Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoYeah, 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.
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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 by” 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.
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.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I’m sure most mutual funds are invested in musk companies, but unless they’re terrible hedge funds or something none of them should have more than a few percent in them. I was more speaking of the lenders who enable Musk’s bullshit like buying Twitter or fucking around with our elections.
And yeah, I guess I should have said finish off our space industry, but yeah it’s been screwed since the shuttle era I guess.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Tesla makes up 2.3% of the S&P 500 and 4.5% of NASDAQ. Then you have business downstream of Tesla - Luminar Technologies sells the majority of it’s LIDAR systems to Tesla, Hertz’s EV fleet is plurality Tesla, Panasonic co-owns Gigafactory 1.
They do it so they can be first in the door for future IPOs. JP Morgan has been a close ally of Musk’s for decades. And he’s repaid them with numerous opportunities to resell their debt. The Twitter loan was a small price to pay by comparison.