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.
This is a terrible and inefficient use of money. It’s inevitable that this paper house will fall over
It's still wildly overvalued, and at it's unclear how long the market will stay irrational.
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 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.
I prefer cars that don't get recalled for glued on pieces falling off and CEOs that didn't pay a quarter billion dollars to buy a presidency.
Plenty of other electric cars being produced by the other manufacturers.
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.
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.
What surprises me is that the drop in sales numbers seems to have zero effect on the stock price, at least not yet.
He had a sizable chunk of collateralized borrowings against his Tesla shares even before the Twitter acquisition. There was the risk of a margin call during year following the acquisition, but AI became the latest hotness so he was able to spin up a company to cook up some more market bubble.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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 ?
Every six months is a 50% chance of ejection.
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.
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?
BTW: find it: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2024/11/
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 !
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.
Where are you getting this from? All numbers I see indicate the user base has been growing globally. https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
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.
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.