We can only hope 🙏
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Elon Musk could lose 99% of his wealth this month, then 99% of his remaining wealth next month and still be better off financially than 99.99% of everyone. He’s not ever going to experience financial distress.
Well, yes and no.
The issue is, that rich people take on lots of debt with their assets as collatoral (e.g. Musk taking a loan from the Saudis for buying twitter). If Musks collatoral suddenly vanishes (s.g. Tesla breaks down within a month), then the massive 10 billion USD debt will still be there. And then he’ll be very very much in negative wealth.
Your assumption is personal or personally guaranteed debt, but the loan was likely (based on my reading the term sheets leaked) to the new entity that was going to purchase/merge with the pre-existing Twitter. That potential negative net worth wouldn’t be tied to Musk but the entity we now know as Twitter. Musk would not be in financial distress.
Edit: I may have misread what you wrote. The value of Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX could go negative and Musk would still be wealthier than 99.99% of the world because personal guarantees are unlikely to be attached to that debt.
My understanding is Musk is personally on the hook for a good chunk of his Twitter loans.
If that’s the case he’s even more arrogant and less intelligent than I thought.
Pretty sure he is less intelligent than most of us thought 🤔
Tesla paid down much more debt than that before it was as profitable as it is now. $10 billion isn’t going to sink Tesla. Or SpaceX. They are both materially valuable in a way companies like Twitter are not.
The problem isn’t losing 99% of your wealth. The problem is losing 101% of your wealth (or more), which is entirely possible.
Also, people like him care about the high score.
Losing 50% of his wealth wouldn’t change his lifestyle. But it would destroy his ego and make him keep making rasher decisions until it’s all gone.
He’ll keep taking risks he doesn’t need to, and since he’s leveraging against other holdings, it becomes a house of cards situation real quick.
Kinda… depends on how things got him there. The thing Elon can’t lose without really going off the rails is his ability to play the markets. Once the SEC kicks him out you’ll see him legitimately calling for open revolt.
That wouldn’t put him in financial distress. His ego would certainly be hurt but he’d still be wealthier than 99.99% of the world.
Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We’ve seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.
He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That’s 80 million people left over in that .01%. That’s not all that powerful at all. It’s removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It’s why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.
I don’t think I’m following. Your example of Michael Milken is odd since he’s estimated to have between $5 to $10 billion in net worth today. Which kind of goes to my point that Musk is less likely to be in financial distress than win the Powerball Jackpot
Milken’s worth is stagnant - he can’t play stocks. In the 80s Milken had what the wealthy always want, power. He doesn’t have it now. 6 billion is what he’s worth and that’s a long long way below the likes of Elon Musk. Had Milken never been convicted he would’ve kept growing like Elon did.
You’re missing my point. I’m not saying these guys are put into the same kind of financial distress the rest of us are when the car breaks down. They’re still the top 1%. And that’s fine with me, there’s always going to be a top 1%. It’s the “beyond” that concerns me, when they have enough money that it no longer matters when they lose. Milken, Madoff, they all had that much at one point and then they lost. They lost the thing they craved, the power. They might still be rich but they know better than anyone that wealth without power is just an appetizer. They want a seat at the table and getting removed from the SEC is paramount to being told they aren’t dressed well enough to eat in the restaurant.
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with no.
Don’t get me wrong that comment was not meant to be supportive of musk, just a pet peeve about bad headline writing.
I just like quoting Elon Musk’s idiocy quotes
I’m always annoyed how these types of news are categorized as “technology”, when they’re clearly just “business and finance”.
Yeah Elon owns companies that do “tech”. He has lot of money, because he’s “business and finance” type.I wish we’d talk more about actual tech than just the rich white dudes who sit on a pile of gold.
He’ll spin it like it was sone master grand plan and his zealots will eat that shit sandwich up and ask for poop nuggets for a side.
Yea somehow selling the company off at a massive loss will be his “high IQ business plan” and not what it really is: the result of him committing to a deal, realizing it was a bad idea but then being forced to go through with it so he pretended he did it for “muh freeze peach”. I almost wonder if the reason he’s been pandering to the right is gonna to run for office for something like Governor of Texas and use that as a grift to recoup his losses from his Twitter blunder, though that’s speculation going to conspiracy theory territory.
Twitter was a hellsite before Musk took over. Even if it could be restored fully to its “former glory” it would still be a hellsite, particularly for minorities.
According to Betteridge’s Law and my ever present cynicism, no.
But it would be so fucking awesome if he did!
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark will have a comment mentioning Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.”
A bit confusing that this adage has the same name, no? 🤔
Maybe it could be Betteridge’s Law of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines 😁
Will Elon lose control of Elon? Seems like a far more predictable outcome.
I think Musk has to worry less about losing Twitter than getting booted from Tesla. There have already been a ton of shareholder grumbling about him being distracted and Tesla being tied financially to the Twitter debacle.
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He’s going to team up with Steve Hoffman (spez), mark my words.
Not surprised if spez will try to sell Reddit to Elon at one point.
For $90 billion. No wait; I want out of this thing. Something something bot accounts. Wait, it’s going ahead and this isn’t just some shitposting I did for fun? Ok that’s fine. That’s what I meant to do. I meant to buy it. I’m a billionaire after all. We must be smart.
If spez was smart, he’s not, he’d find a way to get musk to pay twice the value of it.,
I didn’t think you could lose control of a train wreck.
Muskrat would never take a train; he’s taking a private jet.
And it’s not a loss of control, it’s called a “controlled flight into terrain”.
“unintentional landing”
I mean maybe that’s the plan. He tried to back out of buying Twitter because he knew it would hurt him - now he’s trying to extract as much wealth as possible from Twitter before making it self-destruct, so he at least breaks even and can pay all that debt back without taking any losses himself.
They stopped paying their bills months ago - it’s only now beginning to catch up with them.
There was escrow fail-safes.
If they didn’t pay, there was funds sitting there to avoid downtime.
Took a while to burn through them, then they never got replenished.
I could see it happening honestly. He refuses to pay his bills for critical infrastructure, Twitter is getting evicted from one of his main offices, and now there’s a growing debacle with ads being shown with neo-nazi propaganda; if those ad companies start to pull out it’s game over for Twitter, and possibly a good chunk of Elon’s wealth.
An office they didn’t even inhabit. Read the crazy story from someone who was there: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110561579833908574
tl;dr: Twitter had plans to build out a massive office to consolidate all the small crappy offices they had in Boulder, CO. Pandemic came along. Jack Dorsey says everyone WFH permanently. Nobody thought to cancel the build. Build complete. Grand Opening (but don’t show the hundreds of empty desks). Elon acquisition. Payments not made. Court-ordered eviction of new office building that wasn’t occupied.
…what the hell? Why didn’t Jack Dorsey cancel the project once he decided that Twitter would be remote work only? Reeks of incompetence tbh, seems like the company was already having leadership issues before Elon took over.
Because the building was an asset during the sale…
On paper it was “smart” to have it there because it was a tangible asset. Long term it was a waste of money, but canceling would have been worse before the sale because it would have been an immediate loss affecting the price.
Just kicking the can down the road
Man, the thread author is right, that office is gorgeous. What a monumental waste.
He’s gonna run Twitter into the ground like you would your favorite car
Which will never be a Tesla, unless I’m craving some 2017 era design.
God I miss that 89 Accord… I was young and it was already old. RIP my first car.