I’ve discussed this before, so we’ll keep it brief. Much of Musk’s wealth is in Tesla stock. Tesla car sales are down, and getting hammered particularly, but not only, in China. The Chinese are producing better, cheaper electric vehicles with autonomous driving which actually works, because they use Lidar, which Musk personally decided not to use. Even Western carmakers are catching up to and exceeding Tesla vehicles.
Musk tried to get a fifty billion dollar payout from Telsa, which was spiked in the courts, because, I suspect, he knows Tesla’s going down. He’s been systematically selling Tesla stock, but he can’t sell too much at any given time. So right now he’s trying a parlay, he has to keep Tesla stock up for as long as possible to get as much money out. His strong support for Trump was almost certainly based on the need to keep Trump from ending electric vehicle subsidies, which, so far, Trump has done, even though he was very hostile to them for much of the campaign.
Now don’t feel bad for Musk, he’ll still be one of the richest men in the world, but for whatever reason: distraction, rumored drug use, health or something else, he’s not handling the day to day, month to month business of managing his corporations very well. X/Twitter has bled users, losing millions and while advertisers are coming back, that’s only to kiss up to him for as long as he has Trump’s ear, and Trump is fickle with who stays in the inner circle.
What is happening here…something is off with elon #ElonMusk #Inauguration2025 #InaugurationDay #Elon_Musk #Drugs pic.twitter.com/mFK0gZso1k
— Danny-DreamShock (@Dreamshockcom) January 20, 2025
SpaceX is doing well, but SpaceX is still, mostly, a creature of the government, with the exception of its satellite internet. Its success was made possible by Obama policies intended to build a private space industry. It still requires government contracts and aid to do well.
If I had to make a bet, I’d bet on Blue Origin, Bezos’s space outfit. Yes, it’s far behind, but Bezos is an operator and still seems very skilled and focused, unlike Musk. And with him stepping away from day-to-day operations at Amazon, he’s got the attention to spare on what is a dream from him: he made the money at Amazon so he could do space.
The Chinese space program, as you’d expect, is doing very well, including putting up satellite internet which appears to outperform Musk’s, but America is never going to pay China to use its lift capacity so there’s a guaranteed moat.
Musk, in short, has almost certainly peaked. His political actions are, from a business perspective, necessary because he’s screwed up his core business and needs powerful government access. His competitors are chewing on his heels, he personally seems to be in some sort of decline, and his days as number one are drawing to a close.
Mary Bennet
Musk is supposedly a businessman, but when does he ever do any work?
Trump may have good ideas, like ending our involvement in Ukraine, but he seems not to know how to make appointments. It is not just that any female who works for him must be attractive, although that limits his field of choice; according to reports, he selects men on the basis of one or two conversations, with very little if any vetting. I wonder if that failing is what is behind his successive bankruptcies.
Ian Welsh
Turns out the database errors were being caused by someone spamming the server with a massive number of requests, and not some back end issue. Some stuff has been done to fix the problem, we’ll see if it works. If not, other things will be tried. Bear with us. I don’t think it’s deliberate DenialOS, since it usually doesn’t last long.
Joan
We need electric transport but by that I mean trams and trains. Transitioning away from required personal vehicles is so much cheaper in the long run it’s stupid to not do it.
david lamy
Musk strikes me as a bombastic neurotic narcissist. I bet the timer is running down for his time in the spotlight with Trump. (I think Trump’s Chief of Staff nixed a West Wing office for Musk.)
Our climate degradation is too far along to be rescued by EV’s. That in my view will reduce demand and selling price.
Musk can rant and rave on X. Most of us won’t pay him any mind.
different clue
MMMA.
Make Musk Millionaire Again.
bruce wilder
I said at the end of another thread,
Musk, who has occasionally been a crypto enthusiast and whose fortune was founded I understand in PayPal, is the exemplar of the tech bro conman. I saw Matt Stoller say that Elon seemed to be the only example of a prominent American business man who seemed to have anything like technical competence or a committment to productively doing something, anything. I don’t think Stoller likes or admires Elon, but I understand wanting to acknowledge his accomplishments. SpaceX catching returning rockets is pretty amazing. Getting even a new auto company — even a niche auto company — off the ground is an amazing accomplishment.
On the other hand, some of what he does and promises and touts is just nonsense. That it generates fantastic financial market valuations is a magic act. And, I am not sure how to label what he does as a bureaucratic leader or “visionary”. His takeover of Twitter was interesting to watch. I half-expected a technical meltdown, but he got past some radical trimming of staff and bureaucracy. I know a lot of people, who have purchased Tesla cars and I have never seen one, where the build quality was better than barely acceptable. The “self-driving” promise — always “next year” — is an obvious con, not to mention borderline insane. I have read — not sure it is true, but I can easily believe — that Tesla is the most lethal car brand on the road. If I were still in the Federal government, I would have banned outright the use of a touch-screen control panel for the driver as a safety hazard of the first order. The Boring Company with its Las Vegas tunnel operation is just silliness — he has drivers in cars driving back-and-forth in one-way tunnels he built himself! If you can’t make self-driving work flawlessly there, what are you doing? The whole concept is just bizarrely inefficient. (Put in a train already and run in a circle.)
I cannot help but feel like Elon is like some symbolic microcosm for our era, teetering on the edge of a Seneca’s cliff, waiting for the tumble down hill.
Elon, like Trump 2.0 in general, feels surreal. I have been seeing clips of Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, Jr being grilled by foolish Democratic Senators. I would be shocked if either Tulsi or Bobby made it past Senate confirmation. The Democrats will only allow the absolute worst Republicans into power because that’s who the Democrats are. But, the filter for pure kakistocracy is only one aspect of the weirdly negotiated relation with reality that is being revealed. Nobody on the Dem side wants to acknowledge that the COVID vaccines were misrepresented or that American food is causing obesity and ill health or that Big Pharma is out-of-control. Nobody on the Dem side wants to acknowledge that the War in Ukraine is a disaster or that foreign policy is out-of-control even after the series of Mideast disasters. (I don’t think many on the Republican side want to go there either, but somehow the only glimmer of light is on the Right? Let’s just say it is surreal to watch.) There’s no reasoning on vaccine safety or efficacy coming from Democratic Senators. There’s no acknowledgement that Al Qaeda in charge of Syria is cray cray (let alone that the Douma gas attack was fraudulent or entailed destroying the carefully constructed integrity of the principle international institution established to police the use of poison gas). Our mostly geriatric political and braindead media elite are lost in their own gaslighting “control of the narrative”.
Mark Level
Thanks, Ian!! A feel good post that lets us all engage in a bit of Schadenfreude.
I appreciated the video clip, too. Elon’s dazed eye movements warn us all (in the best spirit of Hunter S. Thompson, but not deliberate in this case) of the repercussions of self-medication. That is a risky road, a lot depends on one’s self-awareness (which is an area I expect he is rather lacking in.)
I’d heard from multiple sources that Baron is a giant, 4 or more inches taller than “dad.” That video doesn’t really support that if he is the same height as Elon, roughly, but whatever.
Purple Library Guy
@Joan
While I agree that moving towards more reliance on transit and trains is a Good Thing (and would be regardless of climate change), we squandered the time we had to make that a mainstay of our actual climate change response. We’re not going to eliminate car culture in the time frame we need. So, sure, any time there’s an opportunity to spend money on (electrified) transit, or better yet, do major initiatives or governmental frameworks pushing increases in public transit in the mix of our transportation, we should totally go for it.
But, we still need electric cars. There are going to be lots of cars for the immediately foreseeable future, and if there are going to be lots of cars they need to be electric. And even in a utopian future of somewhat decentralized left government with a non-capitalist people-owned economy, there would still be some car- and pickup-truck-sized vehicles. And luckily, a fast shift to electric cars is very feasible, and even more luckily the Chinese are going for it. It is happening, it will happen, there almost isn’t much point any more in debating whether we support it because it is fundamentally a done deal now.
As to Elon, I’ll be pleased to see Tesla going down now that other companies are doing it better anyway, and I’m pleased every so often when I check a Bluesky counter and see that it’s still going up at a decent clip. To get real, at the current rate it is going to take a long time before it’s in Twitter’s user numbers range, but speed of people joining Bluesky seems to get a boost every time Musk does something particularly outrageous, which he can’t resist doing fairly often. And I guess since a good portion of people increasing Bluesky’s user count are also decreasing Twitter’s, that would make it a bit faster too. We’ll see. But the trajectory looks promising. Plus, I suspect Bluesky’s numbers are less inflated by bots than Twitter’s . . .
j
Blue Origin is not happening, it’s been built from ground up from seasoned aerospace executives. The same kind of people who in the ULA spend billions with huge delays and barely deliver any result. The same kind of people who in Boeing cannot get the astronauts off the Space Station (and this is not a poke at the purpoted Musk going to do it).
Blue Origin has been around for longer than SpaceX. A lot of people have been having happy warm jobs in there, the worst kind of a public employee stereotype kind. The owner is far, he likes yes men and only understands manager speak, and he has money to spend. It’s not going to fly, pun intended, there is no turning around of it.
The Chinese are getting in the game tho.
Ian Welsh
Elon was always something of a huckster, but he was able to bear down and concentrate on issues, and he could prioritize. The last 3 years or so he’s been very erratic and doing things which are obviously not in the best interests of both Tesla and X. I do suspect drug abuse may be an issue, and it may be on top of some sort of health issues. Often adult drug abuse, especially for someone his age, starts a palliative for other issues. Once you’re on, it’s hard to get off, especially for someone like Musk who probably feels he can’t take a couple months off to get clean, both because he thinks he’s indepensible and because it would cause a lot of talk and investigation.
ella
Musk is engineering a takeover of the US federal governments’ payroll system. He’ll have access to the disbursement of about 5 trillion dollars per year of government money and you can bet he’ll make sure it goes into the pockets of cronies who will make sure Musk gets a big fat cut.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-pushes-top-treasury-official-152934138.html
The DEI bullshit and engineered trans-panic are to distract rightwing culture warriors from the heist going on under all our noses. Not that they should worry about it; they all have extra strong bootstraps to pull themselves up by when the crash comes if this theft succeeds.
KT Chong
Elon Musk is tweeting or playing games most of the time. I know he’s playing Diablo 4, Elder Ring, Overwatch, and Battle of Polytopia. He’s recently caught cheating on Path of Exile 2, and there’s a whole scandal around it, and then he inadvertently also admitted to cheating on Diablo 4 as well.