this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Musk nearly bankrupted Tesla when he insisted that the door handles must be flush after stealing the company from its original founders.
I mean, "stealing" is a strong word. Elon bought them out, and they're both enjoying a net worth in the hundreds of million.
What's more disturbing about Elon's tenure as head of the company is how social media manipulation, insider trading, and blatant SEC violations can pump a company's valuation into the stratosphere.
Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard both continued to contribute advances in engineering that far exceeded the Tesla project. But they'll never have the kind of easy credit Elon secured through politics and media manipulation. So don't expect to see them included among the ranks of "billionaire" any time soon.
"Bought them out" is a weak word too though. He placed loyal people on the board and had them vote to give him control of the company.
And now he has been having them vote to give him absurd unseen before "salaries"
He could place loyalists on the board because he bought a controlling interest in the company.
The latest compensation package has virtually unattainable sales targets. And the compensation is almost entirely in equity that assumes a monumental increase in stock valuation.
If he can manage it, I'd be tempted to say he earned it, except I know he'll only "hit" the target by lying and market manipulation that will collapse as soon as he hits his mark.
Like having space x buy thousands of cyber cucks?
Or donating those shitty dangerous trucks to the Vegas police?
Or when his Canadian dealerships sold themselves hundreds of cars on the last week of government subsidies?
He’s gonna cheat to get his trillion, brag about having the biggest number, and try and fuck the country even more to keep him powerful. These robber barons need to be stopped and imprisoned bodies they can harm the rest of us any more.
He's going to try. Even then, the bar is higher than just nibbling at the margins. And everything is stacked on the shoulders of an overall positive outlook for the US economy in total. He can't insource all his car sales in any practical sense. And he can't use options markets to outrun the perpetual gaggle of Tesla bears nipping at his heels. He also can't reliably expect Congress to bail him out when he's made this many enemies inside both the White House and Congress.
That's not to say he won't get a piece of paper with "$1T" written on it from his company at some point. But nothing in the Tesla financials suggests he will have anywhere to cash it.
Yeah, thanks for clarifying my intent. I’m pretty sure he’s going to ride whatever is left of this AI bubble in finance to get his $1T number. He’ll never ever be able to cash out, but I don’t think he cares about that, he wants the power that comes with the number. It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand. I guess he has to fail for them to stop though. Money talks louder then Nazi salutes.
I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though. Hopefully there are enough adults in charge to stop that, but until the midterms (if they happen) I don’t think congress will be doing anything but infighting about the speaker position and hand wringing over the expected red losses.
Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company's actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a "must buy" for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don't think there's any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don't have a strong monetary incentive to try.
At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he's going to Tulip Mania his company again or he's going to fall far short of the mark.
NASA's been a contractor's boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.
I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we've largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.
For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That's going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.
With any luck Elon with be in jail in a few years when Democrats try to prove we shouldn't abandon this socioeconomic system entirely.
That would require a backbone not seen in democrats in generations. I'd bet money on him being a free man and never seeing the inside of a cell.
There's'a always another'a way'a. Let'sa gooo!
That will never, ever, ever happen. Dems love an oligarch just as much, if not more, than republicans. China is the only country that prosecutes wealthy criminals.
Unfortunately they also lockup anyone they just kind of don't like for any arbitrary reason.
Like the states
Like hispanic looking people! Those darned Han Chinese!!!
Oh I agree, the US has taken a giant step toward the exact same fascist approach to government in the last few years
Uh. Friend. I hate to tell you this, but the US imprisons more people per capital than the Soviet GULAG system at its height. China has never imprisoned people at the rate the USA has. Even in the last 18 months, where the USA dropped out of the top slot in the world, it lost to Cuba who recently had a huge uptick in incarceration due to the US's most recent attempts at recruiting dissidents. And the USA is only slightly better than Cuba on this number. And Cuban prisons are like, fully integrated into communities and don't rely on torture and don't have gang violence and don't charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day and don't use them as slave labor the way the US does.
No. On this particular issue of locking up whomever they want for whatever reason and abusing them and letting them die and massive recidivism and a parole population that is under 24/7 surveillance that is something like 2x larger than the prison population - on this topic, the US is not somehow sliding towards being problematic. It has been this way for a century. The US is a brutal brutal regime to its own people.
I was pointing out a difference in the way America does things. If I started listing things both have in common, the list would literally never end. Besides, the similarity is surface-level. China’s economy isn’t propped up by for-profit prisons
Nor does China suffer the same recidivism rates, carceral rates, or parole rates that the US has. Nor does China accrue debt for prisoners tonthe tune of hundreds of dollars a day that they owe when they get out.
Don't forget the genocide!
Well, then I hope you guys are ready for a revolution unless you're fine with a Blade Runner esc hellscape.
Don't worry, we won't get a Blade Runner-esc hellscape.
Because Blade Runner for a movie had to give us a fascinating world that was interesting that even as a hellscape there was a "Man, it'd be cool to be there."
No, our hellscape is going to be more like how fast food restaurants all look the same now, the corporate architecture version of taupe agreed to by committee.
:(
It’s already fucked up that he legally gets to call himself a co-founder for simply being on the board.