Speaking of AI and other artificial things, I was gobsmacked by the following (probably shouldn't have been) that I read last week in a piece about some of the things we should be doing to get some kind of control over social media and big data. The quote is from Marc Andreessen, venture capital broligarch and all around horrible human being. I also think the whole article from The Washington Monthly is worth a read so below I'm sending along that link as well.
Eat cake? Oh no, they have much better in store for us. The world will be divided between those that have "Reality Privilege" and those that don't - the rest of us.
"A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in."
"The vote [against continuing our acts of murder on the high seas] failed 49–51, with two Republicans—Sens. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski—joining the Democrats who were united in support of the measure." Once again Susan Collins folds.
WRT Musk's pay package - while the $1T is a stunning number which depends on admittedly aggressive targets, Musk gets mega compensation even if he does so-so. I haven't seen detailed numbers, but he should get several billion for hitting the 1st milestone, which is basically Tesla's growth & sales holding steady.
And that's a problem. Why should Musk get more compensation for so-so performance?
The actual company (as opposed to the stock price) would be far better off if Musk left! Tesla would have some hope of turning their declining sales around with a new CEO.
Some of my thoughts from my Substack in concurrence with Bill's from when the outrageous and obscene pay package was first discussed. One paragraph from the post - So here’s a thought experiment for boards, economists, and researchers alike: what if we flipped the script? Instead of funneling $1T to one man, what if it was spread across all 125,0001 Tesla employees? That’s about $8 million per employee. Life-changing money.
I appreciate the sentiment, but Tesla employees are given pretty generous stock options. If Musk hits the targets needed to get his full package, the Tesla employees will largely be multi-millionaires. And so will the other Tesla investors. Odds are that he won’t hit the necessary targets, but if he does, he will be increasing the wealth of a whole bunch of other people as well.
Taxing the shit out of anyone worth a trillion dollars makes a lot of sense for taxpayers though. There’s nothing Musk can’t buy so the idea that higher taxes would somehow affect his quality of life or disincentive him just doesn’t hold up.
I've come to believe that any wealth over a billion dollars on December 31 of each year should be taxed at 100% for just that reason: it won't materially effect the actual day-to-day quality of life of the person, and we've already seen just how much harm the ultra-wealthy can and will do to our political process via their wealth. Rich is one thing; wealthier than many small nation-states is another and is an absolute danger to any democratic government.
That really puts his selfishness in perspective, doesn't it? Rather than doing nothing for himself except making him the first trillionaire, he could change the lives of all of his employees. That idea should prompt someone on the board to call a foul. Just take HALF the trillion and pass it on to the people who ACTUALLY make Tesla function. Elon's a name and a dreamer -- he actually sucks at running companies. That should be obvious to any board member for any of the companies he "leads".
Musk does make Tesla function. It’s a meme stock and he’s the meme. If he quits, the employees, shareholders, and board are screwed. That stock would drop 75% and all the shares they have would be garbage. He’s made a lot of money for people the past few decades and has become a ride or die for a lot of investors. (And Tesla employees have the opportunity to buy discounted shares, so a lot of them are millionaires themselves because of Musk. He may be a crappy boss, but he is making his employees a lot wealthier than those at any other car company. Nobody at Tesla wants the same job at Ford or GM.)
Musk is a horrible human being but pretending his value proposition for investors doesn’t exist is just denying reality. There is a good chance that he won’t hit the targets needed for his pay package and he will eventually lose his status as a sure thing in the stock market. But that day has not yet come and the stock is up hundreds of dollars per share over the past two years, despite all the problems in Tesla’s fundamentals. If anything, his meme value has gotten more powerful because he destroyed the Tesla brand, cratered sales, lost the EV tax credits, and still doubled the value of the stock.
Purely from a shareholder value perspective, Musk is still a huge net positive for Tesla. That may feel horrible and unjust and nonsensical, but that is reality (at least for now).
Meme stocks, although they weren't called that at the time, were a significant part of the 1929 stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. When stocks are highly overvalued and people keep investing in them, the eventual "correction" can be devastating. I lost 30% of my government version of a 401 (k) in 2008, even though I had only 50% invested in stocks, all of which were index funds. After that, I went back to bonds. I'm not disagreeing with your point, but Tesla's value will eventually drop significantly, and it won't be long. Economists and others are already warning us that we are on the precipice of a crash at least as severe as 2008 and possibly even worse than the 1929 crash.
I have gone through some down times too (I owned way too much Cisco back in the day; plus some Enron) and a big drop wouldn't shock me, but a lot of people make their livings predicting a great crash in the next 12 months year after year after year. It's an entire industry. (With a big correlation between guys predicting a crash and guys selling gold.) There was a pretty strong consensus that America was going to have a great recession coming out of Covid too.
There are periods of times when bears look brilliant, but those times are rare. Even within this year, the people that assumed the worst after liberation day and bailed are the ones that got screwed. The people that stayed in the market and even bought that big dip have done very well.
And we are not anywhere close to a 1929 crash. People were actively buying stocks with subprime debt in that time period and for all of our current problems with crypto and AI bubbles, we won't have people having to sell shares at a loss to payback the loans they used to buy the shares. We also have a very different Federal Reserve with a very different set of tools.
Even with the speculative nature of AI, it's the richest companies in the world footing most of the bill out of their own piggy banks. If AI turns into a giant bust, it's not like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are turning out the lights. Their stocks will be cut massively and shareholders will be poorer, but that won't cascade across lenders like the internet crash did when .com's were borrowing massively to try and get market share. (Also, our government will borrow whatever it takes to save our too big to fail companies. That wasn't true in 1929.)
I think it would be healthy for this market to have a 20 to 30% correction myself but I make my living going with the current instead of fighting it. In the market, optimists make money, while pessimists occasionally get to say, "told you so."
Anyway, that's a long winded detour but Tesla is different from the rest of the market. If Musk gets hit by a bus, Tesla shares would probably drop from $430 to less than $100. That's not true of the other big tech companies and their CEO's, because they have massive cash reserves and revenues and growth prospects. Tesla is a unique animal among the big tech companies in its meme characteristics.
Meme stocks are the modern equivalent of tulip bulbs. Eventually a critical mass of investors are going to realize that they are holding shares in a company that IS going to go bankrupt, and that's when we'll see the crash.
Tesla's fundamentals aren't great, but they are far from going bankrupt. I don't think they are in any danger of going bankrupt in the next 10 years with or without Musk. Their margins are declining but they are still selling some cars. They also license software, power chargers, and other tech to other companies because they did innovate some of the best technology in that space.
I agree that Tesla is way overvalued and will eventually correct. But this idea that Musk has destroyed it is overblown. I don't think Tesla is worth anywhere close to its current $430 a share but it is also worth a whole lot more than the $10 a share that Ford is at.
But if you are 100% confident, there is a fund (TSLQ) that is a leveraged short fund on Tesla. It goes up when Tesla goes down. As someone who has lost money multiple times betting against Musk and Tesla, I'll tell you that's a stupid bet. I think Musk is a horrible human being and I hate him. But the market loves him until it doesn't and there is no telling when that day will come.
I don't have the money it takes to short Tesla (as you know, short position are hard to hold for long), so I'm just sitting tight. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" is very true. But it can't sty irrational indefinitely, and Tesla sales are falling worldwide even as EV sales are increasing, and that can't go on forever. I saw some interesting figures on ElekTrek regarding Tesla sales; reportedly their net income fell from 15 billion in 2023 to around 7 billion in 2024, and is on track to halve again by the end of this year. Obviously I can't vouch for those numbers, but if they are accurate that's a disaster.
I agree that Tesla makes some nice tech, and the Supercharger network alone ought to be quite valuable as its absolutely the best and most reliable of the charging networks in North America. But I don't think it's valuable enough on its own to save the company. Absent Musk as CEO, I do think the company might be able to recover; it just needs a CEO who's serious about making great EVs. Unfortunately that's not Elon Musk, and as long as Tesla is tied to Musk's toxicity I don't think it has a long-term future.
Your ending point leads to a question about what a recovering Tesla looks like. The stock is at $430 or so right now. As you note, the company’s fundamentals don’t justify anything close to that.
My contention is that if Musk leaves the picture, Tesla will be a nice little car company worth less than $100 per share, even with a great CEO. That’s it. That’s not a win in any shape or form for anyone who currently owns Tesla stock. Tesla may be living on borrowed time right now, but there is no future without Musk that doesn’t permanently crush that stock for investors and they know it, which is why they are good with a crazy pay package.
At least one economist/entrepreneur predicted the crash, and it was published in the media. It was "poo-poo'd" by the "titans of industry". His name was Roger Babson, and you can find more information about him and his warning in Wikipedia and other online sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Babson
The same thing that happens to all of their faces. They demean themselves by trying to be the perfect "Mar-a-lago" woman. Anyone who injects poison into their body to "improve" their appearance, especially since it often ends up making them ugly, when they were at least attractive to begin has severe issues. One thing I truly embraced about radical feminism, other than equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work, is that my appearance is my appearance, and if it changes your opinion of me, that's your problem, not mine. :)
Bill Kristol's comparison of contemporary America to pre-revoltionary France is not far off-base.
Yet those who are groping toward a solution to American capitalism's slide into oligarchy and kleptocracy are too often vilified out-of-hand. I'm thinking specifically of Zohran Mamdani and Sohrab Ahmari. I disagree with many of the proposals and positions of both Mamdani and Ahmari; but both are actively seeking genuine solutions to our difficult and dangerous circumstances.
The tech-bros, like Musk and Peter Thiel, on the other hand, seek to sustain the current trends and warn, in Thiel's formulation, that any attempt to rein in the oligarchs is the work of the ant-Christ and it is therefore our moral obligation to stem even any "incipient" movement in that direction. Good grief!
Personally, I feel that anyone who says that "empathy" is a weakness should have zero say in our collective futures. As you said, the risks are too great.
Musk’s value as an innovative leader is way behind him. The only new things Tesla has produced in the last 7 or so years have been empty promises of products that never materialized. The company is grossly overvalued and is a reportedly toxic workplace.
Every company he has owned has become a toxic workplace. Elon Musk is a monster. He allowed hundreds of thousands of people to starve just for giggles. In my opinion, he's in the same category as serial killers.
I love it when Bill finds his inner revolutionary. ❤️
Speaking of AI and other artificial things, I was gobsmacked by the following (probably shouldn't have been) that I read last week in a piece about some of the things we should be doing to get some kind of control over social media and big data. The quote is from Marc Andreessen, venture capital broligarch and all around horrible human being. I also think the whole article from The Washington Monthly is worth a read so below I'm sending along that link as well.
Eat cake? Oh no, they have much better in store for us. The world will be divided between those that have "Reality Privilege" and those that don't - the rest of us.
"A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in."
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/11/02/social-media-reform-democrats/
Let them all eat Yellowcake - they are all already radioactive. Send them to Chernobyl to live out their days like the poor Ukranians.
"The vote [against continuing our acts of murder on the high seas] failed 49–51, with two Republicans—Sens. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski—joining the Democrats who were united in support of the measure." Once again Susan Collins folds.
Do the right thing. Please boycott tesla… Spread the word…🙏
WRT Musk's pay package - while the $1T is a stunning number which depends on admittedly aggressive targets, Musk gets mega compensation even if he does so-so. I haven't seen detailed numbers, but he should get several billion for hitting the 1st milestone, which is basically Tesla's growth & sales holding steady.
And that's a problem. Why should Musk get more compensation for so-so performance?
The actual company (as opposed to the stock price) would be far better off if Musk left! Tesla would have some hope of turning their declining sales around with a new CEO.
Good newsletter.
The far-right party is Alternative for Germany (German: Alternative für Deutschland), not Alliance/Allianz. :)
That quote from mike johnson had me laughing out loud as if I was watching an episode of The Office.
Some of my thoughts from my Substack in concurrence with Bill's from when the outrageous and obscene pay package was first discussed. One paragraph from the post - So here’s a thought experiment for boards, economists, and researchers alike: what if we flipped the script? Instead of funneling $1T to one man, what if it was spread across all 125,0001 Tesla employees? That’s about $8 million per employee. Life-changing money.
The full post - https://open.substack.com/pub/wpag/p/calling-all-ceos-and-board-members?r=5gp94g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I appreciate the sentiment, but Tesla employees are given pretty generous stock options. If Musk hits the targets needed to get his full package, the Tesla employees will largely be multi-millionaires. And so will the other Tesla investors. Odds are that he won’t hit the necessary targets, but if he does, he will be increasing the wealth of a whole bunch of other people as well.
Taxing the shit out of anyone worth a trillion dollars makes a lot of sense for taxpayers though. There’s nothing Musk can’t buy so the idea that higher taxes would somehow affect his quality of life or disincentive him just doesn’t hold up.
I've come to believe that any wealth over a billion dollars on December 31 of each year should be taxed at 100% for just that reason: it won't materially effect the actual day-to-day quality of life of the person, and we've already seen just how much harm the ultra-wealthy can and will do to our political process via their wealth. Rich is one thing; wealthier than many small nation-states is another and is an absolute danger to any democratic government.
That really puts his selfishness in perspective, doesn't it? Rather than doing nothing for himself except making him the first trillionaire, he could change the lives of all of his employees. That idea should prompt someone on the board to call a foul. Just take HALF the trillion and pass it on to the people who ACTUALLY make Tesla function. Elon's a name and a dreamer -- he actually sucks at running companies. That should be obvious to any board member for any of the companies he "leads".
Musk does make Tesla function. It’s a meme stock and he’s the meme. If he quits, the employees, shareholders, and board are screwed. That stock would drop 75% and all the shares they have would be garbage. He’s made a lot of money for people the past few decades and has become a ride or die for a lot of investors. (And Tesla employees have the opportunity to buy discounted shares, so a lot of them are millionaires themselves because of Musk. He may be a crappy boss, but he is making his employees a lot wealthier than those at any other car company. Nobody at Tesla wants the same job at Ford or GM.)
Musk is a horrible human being but pretending his value proposition for investors doesn’t exist is just denying reality. There is a good chance that he won’t hit the targets needed for his pay package and he will eventually lose his status as a sure thing in the stock market. But that day has not yet come and the stock is up hundreds of dollars per share over the past two years, despite all the problems in Tesla’s fundamentals. If anything, his meme value has gotten more powerful because he destroyed the Tesla brand, cratered sales, lost the EV tax credits, and still doubled the value of the stock.
Purely from a shareholder value perspective, Musk is still a huge net positive for Tesla. That may feel horrible and unjust and nonsensical, but that is reality (at least for now).
Meme stocks, although they weren't called that at the time, were a significant part of the 1929 stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. When stocks are highly overvalued and people keep investing in them, the eventual "correction" can be devastating. I lost 30% of my government version of a 401 (k) in 2008, even though I had only 50% invested in stocks, all of which were index funds. After that, I went back to bonds. I'm not disagreeing with your point, but Tesla's value will eventually drop significantly, and it won't be long. Economists and others are already warning us that we are on the precipice of a crash at least as severe as 2008 and possibly even worse than the 1929 crash.
I have gone through some down times too (I owned way too much Cisco back in the day; plus some Enron) and a big drop wouldn't shock me, but a lot of people make their livings predicting a great crash in the next 12 months year after year after year. It's an entire industry. (With a big correlation between guys predicting a crash and guys selling gold.) There was a pretty strong consensus that America was going to have a great recession coming out of Covid too.
There are periods of times when bears look brilliant, but those times are rare. Even within this year, the people that assumed the worst after liberation day and bailed are the ones that got screwed. The people that stayed in the market and even bought that big dip have done very well.
And we are not anywhere close to a 1929 crash. People were actively buying stocks with subprime debt in that time period and for all of our current problems with crypto and AI bubbles, we won't have people having to sell shares at a loss to payback the loans they used to buy the shares. We also have a very different Federal Reserve with a very different set of tools.
Even with the speculative nature of AI, it's the richest companies in the world footing most of the bill out of their own piggy banks. If AI turns into a giant bust, it's not like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are turning out the lights. Their stocks will be cut massively and shareholders will be poorer, but that won't cascade across lenders like the internet crash did when .com's were borrowing massively to try and get market share. (Also, our government will borrow whatever it takes to save our too big to fail companies. That wasn't true in 1929.)
I think it would be healthy for this market to have a 20 to 30% correction myself but I make my living going with the current instead of fighting it. In the market, optimists make money, while pessimists occasionally get to say, "told you so."
Anyway, that's a long winded detour but Tesla is different from the rest of the market. If Musk gets hit by a bus, Tesla shares would probably drop from $430 to less than $100. That's not true of the other big tech companies and their CEO's, because they have massive cash reserves and revenues and growth prospects. Tesla is a unique animal among the big tech companies in its meme characteristics.
Meme stocks are the modern equivalent of tulip bulbs. Eventually a critical mass of investors are going to realize that they are holding shares in a company that IS going to go bankrupt, and that's when we'll see the crash.
Tesla's fundamentals aren't great, but they are far from going bankrupt. I don't think they are in any danger of going bankrupt in the next 10 years with or without Musk. Their margins are declining but they are still selling some cars. They also license software, power chargers, and other tech to other companies because they did innovate some of the best technology in that space.
I agree that Tesla is way overvalued and will eventually correct. But this idea that Musk has destroyed it is overblown. I don't think Tesla is worth anywhere close to its current $430 a share but it is also worth a whole lot more than the $10 a share that Ford is at.
But if you are 100% confident, there is a fund (TSLQ) that is a leveraged short fund on Tesla. It goes up when Tesla goes down. As someone who has lost money multiple times betting against Musk and Tesla, I'll tell you that's a stupid bet. I think Musk is a horrible human being and I hate him. But the market loves him until it doesn't and there is no telling when that day will come.
I don't have the money it takes to short Tesla (as you know, short position are hard to hold for long), so I'm just sitting tight. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" is very true. But it can't sty irrational indefinitely, and Tesla sales are falling worldwide even as EV sales are increasing, and that can't go on forever. I saw some interesting figures on ElekTrek regarding Tesla sales; reportedly their net income fell from 15 billion in 2023 to around 7 billion in 2024, and is on track to halve again by the end of this year. Obviously I can't vouch for those numbers, but if they are accurate that's a disaster.
I agree that Tesla makes some nice tech, and the Supercharger network alone ought to be quite valuable as its absolutely the best and most reliable of the charging networks in North America. But I don't think it's valuable enough on its own to save the company. Absent Musk as CEO, I do think the company might be able to recover; it just needs a CEO who's serious about making great EVs. Unfortunately that's not Elon Musk, and as long as Tesla is tied to Musk's toxicity I don't think it has a long-term future.
Your ending point leads to a question about what a recovering Tesla looks like. The stock is at $430 or so right now. As you note, the company’s fundamentals don’t justify anything close to that.
My contention is that if Musk leaves the picture, Tesla will be a nice little car company worth less than $100 per share, even with a great CEO. That’s it. That’s not a win in any shape or form for anyone who currently owns Tesla stock. Tesla may be living on borrowed time right now, but there is no future without Musk that doesn’t permanently crush that stock for investors and they know it, which is why they are good with a crazy pay package.
I'm not a history buff. Anyone know if this level of warning was offered by any media outlet BEFORE the 1929 crash?
Did we ignore it then? And why are so many ignoring it now?
Because we all know what happened when the Nazis came into power - and a lot of us seem to have ignored the fact that it's happening again.
At least one economist/entrepreneur predicted the crash, and it was published in the media. It was "poo-poo'd" by the "titans of industry". His name was Roger Babson, and you can find more information about him and his warning in Wikipedia and other online sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Babson
Thanks!
Interesting man. . .
That picture of Pirro - what HAS happened to her face?
The same thing that happens to all of their faces. They demean themselves by trying to be the perfect "Mar-a-lago" woman. Anyone who injects poison into their body to "improve" their appearance, especially since it often ends up making them ugly, when they were at least attractive to begin has severe issues. One thing I truly embraced about radical feminism, other than equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work, is that my appearance is my appearance, and if it changes your opinion of me, that's your problem, not mine. :)
Bill Kristol's comparison of contemporary America to pre-revoltionary France is not far off-base.
Yet those who are groping toward a solution to American capitalism's slide into oligarchy and kleptocracy are too often vilified out-of-hand. I'm thinking specifically of Zohran Mamdani and Sohrab Ahmari. I disagree with many of the proposals and positions of both Mamdani and Ahmari; but both are actively seeking genuine solutions to our difficult and dangerous circumstances.
The tech-bros, like Musk and Peter Thiel, on the other hand, seek to sustain the current trends and warn, in Thiel's formulation, that any attempt to rein in the oligarchs is the work of the ant-Christ and it is therefore our moral obligation to stem even any "incipient" movement in that direction. Good grief!
We cannot allow someone as amoral and - famously - unempathetic as Musk to design our collective future. The risks are simply far too great.
Personally, I feel that anyone who says that "empathy" is a weakness should have zero say in our collective futures. As you said, the risks are too great.
Musk’s value as an innovative leader is way behind him. The only new things Tesla has produced in the last 7 or so years have been empty promises of products that never materialized. The company is grossly overvalued and is a reportedly toxic workplace.
Every company he has owned has become a toxic workplace. Elon Musk is a monster. He allowed hundreds of thousands of people to starve just for giggles. In my opinion, he's in the same category as serial killers.
This payout is a delusional carrot they're hanging in front of Elon's nose.
They're asking for a huge increase in sales and profit from a car company that has nosedived in the past year.
Never gonna happen
You're right, that's what I said too. If they really wanted Tesla to succeed, they would give him a ton of money to leave.
Well, the French had guillotines, we have AR-15s.