Clickbait title, I apologize but its Rule5 to keep the original titles.
This article performs a business analysis on Elon Musk, and where the money seems to have been going with regards to Tesla, SpaceX, and of course Twitter this year. With $1.3+ Billion interest payments coming up, Twitter is likely low on cash soon.
It seems premature to call Elon out (ie: the clickbait title is too clickbait), but this article makes a good case why Elon’s financial situation across these companies is in trouble.
With regards to Tesla itself: Cybertruck is a dud that is only there to hype the stock price at this juncture. With only 10 deliveries from the delivery event, “2024” for the start of the limited production $80,000 model and an unknown “2025” date for the cheaper mass production model, there’s no hope for Cybertruck to be financially relevant any time soon.
With Rockets exploding at SpaceX, with Tesla ramping up production (ie: $$$$$$ spent), and Twitter losing $Billions/year on interest alone (let alone all the other costs going on), the article suggests that a Twitter bankruptcy is in Elon’s best interest to keep things moving.
An interesting argument, we will see how it plays out over the next year.
Article points out that at least 63% of Tesla stock that Elon owns is tied up in loan agreements. That means that Tesla stock and Elon are tied together.
I didn’t realize that much of Tesla stock under Elon has been pledged on various loans. If this is true, then Elon may not be able to afford to save Twitter going bankrupt. Which… is the best we can hope for in the near future.
Tesla itself is a public company whose shareprice is determined by the public (aka: Musk supporters) who buy his Tesla stock. I don’t know when those shares will start declining in value, but public companies with a reality-distortion-field like this are strong due to the large public base behind them. A declining stock price is “propped up” by the faithful, who see a declining stock price as a bargain rather than an actual problem.
There’s a chance that a Twitter bankruptcy causes the Musk-faithful to sell some Tesla stock and therefore decline Tesla’s price / Elon’s fortune though. I don’t see any cascading set of failures leading to a Elon Musk bankruptcy though.
I think there’s been theories that Tesla itself has been lying about depreciation curves of its tooling and other such financial trickery to make it appear that they’re profitable. But this is all idle speculation (albeit: with more basis behind it than the typical speculation. Tesla seems to have great difficulty keeping CFOs, suggesting that the financial beancounting type do NOT like what they see when they enter the job of running Tesla’s finances). Such issues can go on for 10+ years undetected however (see Enron or Worldcom), so there’s no short-term thing to hope for on this front even if it is true.
I mean, an audit would reveal pretty quickly who’s fudging what numbers, but that would require the government to actually do its fucking job towards a large business.