Because he's not a business genius, he's just a guy who has made a few big bets and they've happened to work out (specifically PayPal and Tesla, and maybe SpaceX eventually). After that, he thought he had a magic touch and started putting money into companies that caught his fancy because it worked for him in the past. Before twitter it was the Boring Company.

The Boring Company is absolutely a success and imo it's the best example of Elon's tried and true strategy: convince government officials of some idea only the government could buy. Boring Company is a money making machine just like SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX even though not a single one of those companies could be profitable without the heavy subsidization they receive.

Good Jobs First track how much subsidies are given out to specific companies. Tesla's racked up $2.5 trillion from states and the federal government and another half trillion in loans/bailouts[^0] (for comparison, Tesla' market cap is $494 billion today). SpaceX is all government contracts where NASA basically pays a private company to do the things they could and want to do but can't because of political impediments. We're still the ones funding it, we're just paying more and letting a private company take credit. Starlink's subsidized by the FCC, SolarCity's subsidized by a number of states as well as the federal gov'ts subsidization through tax credits for 30% of the cost of solar panels, etc.

And people aren't dumb. He's been sued in a number of countries for subsidy fraud already. Remember when Tesla pretended to have rapid battery exchange ready to go and announced it was live? That was purely to take advantage of a poorly written subsidy package in CA that didn't actually stipulate they had to give people access to it. Tesla won that lawsuit too iirc.

Elon Musk became the richest man on earth without ever running a profitable company. In fact, I'd say it's precisely by NOT running profitable companies that he got to where he is today

[^0]: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

edit: grammar

The Boring Company is a money making machine?? Any evidence of this? It looks like a disastrous failure to me:

https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/elon-musks-the-boring-comp...

https://www.curbed.com/2022/01/elon-musk-las-vegas-tunnel-ce...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...

https://www.jumpstartmag.com/what-we-can-learn-from-elon-mus...

A disastrous failure worth $6b! That's my point. Neurolink and SolarCity are also disastrous failures. But Boring Company has gotten contract in Las Vegas, Chicago, LA, and more. And despite all these failures Miami, amongst a few other FL and CA cities, is still in talks about a contract.

That's the business. Continue selling a dream. Talk to any actual engineer with relevant knowledge and they'd likely tell you it was a terribly thought out idea from the start. But those engineers aren't the ones signing gov't contracts

> A disastrous failure worth $6b!

Valued at $5.9B, not worth, a massive difference.

Wow. Thank you for explaining so thoughtfully. Would you get banned if you say this in Twitter. Why no journalist asks these questions and make people realize it's their money in someone else's pocket.

It’s pretty widely reported how much Elon makes in subsidies.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/07/tech/elon-musk-wsj-government...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

https://www.mic.com/impact/elon-musk-build-back-better-tesla...

Boring company was just a scam to undermine high speed rail and prop up demand for tesla.

Iirc that's Hyperloop, not Boring.

it's both!

As best I’ve been able to discern it, Musk said he was going to buy Twitter for a way overvalued sum ($44bn) as a troll? But ended up getting in so deep that he found himself with a legal obligation to buy the thing for an absurd price.

It’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me: obscenely rich man is very used to doing whatever the hell he wants with no repercussions, particularly when shitposting on Twitter (see: SEC) and there was no-one around to tell him to stop.

What kinds of fines would he have been facing for pulling the ejection lever? How much has he lost on this deal by taking it?

he would have been sued by twitter for the full price, and would have had to pay.

So what you're saying is that he's been treating his lawyers the same way he's now treating Twitter.

I doubt very much anyone let him walk into a trap that bad. He had to have been kicking and screaming the entire way.

And even worse than that, he would have had to have been deposed before paying for it. A bunch of his conversations about the deal were already released in discovery. Twitter lawyers were salivating about catching Elon in a lie at the deposition. It’s notable Musk was willing to deal juuust before the deposition was finally going to happen.

Maybe milking elderly people with automated phone calls about the "liberal conspiracy" is really that lucrative, and lighting $44B on fire is just an investment to get into that club?

If that turns out to be true, I am very happy that he cannot run for President.

He doesn't have to, he can just buy his way in.