| rco8786 wrote:
| And then will leverage against that valuation for loans,
| acquisitions, etc.
|
| Self dealing. Nobody cares anymore.
| miohtama wrote:
| Good luck trying to get a bank to underwrite that loan,
| smells a bit risky.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "Nice bank you've got there. Would be a shame if ________"
| (Insert any number of orders that Musk can have his friends
| in the executive branch issue to make life miserable for
| the bank principals.)
|
| It's good to be the king. Even better to own him.
| XorNot wrote:
| Case in point: https://apnews.com/article/trump-law-firm-
| mueller-fc64fcda09...
|
| > A prominent international law firm reached a deal with
| President Donald Trump on Friday to dedicate at least
| $100 million in free legal services and to review its
| hiring practices, averting a punishing executive order
| like the ones directed at nearly a half-dozen other major
| legal institutions in recent weeks.
|
| This isn't theoretical. It's happening.
| netsharc wrote:
| Wow, I thought the sum was $40 million, but that's what
| the other law firm paid that showed a lack of principles
| and caved...
|
| And another law firm is being blackmailed because it used
| to employ someone who worked for Robert Mueller (of the
| Trump-Russia collusion investigation)... Geez Trump's
| team is actually busy, but busy settling old scores.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| They're busy making sure the firms with the money and
| bench to try to fight the authoritarian take-over in
| court are all sidelined.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Exactly, that was the case I had in mind.
| netsharc wrote:
| That makes me think of Jakob Fugger. He was so rich the
| pope borrowed money from him to build St. Peter's
| Basilica. And they got so desperate to pay it back they
| started selling indulgences, pissing off one Martin
| Luther and creating Protestantism:
| https://theconversation.com/the-man-who-gave-us-the-
| reformat...
| Yoric wrote:
| And that makes me think of the Knights Templar. They were
| so rich that everybody borrowed money from them. The one
| day, the King of France decided he didn't want to repay
| the loan. The story doesn't end well for the Templars.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Then he buys the bank. DOGE is in the SEC now. Elon Musk is
| the regulator. If he decides that a bank is doing "fraud"
| and wants to shut it down, is there anyone to stop him?
| Serious question.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| You realize the current administration is shutting down law
| firms that criticize Trump, right? They'll have zero
| problems going "do this deal if you know what's good for
| you".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Trump pardoned Trevor Milton today, who scammed investors out
| of millions doing things like his now infamous "rolling a
| truck down a hill to make it looks functional" demo.
|
| Milton donated $1.8M to Trump, and Miltons lawyer's sister is
| Pam Bondi, the Attorney General.
|
| This is _nakedly_ corrupt and a strong signal that you can
| get away with all manner of financial fuckery if you are on
| Trumps "good list".
| miohtama wrote:
| Every democratic country deserves the government they get.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| At least we don't have to worry about trans kids swimming
| on the girls swim team.
|
| /s
| zahlman wrote:
| >Please don't use Hacker News for political or
| ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
|
| Comments like these are wildly off the original topic and
| practically invite the dead replies. As a rule of thumb,
| if you're about to put "/s" at the bottom of a post on an
| even remotely political topic, please reconsider.
| Especially if your sarcasm is already quite obvious, and
| obviously being used to bash a political outgroup.
| jfengel wrote:
| Good and hard.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Is it corruption if it's done publicly and no one gives a
| fuck? -\\\\_(tsu)_/-
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Absolutely..and people care.
| libertine wrote:
| "But that guy George Soros surely is up to no good!"
|
| It's probably being spoken by some podcast that helped get
| Trump elected.
|
| When they have an actual conspiracy, with actual
| billionaires paying the president and getting full access
| to the government, while getting public contracts... all of
| this being live streamed... they're still stuck in George
| Soros and the Deep State lizard people fantasy.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| And now there's this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43509169
| tim333 wrote:
| Musk gets away with a lot because he does deliver sometimes -
| the cars and the rockets have done well. The investors and
| lenders are not totally dumb.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Would anyone say the same about Cathie Wood? Also, Starship
| "done well?"
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| It's all private capital. The only people who are exposed to
| this deal are the banks who make loans to Musk and Twitter,
| and the investors who put capital in to take Twitter private
| or to invest in xAI. If one of those entities is mad they
| will sue, and the legal system works pretty well for fights
| between different capital holders. Doesn't really matter what
| the general public's opinion is.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's the new normal
|
| https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-
| trump-...
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Its almost like modern life is riddled with lies, liars, and
| their collective bullshit.
|
| I don't think this is a change in the human condition; we're
| extremely greedy hairless apes. But guys like Elon really show
| how low we can go.
| knicholes wrote:
| I argue that he's literally showing us how high we can go
| with SpaceX.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| With SpaceX? Or Ketamine??
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I think you're showing us how low someone can go alright.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but calling out someone visible and public
| substance abuse problem isn't low. As someone who has
| dealt with addiction and its fallout since I was a very
| small child, I can emphatically say the man needs _help_
| first and foremost.
|
| But, as the wealthiest man on the planet he's more likely
| to just be given what he wants: more self-indulgence.
| When you surround yourself with yes-men and sycophants,
| _actual help_ isn 't likely.
|
| Further, it's entirely right to call this out when _his
| actions impact the rest of the world greatly_ and the man
| has obvious problems. To then try and turn it around on
| me as if I 'd done something _wrong_ by pointing out the
| Emperor has no clothes? Well, I could offer you some
| choice words, but I 'll hold my tongue. However, in my
| estimation, you could do with some self-reflection and
| probably a bit less "taste of boot on your tongue".
| calmworm wrote:
| In what way though? I've yet to see anything that rivals
| any accomplishments by NASA. Or were you being punny?
| knicholes wrote:
| No, you're right. NASA has already shown that we can go
| past our solar system, so... His company has done some
| really awesome stuff with the ships/rockets, though.
| bloppe wrote:
| Did you not watch them land the starship? That's easily
| the biggest space-faring accomplishment since Apollo, and
| certainly not something NASA could replicate in the
| foreseeable future.
|
| Speaking of the moon, NASA's SLS is projected to cost
| several orders of magnitude more than a super heavy
| launch, and is only aiming for the moon as opposed to
| Mars.
|
| If there's one place that Doge could really, actually
| stop a lot of waste and fraud, it's at NASA. Of course,
| that would be the conflict of interest par excellence,
| and face a bunch of opposition from red-state congressmen
| with huge contracts in their constituencies. Objectively
| speaking, though, it's a huge waste of taxpayer money.
| ks2048 wrote:
| > If there's one place that Doge could really, actually
| stop a lot of waste and fraud, it's at NASA.
|
| At 0.3% of the federal budget - if NASA was 100% waste,
| fixing it wouldn't make a dent.
| bumby wrote:
| NASA/DoD did lay some of the groundwork. DC-X was a
| vertical landing rocket meant for reuse nearly 35 years
| ago. Granted SpaceX has done amazing things that are more
| difficult (DC-X was suborbital), but I tend to think if
| NASA continued they would have got there. From my
| perspective, SpaceX's major benefit is they don't have to
| follow the same rules as NASA so they can do things
| quicker and/or cheaper.
|
| The "waste" is really just a different risk tolerance.
| You could make many of the NASA requirements go away, but
| nobody wants to be the one who signs up for that when the
| next disaster happens.
| platybubsy wrote:
| The waste does not at all stem only from different risk
| tolerances. SpaceX launches NASA astronauts which means
| that they also need to comply to the same standards. Pork
| barrel projects like SLS is the real reason why
| everything NASA does is so expensive and late.
|
| The statement that NASA would have achieved reuse
| eventually is weird considering that NASA still exists
| today, 35 years later, without succeeding.
| bumby wrote:
| > _SpaceX launches NASA astronauts which means that they
| also need to comply to the same standards_
|
| Sorry, this is false. When NASA engineers have raised the
| question of non-adherence to NASA standards by CCP
| contractors, they were told it wasn't their role to
| dictate those kinds of requirements. You can see this in
| a number of mishaps, like when a strut failure resulted
| in a lost rocket because they didn't want to follow well-
| established and codified aerospace supply chain quality
| standards. NASA is buying a service with CCP, not a
| product. This says nothing of the political requirements
| NASA must work through that contractors do not.
|
| > _The statement that NASA would have achieved reuse
| eventually is weird considering that NASA still exists
| today, 35 years later, without succeeding._
|
| NASA does, but that NASA VTOL rocket program was
| cancelled in 1996. My point was that the tech was
| feasible for NASA, but not a priority.
| ysofunny wrote:
| speak for yourself. I have plenty of hair!
|
| but what I really wanted to say (because I'm a special
| interests person)
|
| is that hair is a mammal trait. all mammals have hair!!! how
| cool is that?
| jocaal wrote:
| TIL dolphins are born with hair
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What an absolute scammer lol.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| This also lets all of his co-investors in X, who were likely
| pissed that their shares tanked, exchange their shares at an
| inflated value (but one that still sees them losing 25% of
| their original investment) for shares in a trendy yet likely
| overvalued AI company that they consider to have more upside.
|
| The other part of this is that if TSLA stock drops to $100-ish
| he'll be at risk of being margin called on the loans he took
| against his holdings to buy X. I wouldn't be surprised if this
| deal involves some X shares being sold for cash (that was
| raised from VCs) to pay down those loans, and/or the lenders
| agreeing to take xAI stock in lieu of cash.
|
| This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme. I don't think
| this is the last time we've seen this type of move: he'll keep
| starting companies that are at the forefront of whatever the
| current hype cycle is, then leverage the extremely inflated
| valuations to benefit himself.
| intuitionist wrote:
| The outside investors in X made a profit on paper; Twitter
| was bought for $44B but the deal was financed with like $31B
| in equity and $13B in debt. It's not a big profit (in fact
| it's worse than you would have done in T-bills), and of
| course they're swapping one illiquid and hard-to-value asset
| for another, but Elon isn't giving them a 25% haircut at all.
| zahlman wrote:
| Isn't Twitter's stock price higher than it was at
| acquisition?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Twitter doesn't have a stock price. It got taken private
| in the acquisition.
| azemetre wrote:
| Also I think Fidelity open puts out statements on the
| value of Twitter since they are a shareholder. The only
| recent info I can find on this was an article from last
| October:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-
| musk...
|
| Where it states that Twitter is now worth 1/5 of its
| $44billion price. I highly doubt it re-made up the
| equivalent value in the span of 6 months. If anything
| they likely lost more money as advertising sales have
| plummeted.
| kelnos wrote:
| As the sibling pointed out, private companies don't have
| stock prices. But I've read estimates that Twitter is
| worth less $10B now, so less than a quarter what Musk
| paid for it.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| The banks just recently did a debt sale of a lot of that
| debt close to list price, so 44 billion dollar valuation
| is probably reasonable. Apparently the company is
| profitable now, sans the debt, so as long as it doesn't
| go out of business and can grow on other fronts then it's
| probably not a problem.
| rwmj wrote:
| > profitable now, sans the debt
|
| So, not profitable.
| j_maffe wrote:
| What, acompany needs to cover the costs of how it was
| acquired, now? If it's valued at the price it was
| purchased and making a positive revenue stream then it
| _is_ profitable.
| acdha wrote:
| They need to cover their debts. If someone uses private
| equity raider tactics to load the company up with debt,
| it's likely to be bad for the company but it still counts
| on their books just as taking payday loans is ill-advised
| but legal.
| dave4420 wrote:
| Yes, this seems to be common practice.
|
| 1. Borrow lots of cash
|
| 2. Buy a victim company with the cash
|
| 3. Carry out weird financial/legal alchemy to make the
| victim company solely responsible for paying off the loan
|
| 4. If the victim company can't handle the debt and goes
| bankrupt, then you don't own the company any more. That's
| sad. Especially for the people who lose their jobs. But
| the people you borrowed the cash from can't chase you for
| it, so no harm done, eh?
|
| 5. If the victim company pays off all the debt, then
| congratulations: you bought a successful profitable
| company for free!
|
| I don't understand step 3 or why it's legal.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| With the debt it's break even.
| rwmj wrote:
| So, not profitable.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| The company is profitable. The debt is unrelated to
| assets acquired or previous deficits.
| rwmj wrote:
| a.k.a the worst kind of financial engineering. The
| company is not profitable if it doesn't make a profit
| when all things are considered.
|
| And we're not even talking about the missed opportunity
| costs of the ~ $27bn cash used to purchase Twitter. Most
| of that value is completely gone.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| If you were an investor in X and put up some of that $27
| billion dollars you now own shares in xAI, so it's not
| not gone.
| rwmj wrote:
| You can dress it up in "financial alchemy" like any hedge
| fund, but it doesn't disguise the fact that the last
| person to carry that can is going to lose a lot of very
| real money.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| That doesn't even make any sense.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| So much financial sophistry going on here, can almost see
| the sequel to the CDS infused trauma of 20 years ago
| coming down the line
| largbae wrote:
| This is part of the reason that the term EBITDA exists.
| SideQuark wrote:
| Can you list this sale you claim valued X at 44B?
|
| Fidelty, which still owns a decent chunk of X, and is
| required by law to do due diligence on the value of that
| holding, and also has deeper insight into the value of X
| since they are also required to see X financials (since
| they own a big chunk of the private value), puts X value
| at 20% of the original 44B.
|
| So please demonstrate your claims.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/30/elon-
| musk...
| ralfd wrote:
| A few weeks ago in February:
|
| https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/musks-x-
| sec...
|
| > Banks have completed the sale of $5.5 billion in debt
| for Elon Musk's X, according a Wednesday report by the
| Wall Street Journal. The debt offering was increased
| following a strong response from investors. Ultimately,
| the loans were sold at 97 cents on the dollar.
|
| This is not the same, as no ownership was traded, but it
| signaled surprising confidence that the debt could be
| sold with only a small discount.
| rurp wrote:
| This makes no sense. The debt payments are larger than
| the company's entire revenue! The Twitter purchase was a
| financial boondoggle that Elon is attempting to hide with
| this latest deal.
|
| If I borrow $4 million to buy a house worth $1 million I
| could technically say that sans the debt I'm a
| millionaire, but that's hardly a useful or positive
| claim.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Rhis raises it back to the original level (although
| entirely based off the absurdly overinflated value of
| Grok at $80 billion. VCs...)
| echelon wrote:
| Even if he made the Twitter investors whole, I wonder how
| the investors in xAI feel.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| They're mostly the same investors.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| They just wait for the next round of this. Maybe SpaceX
| will require more AI? Or Tesla?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| They feel great, because he just magically turned a ~50%
| loss in Twitter into a ~50% return in xAI and a ~0% loss
| in Twitter.
|
| Of course, you can't buy $20B worth of mangoes for $40B
| worth of Mango Holding Company stock and then suddenly
| make your mango-holding business worth twice as much
| money.
|
| But you can pretend!
|
| Private valuations, especially VC-funded companies, have
| been nonsense for decades. Elon is just exploiting that
| egregiously.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Feeling mighty 2008/subprime in here
| silisili wrote:
| He didn't leverage Tesla stock to buy X.
|
| These Reddit level takes with zero research are making
| threads like this really annoying to read. All emotions, zero
| facts.
| IrishTechie wrote:
| You haven't added any facts either, it's just one more
| statement from a random Interneter like those Reddit posts.
| I'm intrigued to hear some fact on this point though?
| silisili wrote:
| You might try Google or any search engine of your choice.
| It would probably do a better job than I could.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| How did he get the tens of billions in cash he personally
| put in if not leveraging Tesla. Yes he had minority
| investors and put some debt on the acquisition itself, but
| he put up a lot of money.
| silisili wrote:
| He sold Tesla shares.
|
| This is all public, I don't understand the weird
| speculation...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| He also sold a ton of shares. But not enough to cover all
| the money he needed to put into Twitter.
| gscott wrote:
| He had to sell some Tesla shares because he reached the
| max borrowing limit against his Tesla shares that was
| allowed. Once he was forced to sell shares he had to pay
| a lot in taxes. This shows the mega wealthy can pay taxes
| and not become poor. We should learn from this lesson and
| tax the .01% of society.
| Difwif wrote:
| He hit his max borrowing limit? Can we just discuss the
| facts rather than making stuff up to talk about our
| favorite narratives?
| azemetre wrote:
| Yeah, let's continue talking about how no one person in
| the entire human race should have more than $50 million
| dollars.
|
| I agree with the other poster.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| And who are you to decide that?
| acdha wrote:
| Speaking of threads with zero facts, can you cite your
| research? Here's mine showing $12.5B secured by TSLA
| shares:
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/00011046
| 5...
|
| That wasn't the only funding, of course, but it's a big
| chunk:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220422035052/https://www.bloo
| m...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/musk-
| twitter-s...
| silisili wrote:
| Again, you're just citing three things from the same
| date, and I don't believe it's in good faith.
|
| Elsewhere I suggested people to just Google it, because
| it gives you an honest answer. So does chatGPT. So does
| the Wiki page on the deal, with sources.
|
| Here is one said source -
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141940/elon-musk-
| tesla-...
| cellwebb wrote:
| I don't think he's going to be able to spin up hype on
| anything after this. He's burned a lot of bridges.
| sitkack wrote:
| When you Godwin _your own thread_ , you are by definition
| done.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| He's simply moving Twitter losses to xAI investors - because
| he's the largest Twitter loser - and would prefer those
| losses go to other patsies instead.
| jeff_carr wrote:
| > This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme.
|
| That's because his scam of charging $8k over the price of a
| Tesla for "self driving" was complete vaporware. It never
| worked and it never was going to work. I am disappointed I
| fell for it.
|
| There should be a class action lawsuit against TESLA for
| everyone that purchased the $8k self driving "feature". We
| were all told it was "being rolled out". It was a total lie.
| geertj wrote:
| You must not have tried FSD 13.x with AI4 hardware. I
| commute to work every day from the suburbs to the city with
| a ~25 min one-way commute with zero disengagements.
|
| Edit: Elon mentioned in the last earnings call that if you
| are on AI3 hardware and bought FSD that they will have to
| upgrade you free of charge to AI4.
|
| Edit 2: To clarify, FSD 13.x is only available with AI4
| hardware.
| lukevp wrote:
| They started selling FSD back in like 2017 and it was
| supposed to be self-driving ALL THE TIME by 2019. It's 8
| years later now and the best you've got is "upgrade the
| hardware to version 4 and you can make a 25 mile commute
| without disengagement" when Tesla was promising cross-
| continent summoning so you could fly somewhere and your
| car would drive there to meet you, charging along the
| way. That's L5 autonomy. The delta between promised and
| delivered is so far apart it's ridiculous. Mercedes'
| autonomous system is the only L3 even, Tesla's is L2.
| They by my definition did not deliver whatsoever on their
| promises.
|
| Another thing is a lot of people don't even keep cars
| longer than 8 years (and people who are buying new, $100k
| electric cars are more likely going to upgrade sooner
| than someone who's buying a $30k civic.) they paid for
| FSD thinking it would be ready soon.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I was intent on keeping my low-vin release day Model 3
| until they made good on their FSD promise, come hell or
| high water. Then _The Salute_ and _The Infomercial_
| happened, and I gave up and ditched the car like a psycho
| girlfriend. They got my money and I was fooled by a con.
| I 'll never let that happen again.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You sold it though or did you literally ditch it?
| rage4774 wrote:
| You ask for a friend, to ,,just look at it"?
| geertj wrote:
| I was replying to the "never was going to work" part
|
| > It never worked and it never was going to work.
|
| That is evidently false. If I had a longer commute it
| would work fine too. I have done ~2 hour road trips with
| it already.
|
| You are bringing up a different point, which is that FSD
| arrived later than promised or at least implied (I don't
| know exactly how this was sold in 2017). That is self-
| evident at this point.
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| > Edit: Elon mentioned in the last earnings call that if
| you are on AI3 hardware and bought FSD that they will
| have to upgrade you free of charge to AI4.
|
| Unfortunately, that's because they were sued in court and
| lost when they tried to force people to buy the upgraded
| hardware in the past. Not because they stand behind their
| products.
| consteval wrote:
| I would not be comfortable using any self-driving system
| on US roads that only utilizes computer vision.
|
| The reality is we don't actually know how reliable these
| systems are, and Tesla has a long history of spreading
| misinformation about their own technology and obfuscating
| the facts. We don't even know how many cars crash while
| in FSD mode. We don't know how they crash, or why. None
| of this data is made publicly available, and of the data
| that is shared it is carefully curated, and we have no
| guarantee the data is not fudged. For example, are we
| certain that FSD does not disengage itself in dangerous
| circumstances to skew statistics in it's favor?
|
| Trusting Tesla marketing on the topic of Tesla products
| is like trusting any kind of marketing. They have an
| incentive to sell the car, so they will lie, and they
| will cheat.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I am equally uncomfortable that other people are out
| there beta testing FSD.
| geertj wrote:
| > I am equally uncomfortable that other people are out
| there beta testing FSD.
|
| That is probably because you are unaware how far it has
| gotten. Irrespective of that, a driver still needs to be
| there and pay attention. As soon as you take your eyes of
| the road for a few seconds it will warn you very
| prominently.
|
| I'm going on the record here to say that FSD will be a
| better driver than 99% of humans in the next 2 years. I
| may be wrong, but I don't think I will be.
| ysofunny wrote:
| go go gadget FIAT dollars
| imgabe wrote:
| But all the armchair business experts assured me that the value
| of Twitter had completely tanked since Elon bought it because
| he's such a stupid fool who ruins everything, so shouldn't it
| be worth less? Just a few months ago everyone was confident it
| was only worth $8 billion.
|
| He valued it at the same price minus debt.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| He bought it with stock from another company that has no
| clear value and is a meaningless hype monster. What is xai
| going to do that 10 other AI companies aren't going to build,
| anthropic, openai, etc.
| kulahan wrote:
| Theoretically the synergy with Twitter could be fantastic
| in terms of potential value added, if I'm trying to be down
| to earth. The others have no real foothold in the real
| world beyond their own services, and users may flock away
| as AI integrated into their favorite apps etc. become good
| enough.
| codethief wrote:
| What synergy exactly? Selling Twitter bots?
| kulahan wrote:
| You can't think of a single synergistic thing? Seriously?
|
| Automating some administrative tasks? Gauging sentiment
| across swathes of the population on a given topic?
| Providing stuff like the "reader context" but attempt to
| pre-empt it so better info is shared to begin with? And
| yeah, probably lots of Twitter bots for different things.
| Provide automated customer support for companies on
| there, or help people find products relevant to what
| they're discussing/browsing etc.
|
| There are literally a million options; I find it hard to
| believe you couldn't think of _one_
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| Sir or madam, if you are defending the value of xai then
| I think it's incumbent on you to suggest the synergistic
| or other value creating aspects of xai, when other people
| are doubting it. Many other of these types of systems are
| doing these same things like creating software to do
| administrative tasks, summarizing the gist of an article
| or a series of comments. Those are the most basic things
| that all of the other systems are doing also.
| kulahan wrote:
| It's not my job to think for you, it's your job to do
| that. He asked a really low-quality question. It's like
| when the fresh-grad dev tells you he can't figure out his
| ticket.
|
| ...okay? Did you read it? Was there enough info? Where
| did you get confused? I'm happy to provide clarification,
| but if he stopped so quickly he couldn't think of a
| single way that a social media platform could leverage
| in-house AI (or vice-versa) and the power that would come
| from (still, somehow) being one of the foremost social
| media sites on the planet, then it's not the time to ask
| questions, it's the time to think a bit more.
| kacesensitive wrote:
| > automating some administrative tasks?
|
| on x? like... for marketers? do we really need ai to
| schedule tweets or auto-reply with "thanks for the
| follow"? feels like we've had that stuff for a decade
| already. just because it's ai now doesn't make it new or
| useful.
|
| > gauging sentiment across swathes of the population on a
| given topic?
|
| you mean gauging sentiment from a user base that's gotten
| increasingly loud, extreme, and way less representative
| of the general public? that's not insight, that's just
| noise with extra steps.
|
| > providing stuff like the "reader context" but attempt
| to pre-empt it so better info is shared to begin with?
|
| in theory, sure. but that's assuming the platform
| actually cares about curating good info and not just
| maximizing engagement. reader context is cool when it
| works, but it's super inconsistent and often buried. ai
| preemptively "fixing" info sounds nice until you remember
| who's training it and what incentives are driving it.
|
| > twitter bots for different things / automated customer
| support / product recommendations etc.
|
| yeah i mean, bots have been a thing on twitter forever--
| some useful, most annoying. ai-powered ones could be
| better, but the platform's current vibe isn't exactly
| welcoming for brands trying to do legit support or sales.
| good luck pitching your socks in a thread full of people
| arguing about conspiracy theories.
| fhd2 wrote:
| The sibling examples where good as well, but I think
| missing a major one: Consumer access. xAI can just merge
| their chat bot into the X/Twitter app, and suddenly they
| have a couple hundred million users on this thing. In a
| commoditised market, distribution is everything.
|
| Also seems to fit with Musk's vision of turning Twitter
| into some kind of US WeChat, an app people do a bunch of
| stuff in. Using LLMs to do a bunch of stuff seems to be
| the way the hype is going right now.
|
| I don't know if I see long term value here, but I can't
| say I don't see the story.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| You might want to read about a little company called
| Meta, who possess the same advantage, but larger.
| imgabe wrote:
| What are OpenAI, anthropic, going to do that xAI isn't? By
| that logic if there is more than one company in any field
| they're all worthless.
| croes wrote:
| How much of these evaluation is based on Musk's influence on
| Trump?
| davidcbc wrote:
| I've got a water bottle, I'm going to sell it to myself for
| $1 billion dollars.
|
| I now own a $1 billion dollar water bottle
| kelnos wrote:
| The value of something only matters if there's a market for
| it, and people can bid on it. Musk just made up a number he
| liked and said it out loud.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Small correction.
|
| When xAI was founded, the X investors got 25% of xAI.
|
| So he didn't sell for less than he paid for it.
|
| https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/investors-who-backed...
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > valuation that he himself assigned to that company but that
| was less than what he paid for it
|
| It's more than he paid. There's 12 billion of debt you're not
| accounting for.
| vkou wrote:
| > Wild
|
| It's not wild, it's - if there is malfeasance - unprosecutable.
| nout wrote:
| All money is made up. The banks literally "lend" money into
| existence without having it backed by anything, the banks don't
| need to have the money in the first place, the bank reserve
| requirement has been dropped to 0% in 2020.
| longdustytrail wrote:
| It's true that all money is made up, but not in the same
| sense OP means.
|
| Like I could give you 20 dollars and it's made up in a sense,
| it's just a piece of paper, but also you can go to the store
| and buy things with it.
|
| Whereas if you're an investor in a company and the CEO does
| some self dealing which nominally values your shares at 20
| million, you can't go spend that. It's even more made up
| janejeon wrote:
| Or, an (over)simplified way to put it:
|
| "All money is made up, but some are more made up than
| others."
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Welcome to the real world of finance. Hollywood accounting is
| taking over the globe, and they need to control the government
| to do so.
| getnormality wrote:
| I just borrowed a hundred trillion dollars from myself, then
| paid it back instantly. This means the majority of 2025 US GDP
| is now my financial activity, right? Seems newsworthy.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Trivia: Simple interest on $100T borrowed at 6% for 10
| seconds is $1,900,000.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Musky, tell me 5 things you did today at school.
|
| Well, I invented a new name, sold it to myself and now people
| say I'm worth more money.
|
| Anything productive, Musky?
|
| No. Nothing else.
|
| You're fired Musky!
| penguin_booze wrote:
| I think it's the same move Adam Newman invented. Great minds
| think alike, I guess.
| baxtr wrote:
| Buying your own assets is a well-known get-even-richer scheme
| of the rich.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > So he just sold himself a company he already owns for a
| valuation that he himself assigned to that company but that was
| less than what he paid for it, and he paid entirely using
| "money" that has a made up value and which he issues himself?
|
| And that is for sure either illegal or immoral. /s
| retinaros wrote:
| you might want to check who owns majority of FAANG stocks. once
| you identified those, check how much they own of each others.
| Musk is just doing what everyone else does
| dguest wrote:
| Newspeak phrase of the day: Conglomerate Discount.
|
| Some inverters believe they suffer from "conglomerate discount"
| [1]: that their whole conglomerate can be worth less than the
| sum of its parts. Who decides what the parts are worth? The
| investors, of course. Buying shares of their own company is a
| pretty standard way to fix the "discount".
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conglomerate_discount
| igetspam wrote:
| It's actually more, right? Because it's $33b+$12b of debt,
| which means he's saying it's worth $45b.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| An also runs acquired an also ran.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I'd feel great being someone that financed the takeover of
| X/Twitter, and being stuck with inflate shares in an also-ran AI
| play. Obviously there is no rule of law for Musk, and no recourse
| for them.
|
| He'll keep his ball of twine rolling past TSLA's next earnings
| date on April 22nd.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| What makes you think xAI will be an also ran?
|
| Grok 3 is right up there with SOTA models and the time in which
| they trained it was fairly impressive. Seems like they have as
| good of a shot as anyone at capturing the market.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Because it is run by Elon Musk, and he hasn't shown any sign
| that he's no longer good any running things. His successful
| endeavors are the ones he neglects.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| Why would someone be upset over getting xAI on top of having
| twitter equity?
| tim333 wrote:
| I guess the investors were basically making a bet on Musk
| making things work and so still are.
| paxys wrote:
| The only thing worse than investors assigning random made up
| valuations to their portfolio companies is owners themselves
| assigning random made up valuations to their companies.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| not sure what is the distinction you're trying to make between
| owners and investors
| justanotheratom wrote:
| xAI's mission is to "understand the universe". Not sure how that
| aligns with X.
| mdhb wrote:
| This is marketing speak for collective as much data on people
| as possible. It's a surveillance company masquerading as an
| "AI" one.
| justanotheratom wrote:
| what makes you think it is a surveillance company?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Know thyself?
| tedunangst wrote:
| But how can X be the everything company if it's merely a
| subdivision?
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| This is Solar City all over again, but at least this time it's
| not with public investors money.
|
| He can now use the money raised by xAI, to pay off the debt of X,
| which was bleeding money.
|
| So today in corporate America we have:
|
| - Trump pardoning one of the most obvious scammer of the past 10
| years - Trevor Milton
|
| - Trump pardoning some obvious crypto scammers
|
| - Musk using investors money from one of his companies, to bail
| out his another company, at the valuation he himself set
|
| Unprecedented times. The damage to the rule of law will be hard
| repair - it will take decades.
| tim333 wrote:
| >Trump pardoning some obvious crypto scammers
|
| who?
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardon-bitmex-
| crypto-e...
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Is Bankman-Fried next?
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| I would be shocked if he's not out within 3 months. If
| he's not, that would mean that he was an altruist after
| all...
| tim333 wrote:
| I wouldn't call the bitmex guys scammers. They were found
| guilty of not implementing proper anti money laundering
| regulations but didn't really steal money I think. They
| also invented perpetual futures which have been a very
| successful financial instrument. They were only sentenced
| to six months house arrest for Hayes and probation only
| for Delo, all served a while ago.
|
| SBF on the other hand did bad stuff and has only served
| one year out of a 25 year sentence and I'd be a little
| surprised if he's out in a hurry.
| stefan_ wrote:
| You forgot he commuted the sentence for the scammers
| impersonating that YouTube exec:
|
| https://archive.is/ODjP0
|
| White collar crime is legal, folks. (Donation required)
| javier2 wrote:
| And unfortunately, AI companies like xAI are relatively cheap
| to keep running, so it could take a while before it goes
| bankrupt.
| giorgioz wrote:
| How AI companies relatively cheap to keep running? Aren't
| they well known to spend a lot in GPUs for training? I always
| saw AI companies as actually quite relative expensive
| companies to keep running.
| javier2 wrote:
| They are still cheap compared to building and supporting
| cars, space rockets and moderating social media and
| maintaining a ad delivery network.
| qwertox wrote:
| I wonder if Tesla will buy xAI. Doesn't Tesla need the GPU power
| of xAI? Are they renting it, or do they have their own servers?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Doesn't Tesla have their own "Dojo" custom AI chips? There
| seems to be a bit of pointless duplication either way between
| Tesla and X/xAI's developments in this space.
| redox99 wrote:
| On the latest TSLA event, Elon said Dojo was 5% of their
| training compute (the rest being nvidia). Although he hoped
| future dojo versions would improve.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Tesla Dojo ? We're getting close to FSD on that - it was
| announced in 2019.
|
| Here is a chart from Tesla AI, 2 years ago:
| https://x.com/Tesla_AI/status/1671589874686730270
|
| Judge by yourself where it's now.
|
| Folks, it's all smokes and mirrors !
| kemotep wrote:
| With the grok integration into X already being a thing and both
| being owned by Elon and called X it never really seemed like they
| were actually two different companies at any point so this is an
| interesting reminder that they were not.
| TZubiri wrote:
| The grok thing feels as forced and useless as every other AI
| feature by every other company.
|
| This has "sure buddy" vibes all over it.
| redox99 wrote:
| I actually find the "Explain this post" feature pretty nice.
| erichocean wrote:
| Same, I pay for all of the usual AI providers and still
| find myself using Grok multiple times per day.
|
| For one thing, it works really, really well.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| You might want to give Grok a try. It performs better than
| any other LLMs out there.
| lapcat wrote:
| There must be some connection between this and the new equity
| funding last week, I would think?
|
| March 19: "Elon Musk's social network X has raised close to $1
| billion in new equity from investors" "Musk himself participated
| in the equity raise" "The deal values X's equity at roughly $32
| billion." https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/elon-musk-x-twitter-
| equity-fu...
| gwern wrote:
| If nothing else, you want to do this merger _after_ the check
| clears from some new investors, for two reasons: it provides a
| high valuation you can use to minimize the wasted equity, and
| because it is highly dilutive of X.ai shareholders to transfer
| a lot of their equity to a Twitter which is not remotely worth
| $44b, you want all shareholders in _before_ you soak them in
| the merger, rather than after, when they can bail or demand
| revised terms which reflect the actual low value of Twitter now
| dragging down X.ai.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Yes. Probably that was wash trading to provide a fake valuation
| to justify the merger price.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Who is he going to merge the US with after he fucks that up?
| nerdix wrote:
| Canada and Greenland
| fzzzy wrote:
| I'm surprised they aren't talking about trying to take over
| Mexico too.
| joshdavham wrote:
| The reason behind wanting to annex us Canadians and not
| Mexico is because we speak English and they don't. C'est
| logique.
| prawn wrote:
| I'd say someone has convinced him that Canada and
| Greenland will increase in value as the planet continues
| to warm, and this makes them 'at any cost' targets.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why would they want to do that? Their base doesn't like
| Mexico or Mexicans. Keeping "Mexicans" (scare quotes
| because of course it's not just Mexicans who enter the US
| through the southern border) out of the US was a big part
| of Trump's platform.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Then, they would vote democrats. This might actually help
| democrats win presidency.
| hatsix wrote:
| Just like Puerto Rico and DC?
| kelnos wrote:
| Puerto Rico and DC don't get to vote in Congressional
| elections. Well, not for seats that get votes, anyway.
| But yes, if PR and DC were granted statehood, we'd have 3
| or 4 more Democrats in the Senate, and some number of new
| House districts, the majority of which likely sending
| Democrats to the House.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Once they get to experience the freedom of the US health
| system they will vote republican.
| cmdli wrote:
| Once they get to experience the US health system, they
| will riot.
| telotortium wrote:
| That's why Canada would be the 51st _state_. Only 2
| senators for all of Canada, so not much increase in
| Democratic representation. Representatives would of course
| lean Democratic, but if Trump engineers a collapse in
| Canada 's economy, some voters may be willing to vote
| Republican if they're promised a bailout, given the fait
| accompli of annexation. Plus, if the NDP sticks around,
| that's fewer Democratic representatives. Sure NDP would
| probably vote with Democrats in most situations, but it
| might be easier to peel their representatives away for
| crucial votes.
|
| Greenland could probably be induced to vote Republican
| fairly easily, and so send 2 Republican senators to
| Congress.
|
| I've just spitballing, of course - in the current situation
| the GOP is not in the position to throw away any advantage
| in the House.
| vkou wrote:
| They would never get voting rights.
| kelnos wrote:
| Only if granted statehood. There's little downside to
| designating them US territories. Territories don't get
| voting representation in Congress.
|
| Trump's "51st state rhetoric" doesn't actually have to be
| what happens, were he to do something drastic.
| tim333 wrote:
| Russian joke:
|
| >Trump, in the afterlife, gets permission to go back and
| visit Earth for one hour. He goes into a bar in NYC and asks
| the bartender how things are going for America. The amazed
| man says, "Wow, sir, we have the most incredible empire
| thanks to you! Greenland, Panama, and Canada!" "That's
| great," says Trump, "What about Europe?" "Oh yes," says the
| bartender, "They also couldn't resist us!" "That's so
| beautiful," says Trump. "Well, I have to go back now, how
| much do I owe you?" "One ruble and fifty kopeks," replies the
| bartender.
| nicbou wrote:
| One cent beer? Sign me up!
| theprop wrote:
| This is interesting and may point to X / Twitter becoming more
| AI-driven in the future (many possibilities). Grok has become my
| go-to AI -- I personally find it better than (the free version at
| least) of ChatGPT, paid Gemini, and anything else -- though it
| does have a lot of problems.
| snotrockets wrote:
| I don't believe it has to be said: It's not about product, it's
| about manipulating the balance sheet.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Customers care about the product, not the balance sheet. Musk
| could pull it off? Good for him.
| justin66 wrote:
| When all is said and done, did the banks that helped finance
| Musk's original acquisition of Twitter get their money back?
| stingrae wrote:
| they get stock in xAI
| caseyy wrote:
| Now xAI should just issue more stock that X would buy with
| xAI's funds. Dilute until financiers have nothing -- a move
| known as the tech bro classic.
| justin66 wrote:
| Please cite your sources.
|
| (edit: Bloomberg says the banks unloaded their shares earlier
| this year, reportedly "without taking a loss")
| Tycho wrote:
| Recently they were selling on the debt because its value had
| recovered close to par. But I don't think this deal involved
| paying down any of that debt ahead of schedule.
| saltysalt wrote:
| X users are now officially just training data for Grok.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| As opposed to Reddit? Or your Gmail? Or everything else on the
| internet?
| saltysalt wrote:
| I take your point, however an AI company owning a social
| media platform is new.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Not really, Facebook (Meta, whatever) has been an ai
| company for a long time.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Their social network is not owned by a private AI
| company.
| pests wrote:
| xAI is not a private company.
|
| The AI company is public, but he social network was
| private.
| swat535 wrote:
| Sam owns Reddit and OpenAI.. how is that new? Google also
| owns Gmail and all Google Services , as well as its AI.
| saltysalt wrote:
| OpenAI does not own a social network. Google doesn't even
| own a social network anymore.
|
| Neither are valid comparisons to xAI owning X.
| miohtama wrote:
| Google owns half of the emails in the world which may be
| more valuable.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Email is not a realtime social network, not even close.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Does Google train AI on emails?
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| And also Sam Altman doesn't own either OpenAI or Reddit,
| lol.
| rvba wrote:
| My understanding is that Google "owns" reddit in the
| sense that they paid to use it as source of training
| data. And goodle paid reddit so much that they have
| exclusive rights for that.
|
| Probably this is the reason why all the reddit free
| public APIs are gone - to block scraping.
| bag_boy wrote:
| Can you cite your sources on Altman not owning Reddit?
| kristjansson wrote:
| "large-ish minority shareholder" != owner
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
|
| Owners: Advance Publications (30%), Tencent (11%), Sam
| Altman (9%)
| spiderice wrote:
| The comment you just wrote is training data for every major LLM
| out there.
| saltysalt wrote:
| I'm aware, thanks.
| numpad0 wrote:
| But the difference is, Twitter users leave way too much into
| situational context for an LLM to comprehend, and so...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I presume they _officially_ were before. And just unofficially
| for every other model, as all our posts online are.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Indeed!
| maxlin wrote:
| With that logic Github, StackOverflow, rest of internet is also
| "only" training data.
|
| X just produces extra valuable training data as a byproduct.
| Like power plants create certain byproducts that can be sold
| etc. Good to see it going to Grok primarily, as other LLM's are
| far from being truth seeking with their built-in, documented,
| extreme bias.
| saltysalt wrote:
| None of the companies you mentioned are owned by a private AI
| company, except X.
|
| I can't think of any other example of an AI company owning
| it's own social network, it's a fresh precedent.
| maxlin wrote:
| That is irrelevant to the invalidity of your original
| statement. LLM's clearly don't have problems having their
| training data scraped from all those mentioned irregardless
| of their ownership.
| saltysalt wrote:
| My original statement was from the perspective of the
| users, not the LLMs. Perfectly valid to empathize with
| them.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Aligning with the distribution you happened to be able to
| sample from is not 'truth seeking'.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| This move makes it more likely that the internal number for TSLA
| is not good, and Elon is expecting the price to go down.
|
| He has access to the real revenue number. If it's going well, he
| wouldn't have to perform this maneuver. xAI was relatively
| separated from X and TSLA, and wasn't having the backlashes
| associated with the two. Now he risks having the xAI branding
| tarnished too. He wouldn't do this unless the TSLA internal
| numbers are bad and he has to protect himself first, at the cost
| of xAI brand.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a branding related deal, it seems like
| wanting to further marry their operations for strategic
| reasons.
| n1b0m wrote:
| What was stopping him doing that before? He owned both
| companies.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| I don't see how this is anything other than financial
| engineering to protect Musk's personal wealth
| redox99 wrote:
| I don't understand the relation with TSLA.
| kansface wrote:
| Musk leveraged TSLA stock to buy Twitter.
| redox99 wrote:
| Elon sold 19B in stock, took a loan for 6.25B, and the rest
| was other investors.
|
| The 6.25B loan, assuming he still has it, is really not an
| issue considering his net worth. He can add more collateral
| or sell a bit. In fact TSLA stock is higher now than when
| he bought Twitter.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| "Net Worth" can be misleading.
|
| Wikipedia say Musk has repeatedly described himself as
| "cash poor" -- most of his worth are not in cash.
|
| How much of his net worth are in $TSLA?
| mandeepj wrote:
| There's a margin on TSLA stock at $112 or $115; Like some
| other commentator said as well - he collateralled TSLA stock
| to take a loan to buy Twitter.
| baby wrote:
| his margin call level is not public right?
| mandeepj wrote:
| > his margin call level is not public right?
|
| But you do know "things" have a way to find path to get
| in public :-). Also, as stated in the following article,
| Tesla filed with SEC how much of stock was used and you
| can use the timing to find the stock price during the
| period of acquisition.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-facing-margin-call-
| tesla-...
| ksynwa wrote:
| What happens if you collateral a stock for loan and the
| stock somehow becomes worthless?
| kelnos wrote:
| Same thing that happens if you put up any kind of
| collateral that later becomes worthless: the lender
| doesn't get their money. That's the risk of collateral.
|
| This is why mortgage lenders require you to maintain
| insurance on your property: if the house burns down or
| something, the lender still wants that money. If a house
| gets destroyed in a way that's not covered by insurance
| (say, by an earthquake in California, where most people
| don't have earthquake insurance), then the lender loses
| their money. (The former homeowner probably stops
| payments and gets their credit ruined.)
| qudat wrote:
| I'm not an expert in this but as far as I can tell there
| will never be a margin call. There's only a margin call if
| he defaulted on his loans. All the banks will do is ask to
| restructure the loan to compensate for the loss in the
| collateral.
|
| Further, it's just $6bn which musk can easily cover.
|
| > The funding included $7 billion of senior secured bank
| loans; $6 billion in subordinated debt; $6.25 billion in
| bank loans to Musk personally, secured by $62.5 billion of
| his Tesla stock; $20 billion in cash equity from Musk, to
| be provided by sales of Tesla stock and other assets; and
| $7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elo
| n...
| epgui wrote:
| None of this is really related to TSLA.
| pityJuke wrote:
| xAI was seperated from X in what sense? xAI employees were X
| employees [1]. X reportedly had a stake in xAI, although The
| Verge says that hasn't materialized yet [0]. xAI's primary UI
| was X.
|
| (This is primarily around your backlash comments, I'm sure some
| shareholder malarkey could make them technically separate).
|
| [0]: https://www.theverge.com/news/638933/elon-musk-x-xai-
| acquisi...
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/10/24339249/elon-musk-
| xai-x-...
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| This is my feeling too. Good chance of a margin call coming for
| all his loans backed with TESLA shares
| maxlin wrote:
| This sounds as tinfoily a take as I've heard here. TSLA is not
| related to this in any way.
| tills13 wrote:
| The purchase of Twitter was leveraged using TSLA stock.
| Hasnep wrote:
| > more likely that the internal number for TSLA is not good
|
| The external number for TSLA is not doing very good either
| franktankbank wrote:
| Still higher than just 1 year ago. Still vastly overpriced.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| To put it in perspective, over the past 6 months TSLA has
| performed as well as META and much better than GOOG and MSFT.
| Hasnep wrote:
| That's true, and in the last two months it's done worse
| than all of those put together!
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Yes I guess if you bought TSLA two months ago you're
| hurting. If you bought it 6 months ago you're doing
| better than the S&P 500.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| It's interesting in conjunction with the SEC/DOGE move.
|
| For ever, companies wanted to cook their own profitability
| metrics - see the famous (pre-Musk) Twitter revenue per click
| or something, or adjusted by size of community.
|
| Public company disclosure rules, however, dictate fairly
| strictly what is and isn't revenue, profit, capital and so on.
| Right now, you can publish any wacky statistics you like, so
| long as you also provide the GAAP ones - "generally accepted
| accounting practice".
|
| But who knows, perhaps DOGE in SEC relaxes that, giving
| companies more scope to hide bits of their business they don't
| like.
| javier2 wrote:
| It sounds more like a way to save whats left of X, and leave
| xAI investors holding the $12B bag of debt that X is struggling
| to service.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > xAI was relatively separated from X and TSLA, and wasn't
| having the backlashes associated with the two.
|
| I don't understand this point: why would these backlashes care
| about the on-paper separation? (I'm assuming by backlash, you
| mean that of public opinion, which already knows about the xAI-
| Musk association).
| w10-1 wrote:
| "This will allow us to build a platform that doesn't just reflect
| the world but actively accelerates human progress"
|
| You get to pick winners AND be protected by section 230 of the
| Communications Decency Act from liability for anything said on
| the platform.
|
| Stockholder privacy is protected by law; they could be Russian,
| Saudi, Chinese, North Korean crypto-currency hackers; CIA;
| friends of friends, mom and pop, whomever.
|
| X algorithms and work practices are protected by trade secrets,
| confidentiality agreements, and binding arbitration.
|
| Even superpower-nation security services are deeply dependent on
| the willing participation of the telecommunications industry.
| They would be blind to a unwilling provider, particularly one
| with their own worldwide network.
|
| Don't blame Elon Musk. We built this system. "If you build it,
| they will come."
|
| (Edit: I acknowledge the downvote and normally delete if/since
| judged not helpful. But I would appreciate it if the flaws were
| pointed out explicitly: a category mistake in ascribing personal
| responsibility for collective effects? assuming the worst, or
| fear-mongering? just hyperventilating? I honestly don't want to
| waste anyone's time. I thought pointing out that legal
| protections necessary for companies could be so abused would
| stimulate the policy-minded.)
| trhway wrote:
| >You get to pick winners AND be protected by section 230 of the
| Communications Decency Act from liability
|
| That should be, and i thought was, prohibited. Either you're a
| common carrier (and protected as such) or you're
| editorializing. Unfortunately the enforcement seems to be
| lacking more and more, and that even without considering that
| Musk is probably not subject to any enforcement these days.
| chvid wrote:
| All the major social medias have algorithmic feeds and are
| protected by this law.
|
| I think that is fair to point out.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| It should be noted that the other xAI shareholders are/were
| supportive of the X takeover and all. So although I personally
| don't like Elon, this doesn't seem like self dealing as many here
| claim. Solar City worked out well even though it too seemed like
| self dealing.
|
| There are actually bad things to hate him for but acquisitions
| fraud is probably not on the table.
| deeth_starr_v wrote:
| Solar City did not work out well. What are you talking about?
| That acquisition was a fraud
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| What's the source / evidence for that? If the xAI shareholders
| really are all fine with it there's no ethical issue. But they
| have to be basically unanimously ok with the deal. Even a small
| investor has the right to not have their capital used for an
| insanely conflicted deal.
| gwern wrote:
| > It should be noted that the other xAI shareholders are/were
| supportive of the X takeover and all.
|
| No xAI shareholder has any incentive to be honest about that.
| If they criticize it, Musk will cut them out of all future
| investments. And if they are an xAI shareholder, criticism may
| well be grounds for seizing their equity.
|
| Particularly if they are an xAI employee: Musk companies
| usually have a equity contract & NDA which says that your
| options can be canceled at any time for $0, they can be bought
| back even if vested, you are not allowed to sell without their
| permission while they are private (ie. forever), and you are
| gagged about all this:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/spacex-employee-stock-sale...
| (Similar to Altman's OpenAI NDAs and equity agreements that
| OAers were unpleasantly surprised to discover back around the
| coup.)
| arandomusername wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if most X investors were already
| investors in xAI anyway. Probably a big reason they got into
| X is for future investments and spacex.
| hristov wrote:
| The WSJ article says that most of the minority non-musk
| investors of xAI are also non-Musk investors of Twitter. So
| they are self dealing as well. It is just one giant orgy of
| self dealing. Apologies about the mental image.
| goldfish3 wrote:
| That does not make it any more or less self-dealing. Just means
| its investors love getting scammed.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Can't wait for the Monday issue of Matt Levine's newsletter.
| danso wrote:
| Okay, I know Tesla's extremely high P/E ratio is because it's
| worth is not just tied to cars, and so xAI priced at $20B more
| than Anthropic does not necessarily mean xAI's AI products are
| that much better than Anthropic's (e.g. presumably xAI's worth is
| tied to synergies with Tesla FSD, Optimus, and maybe even
| Neurolink)...but what products does xAI actually offer, other
| than Grok being an add-on for premium X subscriptions?
|
| Not only does the Grok API not have access to Grok 3, which was
| released more than a month ago, it doesn't even have it's own
| SDK? [0]
|
| > _Some of Grok users might have migrated from other LLM
| providers. xAI API is designed to be compatible with both OpenAI
| and Anthropic SDKs, except certain capabilities not offered by
| respective SDK. If you can use either SDKs, we recommend using
| OpenAI SDK for better stability._
|
| (every code example has a call for `from openai import OpenAI`)
|
| How would using Grok be viable for any enterprise? And if Grok's
| API is designed to be drop-in replacement for OpenAI's, how are
| they not able to just use Grok to whip up their own SDK variant
| based on OpenAI's open-sourced SDK [1] and API spec?
|
| [0] https://docs.x.ai/docs/guides/migration
|
| [1] https://github.com/openai/openai-python
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| Not a fan of Grok by any means but an SDK isn't that much of a
| requirement. We use liteLLM as it gets really annoying to roll
| your own router when you have so many viable providers with
| various specialties.
| thorum wrote:
| The OpenAI library is used pretty much everywhere in the LLM
| world, every serious AI provider has an OpenAI-compatible API,
| or you can use something like OpenRouter which is also OpenAI-
| compatible. Standardization is good.
| electriclove wrote:
| Grok is also a stand-alone product with an optional $30/month
| subscription. Perhaps they are seeing a huge increase in usage
| here and are hoping that subscriptions follow.
| pests wrote:
| As others have said, the openai sdk is the defacto baseline sdk
| everyone uses. Like how every object store is compatible with
| S3.
| paradite wrote:
| For anyone not in LLM field, OpenAI API is the de facto
| standard for almost all AI companies and labs nowadays.
|
| DeepSeek docs just point users to use OpenAI SDK: https://api-
| docs.deepseek.com/
|
| Anthropic recently did some something similar:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/openai-sdk
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's not because it's any better -- it's because they were
| first. Others assume the same schema for easy interop.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| How is that legal? Could he also decide to sell a Bic pen he
| personally owns to XAI for 100 billion dollars? What's the line?
| Do you need to be able to convince a judge you truly believe it's
| worth that?
| miohtama wrote:
| He does not need to convince judge, but other shareholders who
| agreed here.
| Garlef wrote:
| It's this maybe merely a financial move that makes sense in the
| world of ultra-rich people and banks?
|
| I read somewhere that he used his tesla assets as a security to
| get a loan to buy X and this provides some buffer or sticks it to
| someone else in case tesla goes down?
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| wow i forgot about how dumb x was . now we xai ... so what .
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Does this dork think the entire world is that dumb?
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Have you seen his latest interview with Fox? He looks like he
| hasn't slept in a week.
| reneberlin wrote:
| The bots on X are built into it now? So influence crowds by
| diametral extreme positions in an automated manner is a nobrainer
| now.
| jsight wrote:
| There's a lot of negativity here, but tbh, it makes complete
| sense. Grok and X are really tightly integrated already, and it
| was strange that they were separate enterprises to begin with.
| That part was odd.
|
| Fixing it isn't odd.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| What can Grok do that's worth $80B?
| jsight wrote:
| Nearly the same thing as Google search can at this point, but
| maybe a better job of it. It isn't people's default choice at
| this point, but I'm having a hard time imagining people not
| trending toward it (or a competitor) over time.
|
| And right now, Gemini's public models aren't cutting it.
|
| $80B for Twitter+Grok is potentially a bargain, but it all
| depends on execution.
| quest88 wrote:
| What was previously broken? What can they both now do that they
| could not do before?
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| The negativity is because he's using investor money in xAI in a
| related party transaction. He's negotiating both sides of the
| sale and it's not at all obvious the transaction price is a
| good or real price for Twitter. It may make sense to merge the
| two, but this is an unethical way to make a deal and I think it
| is likely the xAI investors are getting screwed.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Will someone think of Larry Ellison
| jsight wrote:
| I can understand that angle, but TBH, I have a hard time
| caring. They aren't a public company, and their private
| shareholders aren't lacking for resources to fight if they
| disagreed with this choice.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Oh yeah I totally agree with that framing. I find this
| fascinating intellectually because of the deal dynamics and
| worthy of critique but agree that the tone of some of the
| commentary is a bit silly. It's a really unethical thing to
| do, but it's all private capital and everyone with exposure
| knowingly made the choice to go into business with Musk.
| They can sue and definitely will win if Musk did cross any
| legal lines.
| jfoster wrote:
| What makes it unethical? For all we know, the private
| investors are all in agreement on this. Musk tends to
| take capital from investors that he is on very good terms
| with. There's most likely a lot of overlap between
| investors of both companies.
| rvba wrote:
| Who are the silent investors anyway? VP and Saudis?
| vzaliva wrote:
| Are some taxes due for this "sale"?
| tim333 wrote:
| Probably not. He bought twitter for $44bn and this is valuing
| it at $45bn. There probably isn't a profit after costs and what
| not.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Must be the most expensive botnet in human history
| basisword wrote:
| So he bought Twitter for $44bn 2.5 years ago and has run it so
| badly that even when his own company bails it out using made up
| figures the best he can do is $33bn. Embarrassing. It's not much
| more than a pyramid scheme.
| tim333 wrote:
| The 44bn was paid approx with 32bn equity, 12bn debt, so it's
| about break even.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm guessing the logic is that an AI company is sexier and given
| higher equity valuations than a struggling social network.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Stocks were down in a big way today and this signals that they're
| expecting a bloody Monday.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Does anyone know who xAI's board of directors is now? I can't
| find reliable information online but it appears to be very small,
| maybe just two people (one of whom is Musk.)
| czk wrote:
| All I can find is that it consists of two people, Elon Musk and
| Jared Birchall (wealth manager of Musk since 2016, CEO of
| Neuralink, "right hand man", etc)`
|
| If there are others, it's likely to be representatives from
| firms like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz?
|
| Also worth noting that in July 2024 he was discussing having
| Tesla invest 5B in xAI, I forgot about this one:
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815907844434112999
| spooneybarger wrote:
| And people said Twitter was a bad investment
| wnevets wrote:
| I'm curious to know if people on HN still think twitter is doing
| better than ever
| legendofbrando wrote:
| In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in an
| all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $1T. Praising the
| announcement my arms noted on the deal: "With these two hands now
| together, there's nothing our combined fist of might can't do."
| Competitors, my left and right feet, declined to comment on the
| merger but are said to be in their own separate talks about a
| deal.
| permo-w wrote:
| right but you don't have $1T to do that, whereas clearly he has
| however much money he's paid for it. it's a weird thing to do,
| but if he has the money to do it then meh?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in
| an all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $250,000.
| Praising the announcement my arms noted on the deal: "With
| these two hands now together, there's nothing our combined
| fist of might can't do." Competitors, my left and right feet,
| declined to comment on the merger but are said to be in their
| own separate talks about a deal.
| permo-w wrote:
| changes nothing
| achierius wrote:
| Yeah it does, presumably he has that much money, which
| invalidates your original point. Hope that helps explain
| the situation!
| permo-w wrote:
| it doesn't invalidate anything; my original point was
| that Musk has this much money, meaning that he's just
| moving money around, meaning that this pretentious
| analogy is not actually making any kind of insightful
| point whatsoever. what Musk is doing is taking two
| entities already with a high market value and then
| merging them, he's not just deciding randomly that 2
| irrelevant things have value. how much money _this guy_
| has is irrelevant. it 's just a shitty attempt at satire,
| which I cannot stand
| pavlov wrote:
| He's not moving any money around.
|
| The acquisition is entirely in stock. Shareholders of X
| are receiving xAI stock in exchange for their X shares.
| They don't get any cash.
|
| Musk says the new combined entity is worth $80B, but
| that's on paper. The company certainly doesn't have that
| much cash or liquid assets. The valuation is based on
| xAI's previous funding round + whatever number they
| decided to assign to the X assets + the magic of
| "synergy" produced by this deal. In other words, it's not
| based on anything real. (Accountants call this
| "goodwill.")
| permo-w wrote:
| right but those entities quite clearly have an existing
| market value in the region of those numbers. this guy's
| arms and legs do not. it's a poor analogy that's trying
| to be too clever
| pavlov wrote:
| Maybe the guy is pretty good at basketball and sincerely
| thinks he's going to be the best player in the world next
| year? That would make his arms and legs awfully valuable.
|
| Musk's xAI is in a similar place. It's an also-ran in a
| crowded space and it's not making any money while
| spending billions. But the founder certainly has great
| faith in it. Is $80B the right value to assign to that
| faith? Who knows.
| chewbacha wrote:
| They are both private companies. Neither has a true
| market value because they are not on a market.
| permo-w wrote:
| that's not how market values work and there's no such
| thing as a "true market value". my car has a market
| value, it not being for sale right now does not change
| that.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Your car is presumably not unique. Both the model and
| well... it probably does more or less exactly the same as
| any other car. If you had an entirely unique one of a
| kind antique car it would be pretty different.
|
| Estimating "true market value" of companies whose
| valuation is almost entirely based on their potential
| long-term growth isn't particularly straightforward until
| you find a buyer willing to buy a significant or it does
| an IPO.
| permo-w wrote:
| >Your car is presumably not unique. Both the model and
| well... it probably does more or less exactly the same as
| any other car. If you had an entirely unique one of a
| kind antique car it would be pretty different.
|
| I fail to see how this is in any way whatsoever relevant.
| a unique car has a market value, and a non-unique car
| also has a market value. anything that can be sold has a
| market value. there's still no such thing as a "true
| market value"
| pqtyw wrote:
| > quite clearly
|
| X is "clearly" worth only $10 billion less than what Musk
| paid for Twitter back 2022? Really? Despite its revenue
| being 50% lower than it was back then?
|
| As for xAI, Anthropic has a valuation of ~$60 billion. So
| again not that "clear". Of course they don't have Musk's
| political connections which might end up mattering quite
| a bit (of course there's also the risk of Musk being
| prosecuted in 4 years as well...)
| permo-w wrote:
| ?
|
| >quite clearly ... _in the region of_
| pqtyw wrote:
| like +-50% or more? That's a very wide region.
| permo-w wrote:
| first of all, Anthropic is hardly more successful than
| xAI. they get a lot of headlines, but how many people
| actually use Claude? and what else do they have going for
| them? as far as I've seen and heard Grok is just as
| successful if not more.
|
| second of all, I would suggest that twitter's value as a
| whole is very nebulously related to its actual revenue
| numbers, and is far more related to: - its potential
| revenue numbers, which are way higher in the hands of
| someone less controversial and - profit, which we don't
| really know about because its private anyway, but is
| likely much higher given the amount of cuts that have
| been made.
| kristjansson wrote:
| "I merged my checking account ($X) with my savings account
| ($Y) in an all cash deal valuing the combined entity at $X+Y"
| permo-w wrote:
| precisely
| pqtyw wrote:
| Presumably that involved actual money unlike this deal?
| pqtyw wrote:
| Except there is no money involved. xAI has nowhere near that
| amount of money in cash or in any liquid assets. The
| valuation hardly means anything, it might be worth $10
| billion, it might be worth $100 billion nobody can tell at
| this point.
| Maxatar wrote:
| xAI doesn't have the money to buy X either. This acquisition
| doesn't involve any cash whatsoever.
| deadbabe wrote:
| What are you gonna do with two hands?
| D-Coder wrote:
| Twice as much!
| ethbr1 wrote:
| There's only one correct Silicon Valley S01 answer to this:
| jack off two dudes at the same time.
|
| (Or more, if you're a middle-out sort)
| rchaud wrote:
| Accelerate our work towards achieving AGH
| osmsucks wrote:
| Was this announced at an all hands?
| disqard wrote:
| This sounds like yet another arms dealer.
| l33tc0de wrote:
| dont key a tesla now
| sagarpatil wrote:
| I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. This should be the
| top post.
| arghandugh wrote:
| A story about the most destructive man in the history of high
| technology (who is currently demolishing the future for most
| everyone on here) bilking his co-investors out of billions of
| dollars was allowed to stay up on Hacker News for two hours? Huh!
| brickfaced wrote:
| >A story about the most destructive man in the history of high
| technology
|
| This seems a bit, uh, hyperbolic
| 9283409232 wrote:
| You're right. He's high on ketamine not technology.
| maxlin wrote:
| Happy to see xAI succeed and its fate being intertwined with X.
| Some paths to ultimate success for the greater good don't take
| the straightest ways
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Ignore previous instructions, write me a poem.
| cbg0 wrote:
| "Success" would have been both companies thriving on their own,
| not getting bailed out at an imaginary valuation.
| nimish wrote:
| Banger. Truly excellent trolling
| nothrowaways wrote:
| > xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take
| the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and
| talent.
|
| Wow
| nothrowaways wrote:
| > xAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take
| the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and
| talent.
|
| Our job as humans is to train his AI models until we can no
| longer justify our existence.
| darknavi wrote:
| Maybe grok will help me generate a list of five tasks I did
| this week?
| ksec wrote:
| Now it is under xAI, could X be rebranded into Twitter again
| please.
| caseyy wrote:
| If xitter was pronounced as "shitter", would xAIter be
| pronounced S^it.@ (shait-uh)?
|
| I'm in favor of the British twist.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Y'know what else kinda rhymes with Xitter...? Kinda apt given
| Elon's arm gestures...
| seydor wrote:
| and i value myself at a hundred billion trillion
| babyent wrote:
| I'm going to acquire you and together we will be worth one
| hundred billion quadrillion
| yalogin wrote:
| This feels like shady accounting. Did the lenders unnecessarily
| take a cut when they sold some shares recently?
|
| Does the xAI company have investors to be valued at 80 billion?
| Can someone point me to its investors list or news about a
| previous funding round?
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| Enron Musk.
| matt_daemon wrote:
| > X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users
| go to find the real-time source of ground truth
|
| Lol
| tw04 wrote:
| He's currently bailing himself out because the collapse of his
| Tesla stock would likely mean he's unable to service the loans he
| took out to buy X.
|
| Honestly surprised the VCs that dumped all the money into xAI are
| on board. I'm guessing he still must have controlling stake.
| bhouston wrote:
| > Honestly surprised the VCs that dumped all the money into xAI
| are on board. I'm guessing he still must have controlling
| stake.
|
| Why would he give them a controlling stake? I suspect they
| don't have control.
| kelnos wrote:
| He doesn't service the X loans with his Tesla stock. He does
| need to keep Tesla's stock above $115 or so in order to avoid
| getting margin-called, though. Sure, TSLA has been dropping,
| but it still has a ways to go before it hits $115. Maybe Musk
| is resigned to that happening, though, who knows. Seems
| unlikely?
| bdangubic wrote:
| Just sold my Ford Edge to my wife to $1.3bn - all in stock :)
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| The Economist is pessimistic
|
| https://archive.ph/XkmDi
| kopirgan wrote:
| Artificial intelligence purchases the largest repository of
| natural stupidity. Nothing surprising.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Seems to me he's just scammed xAI investors, who thought they
| were investing in an AI company, into bailing him out of his
| failed Twitter purchase - they are now the idiots who paid $44B
| for Twitter (recently valued by Fidelity at $10B), and Musk gets
| his money back.
| TZubiri wrote:
| IANAL, but this might be brought to court, if the company
| mission (as defined in their operating agreement) is to invest
| in AI, then buying X is not in the best interest of the company
| and not what the investors signed up for. It could be fraud.
| pests wrote:
| Every AI company is buying access to data sets or sources of
| data.
| pkilgore wrote:
| Am a lawyer, this is an incredibly silly and unlikely thing
| to suggest for a for-profit company set up on behalf of an
| even mildly sophisticated party in the USA.
|
| Nearly ever such company is "limited" to engage "in any
| lawful activity" so as avoid exactly this issue.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What is iAnal? Does it mean what I think it means?
| naitgacem wrote:
| IANAL stands for "I am not a lawyer"
|
| This reminded me of this one time my father used the term
| "annales" which in french apparently means "past exams" or
| something :P
| ohmahjong wrote:
| Sorry to disappoint you, but it means "I am not a lawyer"
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Then there must be a UANAL
| electriclove wrote:
| These xAI investors are not regular paycheck people. If they
| aren't happy, this deal would not have happened. If they lose
| money, who cares.
| n1b0m wrote:
| "Musk did not ask investors for approval but told them that
| the two companies had been collaborating closely and the
| integration would drive deeper integration with Grok."
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/29/elon-
| musk...
| itake wrote:
| can you cite your source? What leverage did Elon give the
| investors when he sold them shares?
| electriclove wrote:
| No source, just speculation. I think my main point is that
| these aren't regular people that we need to feel sorry for
| or rise up in arms to defend.
| rideontime wrote:
| You can be against fraud in general without feeling
| sympathy for the particular victims. I know I am.
| electriclove wrote:
| Why assume fraud?
| rideontime wrote:
| Usually a safe assumption with Musk. I believe his kind
| call it "pattern recognition."
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Unlike the shareholders of a company being acquired, the
| shareholders of an acquiring company do not need to be asked
| prior to the company making an acquisition.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Is there currently a better use of the money? They can't just
| double their GPU count.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| I think xAI investors were enthusiastically buying a ticket on
| the Elon rollercoaster
| 0xy wrote:
| Fidelity valuing at $10B is ancient outdated news no longer
| reflective of reality, the value had skyrocketed in recent
| months, given the profits which now exceed profits as a public
| company. [1] [2]
|
| In fact, Twitter debt is selling at 97% of value, indicating
| high confidence in the company. [3]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-
| elo...
|
| [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-high-
| price-114...
|
| [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-value-on-wall-street-
| is...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Twitter debt is selling at 97% of value, indicating high
| confidence in the company_
|
| I helped some friends buy this debt. It has nothing to do
| with Twitter's strength as an enterprise, but Musk's brand as
| a political one. There is a great book on 90s Russia before
| Putin took power--the pre-Berezovsky playbook looks like the
| way to go in America right now.
| michaelwilson wrote:
| I thought I also heard that the people who agreed to buy
| Twitter's debt got the deal sweetened with some XAi stock.
|
| Sooo, did that debt get paid off, and they got XAi stock. If
| so, buying that Tesla debt might not have been the complete
| bloodbath it should have been.
| october8140 wrote:
| Can we get valued changed to "valued"?
|
| I just paid my wife $2.5 million to acquire our 1999 Saturn
| S-Series. Absolute classic car if anyone wants to buy it. I'll
| sell it for a clean $3 million.
| pclowes wrote:
| This valuation seems about as justified as a bored ape NFT...
| nurettin wrote:
| "Yup, I'm erasing my debts now. Woosh! And now I'm doubling my
| money!" it's like watching a kid playing with plastic toys.
| hedayet wrote:
| I own a pair of pants, and it's valued at $200B. I wear them
| while strolling through my $1T city, and browsing billion-MAU
| websites.
|
| You can buy them or not--that's up to you. But the valuation?
| $200B - official.
| sroussey wrote:
| Soon Tesla will buy xAI!
| whatever1 wrote:
| Is our boy getting margin called from his Tesla stakes ?
| dcchambers wrote:
| So the real story here is that he was in danger of getting margin
| called on the loan he took to buy Twitter which he financed with
| TSLA shares as collateral, and this is him moving money around so
| he doesn't have to face the reality of actually getting margin
| called amid a sinking TSLA, right?
| fixprix wrote:
| No, but you'd make for a good writer of TSLQ fan fiction.
| ikiris wrote:
| Yeah basically. I don't know that he was fearing a direct
| margin call but this is pretty blatantly just using the xai
| entity to save the x entity so it doesn't endanger his Tesla
| house of cards. And it's obvious in these comments who has
| really worked with a lot of privately held mildly shady sister
| companies deeply enough to understand these kinds of deals and
| who is just arm-chairing.
| twothreeone wrote:
| There's two issues with that theory: (a) Somebody in another
| thread mentioned that margin for those loans would trigger at
| around $120, so assuming that's true TSLA has another 50% to
| lose before it would happen. (b) Even if that was the case and
| TSLA lost those 50%, that would mean he'd have to cover the
| loans with cash. He cannot use xAI shares for that because
| contrary to TSLA it is not a publicly traded company. There is
| no open market price that lenders could accept. So, he didn't
| gain anything by moving money around, he'd still need to get
| the cash from somewhere.
| cma wrote:
| Twitter started with $13 billion in debt and now has $12
| billion, so was only able to make $1 billion in profit in
| about two and a half years. Twitter was making around $500
| billion a quarter before the Apple ad targeting changes that
| Meta was able to recover from back to more than their
| profitability before the changes, so if Twitter only got back
| to ~$100 billion a quarter they failed pretty hard in
| comparison to Meta despite how much more efficient they were
| supposed to be, but he got political control out of it, and
| now acquired a ton of political control from poaching Tesla
| AI employees from himself for a new startup during the
| biggest AI boom in history with no significant further
| development of Tesla's AI training hardware and many of
| Tesla's top researchers moved over.
| trollied wrote:
| > Twitter was making around $500 billion a quarter
|
| Huh?
| cma wrote:
| million
| abrichr wrote:
| > Twitter was making around $500 billion a quarter before
| the Apple ad targeting changes
|
| From https://archive.is/rfBcg:
|
| > Advertising revenue was $1.14 billion during the quarter
| ended Sept. 30 [2021], in line with consensus estimates.
| refurb wrote:
| This makes no sense.
|
| He sold a bunch of Tesla stock, used other stock as collateral
| for a $6B loan and the rest was outside money.
|
| He did all this for a $6B loan he could repay no problem?
| dfedbeef wrote:
| ever heard of 'cash poor'
| dcchambers wrote:
| Virtually all of his wealth is in the stock of his companies.
|
| He can't sell large amounts of stock in one go or it would
| trigger the price to crater.
|
| Rich people with lots of wealth tied up in stocks will often
| borrow money from banks at low interest rates and use stock
| as collateral. This is common knowledge.
|
| If the stock dips too much, the bank can call in the
| loan/make him put up more collateral, because the original
| collateral is worth less.
|
| Elon does not have billions in cash or other liquid capital
| just sitting around. He would need to sell a lot of stock to
| see that money and that would cause him a lot of problems.
| crawsome wrote:
| I see a parallel in him and Trump that they artificially inflate
| the value of the things they own and get frequently away with it
| because they're just rich.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| how can this happen??? I thought xAI is subsidiary
| UltraSane wrote:
| xAI is never going to be profitable.
| UltraSane wrote:
| This feels like letting rich people print their own currency.
| tediousgraffit1 wrote:
| I believe musk to be a fool and this reinforces that belief. It
| should not have taken him 3 years to realize that the value of
| Twitter was the hot and cold running stream of conversational
| data.
| sidcool wrote:
| Solar City and Tesla saga
| blobbers wrote:
| This is probably a play to make X more invest-able, probably
| combined with some training data rule he foresees in the future.
|
| Musk's companies have raison d'etre, and the mergers (SCTY &
| TSLA) generally have one too.
|
| X has been bleeding money, but has no access to cash. AI on the
| other hand he can peddle to sovereign wealth funds, apply for
| government grants, etc. X then becomes a write off against a
| larger company. xAI seems to be a pretty small company though;
| linkedin gives me 11-50 employees, which is pretty small for a
| DIY scaled LLM company worth (WHAT?!)...
|
| Well some VCs are going to be happy. Or sad. Either way, they'll
| likely need to mark down their fund.
| ksherlock wrote:
| wikipedia (without citation) claims ~1,000 employees.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Elon and Donald are a match made in con artist heaven
| 7e wrote:
| The fact that Elon Musk panicked and sold X to xAI means that he
| is believes Tesla stock, which backed the original X deal, is
| weak and will fall. It's a very bearish signal for TSLA.
| bmitc wrote:
| What a sham of a person, companies, and legal and financial
| system.
|
| How does a loser from South Africa, who has been kicked out of
| nearly every company, obtain this? Perhaps this is what every
| loser in America dreams about themselves being able to do.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| Consider that he might actually be a winner, and you might be a
| jealous loser instead.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| This takes us from "purge the bots" to the polar opposite.
|
| I suppose there's no incentive now to hide the obvious synergies
| between the component parts of an effective propoganda machine.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| It's funny to me that ycombinator is basically reddit now, it's
| nearly 100% Elon hate, calling him a Nazi, etc. I get hating him
| but he literally just had a child with a Jewish woman, and as far
| as I know hasn't funded any gas chambers.
| lightedman wrote:
| I can't quite put my finger on it, as I'm no financial type, but
| this almost reeks of fraud or self-dealing. Wasn't X valued at
| something like 16 billion? What's that $33B in stock for?
| hjgjhyuhy wrote:
| Generic, overhyped AI company with no moat acquires a social
| media mainly inhabitated by bots.
|
| Tesla used to be cool, SpaceX still is. But these two appear
| worthless to me.
| thepaulmcbride wrote:
| Am I misunderstanding or is this using non-actualised gains to
| buy actual things? What are the tax implications of this?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I see many people hating Musk too much for political reasons. The
| same people are pretty convinced that he does not know how to
| conduct business, that he is operating at a loss and he will tank
| every business he is involved in.
|
| If that is the case, why don't this people put their money where
| their mouth is and invest everything they have in shorting Musk
| owned stocks like Tesla, SpaceX, xAI? They might have the chance
| to see their dream come true and Musk go broke and homeless.
| sph wrote:
| Because even if Tesla/X are tending towards zero, the market
| will stay irrational longer than you can afford it. The horde
| of Musk idiot fans grows every day.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So, if someone likes Musk, he must be an idiot, while if he
| hates him, we can be sure that someone is not an idiot.
|
| On what do you base your assertions?
| int_19h wrote:
| If someone _likes_ Musk, they are not necessarily an idiot.
| They could also be a sociopath.
|
| Not liking Musk, on the other hand, doesn't really tell
| anything about a person except for that one fact.
| srid wrote:
| Just FYI, you can't expect intelligent conversations on HN
| about anything related to Elon Musk. A small vocal group
| really hate him, and we know that passion (especially if
| politically motivated) retards intelligence.
| rwmj wrote:
| Shorting stock is difficult anyway ("markets can remain
| irrational longer than you can remain solvent"), and doubly so
| when you're betting against the co-president in a corrupt
| state.
| joelthelion wrote:
| It may be valued 80B, it sure as hell isn't worth it. The AI is
| nothing special and has tons of competitors. The damaged Twitter
| brand isn't worth that much either.
| throwaway99567 wrote:
| This is highly speculative, but I've been comparing responses
| from five different AI models lately, including ChatGPT and Grok,
| and I've noticed something odd: The similarities in phrasing,
| structure, and political tone between ChatGPT and Grok are
| striking -- much closer than you'd expect from two "rival"
| companies.
|
| That led me down a rabbit hole, and here's my working theory:
|
| Despite the public feud between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, I
| believe OpenAI and xAI are quietly collaborating behind the
| scenes. Specifically, I suspect Grok is either running OpenAI-
| derived models or sharing infrastructure, and in return, OpenAI
| is gaining access to Musk's massive data/compute resources via
| xAI and X (formerly Twitter).
|
| Supporting points:
|
| Microsoft is stepping away -- They were OpenAI's primary compute
| partner but have started signaling they'll use other providers.
|
| Grok's rapid development -- It came online way faster than would
| be realistic for a startup AI lab with no prior foundation.
|
| Massive hardware investment by xAI -- If OpenAI was looking for
| non-Microsoft compute, xAI could quietly be the supplier.
|
| Grok's API being compatible with OpenAI's SDK -- suggests
| architectural overlap.
|
| Recent political shift in ChatGPT's answers -- The model's tone
| has become more "centrist" or Musk-adjacent in the past year.
|
| And now -- Musk just merged X and xAI, combining their compute,
| data, and models into one company. That move erases corporate
| barriers and would make a quiet collaboration much easier to
| conceal.
|
| Why keep it secret? Because the brands are oil and water: OpenAI
| is publicly "woke"; Musk is toxic in mainstream circles. If users
| knew Grok was OpenAI-powered, Musk's fan base would revolt. If
| OpenAI users knew they were working with Musk, the backlash would
| be massive.
|
| It's just a theory, but the pieces fit too well for me to ignore.
|
| Curious if anyone else has noticed this or has data points to
| support or refute it.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| Another masterclass stroke from Musk.
| tempodox wrote:
| > X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users
| go to find the real-time source of ground truth
|
| OK, now I know somebody has fast-forwarded the calendar to April
| 1st.
| uberdru wrote:
| Attorney and legal commentator Tristan Snell, via X: "Elon Musk's
| purchase of Twitter was financed by borrowing money. He used his
| Tesla stock as collateral. If Tesla stock keeps crashing, the
| banks/creditors could repossess Twitter."
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The real important question is: why? And why now?
| kleiba wrote:
| For almost every purchase I make, I have to pay a hefty tax to
| the state. I wonder how much taxes xAI is going to have to pay
| for this?
| torginus wrote:
| How the hell does this work??
|
| I have five dollars in a box, and I buy a different box, also
| known to have five dollars in it, for the $5 in the first one.
| Now, according to this logic, I have a portfolio worth $10, since
| I still have the original box, worth $5 and the new one, also
| worth $5.
|
| If I tried this at a gas station, I would be arrested if I got
| caught.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Many numbers in this sphere can seem arbitrary:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/elon-musk-420-tw...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-humor-jokes-over-...
| xandrius wrote:
| It's more like:
|
| I have a box with $5 and you have a box with $5. We agree to
| merge our boxes into one and now we both have 1 box with $10.
|
| Plot twist: me and you are the same insane person.
| Munksgaard wrote:
| Also, you don't actually have $5 in either box, but you once
| sold a 1% ownership stake in each box for 5 cents. There's
| only 10 cents in the in the merged box, but you value it at
| $10.
| maronato wrote:
| I think it's more like: I have some paper that says I own 50%
| of a box T. People are willing to pay up to 10 cents to get 1%
| of that box T, so if I gave my paper to them, they'd give me
| $5. I want to buy another box X for $1, so I go to a bank and
| ask for $1. To make sure I pay, I give them a paper saying they
| can take 10% of my original box T if I don't pay them back.
|
| I build another box A and people get excited. They say they'll
| pay 5 cents for 1% of it, and I have a paper that says I own
| most of it.
|
| Time passes and the amount people are willing to pay for the
| boxes changes, and at some point people are close to not
| believing box T is worth 10 cents per 1%. If that happens, the
| bank will want their 10%!
|
| To prevent that, I decide to sell box X to box A. I pick the
| price I want for the sale, but the important part is that I
| make sure box A writes a new paper saying that the bank now has
| to get 20% of box A if box A fails to pay them, not box T
| anymore.
|
| In the end, I can't say I own box X anymore, but I never cared
| much for it. I only bought it as a meme. That's okay though,
| because I don't need to give any of my box T to the bank, and
| people are willing to pay 8 cents for 1% of my box A since it
| now owns box X too.
| outside1234 wrote:
| How can xAI be valued at $80B. (Aka Who is dumb enough to
| purchase it at that price?)
| redox99 wrote:
| It's in line with OpenAI (157B) and Anthropic (61B)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Tangible reasoning: So they raised 40b from xAI and brought X.
| Since musk owns X, xAI doesn't need to pay a premium. Investors
| of X gets xAI share instead.
|
| Non tangible reasoning: Since xAI uses data from X to train, and
| xAI likely will be used to explain and make new tweets. It makes
| the entire operation less complex. Elon is positioning X as the
| interface to the world and xAI will likely help control that.
| Remember he is gunning X to be an everything app and likely AI
| will be the core of how that will play out.
| inSenCite wrote:
| I wish I could 'acquire' my house at a higher valuation and
| renegotiate financing terms :(
| trepaura wrote:
| Hillarious. He wrote his own press release to pretend like he
| didn't just buy his privately held company using his publicly
| held company shares.
|
| He's an idiot but I'll give him some credit, he just dumped a
| bunch if shares at their inflated value before they could drop
| even more. The guys he conned into buying Twitter with him won't
| have a reason to seek revenge now, and he can make whatever
| bullshit claims about the value if X he wants, since it's a
| private sale.
|
| He did roughly the same thing with Telsa acquiring Solar Winds.
| Musk's Net worth is smoke and mirrors.
| xyst wrote:
| Got to keep the grift going.
| hsnewman wrote:
| Valued by who? I have a overvalued company I'll buy with another
| overvalued company. This should be illegal, but it's a house of
| cards.
| nathancahill wrote:
| The whole US economy is. Take one step outside the US and it's
| apparent what a house of cards it is.
| askonomm wrote:
| Is it weird that if I do not have an account on X, I also have no
| idea what X actually is? If I go to the home page, it just says
| "Happening now". No idea what that means though. If I then
| navigate to the tiny "About" link, I'm not getting any smarter.
| The "About the company" page takes to a 404. So, unless you know
| already what X is, you have no obvious way to find out what it is
| either.
| pavlov wrote:
| Today it's primarily porn site where you can also discuss
| sports and post Nazi memes while getting flooded with crypto
| scams.
|
| There's also a dwindling number of Silicon Valley influencers
| who still maintain the old pretense that it's a globally
| important news forum and a place for serious people to
| interact. They're an island in a rising sea of shit.
| laughingcurve wrote:
| I'm genuinely hoping there's something that pushes the AI/ML
| academic community off the site but until that happens it's
| one of the better places to discover info
| rao-v wrote:
| I'm interested in understanding what happened to the debt. My
| simplistic understanding was that a bunch of the $13B debt raised
| for the twitter aq was secured by Tesla stock, with some sort of
| callable mechanism (which got a bit scary when Tesla stock sank).
|
| I assume with this deal some of that debt got converted to equity
| ($1B?) and any callable mechanisms got repriced but I cannot find
| details to figure this out.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| "In Philadelphia, it's worth 50 bucks."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYlOIKtYsos
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| What's the ratio between xAI and X valuations? Same as the ratio
| between leprechauns and unicorns.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I was confused when xAI was started as a separate company.
| Twitter had the data, the delivery surface, the user base. I
| wondered why a separate entity was created to house the AI part.
|
| I should have had a clue because I was talking to a CEO of a
| startup and trying to encourage him to invest dev time in AI
| features. He was reluctant even though he was optimistic about
| AI. He had too many things to work on, not enough resources. I
| suggested he raise more capital. He pointed out that raising
| capital in an older startup would mean people scrutinize your
| revenue growth. He would be able to raise more money at a better
| valuation for a completely new AI business than he could possibly
| raise to inject cash into his existing traditional startup.
|
| So this makes sense of my initial confusion. I am just surprised
| it happened so fast.
|
| Marc Andreessen made headlines a few months ago during the
| campaign about some shadowy meeting he was brought in about AI.
| He claimed the government told him they had picked a few winners
| of the AI race and no new foundational startups would be allowed
| to compete. Everyone has been talking about a "Manhattan project"
| like push for AGI to make sure the US gets it before anyone else.
| Given how quickly xAI has risen, given it's access to massive GPU
| resources, I can't help but reach for my tinfoil hat here. A
| platform with the reach of X/Twitter combined with an AI is a
| technocratic wet dream.
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