Plunging U.S. revenue at X risks opening up a "massive hole" on its balance sheet that Musk needs to plug to stave off its financial collapse.
Musk’s repeated outbursts against advertisers have dried up the main source of revenue for the loss-making company formerly known as Twitter. A recent decision to sue them for heeding his own advice to not buy ads on the platform hasn’t helped. At some point, he will have to provide a fresh infusion of cash to salvage his $44 billion takeover.
There are many reasons to avoid Tesla, regardless of Musk. The complete lack of independent repair was my deal breaker, but you'll find your own. Their competition is looking pretty good these days, too.
I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.
That’s because it is almost exclusively tied up in his various corporate holdings that include everything from rocket builder SpaceX and brain chip company Neuralink to his latest startup, xAI.
None of these investments are easily fungible. Only Tesla is a publicly traded company. So the easiest solution at his fingertips is to liquidate a portion of his remaining 12% stake.
Are there? Last I'd heard other options either didn't have infrastructure to charge vehicles on long trips and / or took too long to charge.
I really haven't looked into this so please just take this as a genuine question, and if you do have suggestions on other EVs I'd be curious what they are even though I'm not really in the market for one right now.
I've no complaints about the 2020 Ioniq.
Road trips we've taken have all had more than adequate chargers, but contextually this is Vancouver Island/Lower Mainland/Gulf islands and they government definitely had a hard-on to put in as much as they could a few years ago, so finally ownership density is starting to catch up a tad now, but new chargers seem to appear all the time.
Nothing beats just being able to charge at home though.
Musk: How about a multiple billion dollar pay package?
Sane people: You've already had it.
Musk: I've had one, yes. What about a second multiple billion dollar pay package?
The thing y’all keep forgetting is that it’s mostly in stock. He has HUGE incentive to keep Tesla going successfully, because of the immediate impact of the stock price on his wealth
That's because he installed his family and sycophants into the board at Tesla. They were literally put there to vote for whatever he wants. The shareholders approved the board appointees, and now they're completely fucked unless someone calls for a full replacement of the board of executives at Tesla.
It's his company, for better (unlikely) or worse (very likely).
Maybe if he was smart, he'd just give up on the social network and sell it off to someone else. But he's not smart, so he'll keep sinking money into it until cooler heads in the company prevail.
The era of social media dominance, I'm sorry to say, is over.
Don't be sorry, that's amazing and awesome! Social media was internets biggest mistake. It going down is great. It dragging the shit clown Musk with it is an absolute cherry on that cake
Judging by the used car online sites, it has about as much value left as any other car with similar age and kilometers. If I had to buy a car right now, I'd probably take a hard look at the alternatives. But they'd have to actually be better, I usually make car purchase decisions based on the qualities of the car.
Although Musk is certainly trying to make such principles difficult.
Good thing my car is new enough that I don't have to make this choice for several years. Perhaps the competition will have caught up by the time I need to get a new one.
It's still a car company with factories in multiple countries and pretty much the best battery tech and the best charging network. If they get bought by an established car company, they keep building the model 3 and Y cars while fixing the production issues there's still a lot of value there. You just need someone in charge that doesn't spend their days shit posting.
Because it will affect Tesla's share price (negatively), just like it did last time, and Fortune's job is to report on things that affect share prices.
There is also a public interest element, because Musk is currently the richest man on earth - which affords him massively undue power and influence - but he won't be if he manages to crash the Tesla stock price with a massive sell-off.
Tesla is exceedingly overvalued right now which makes it a very volatile stock. We already saw the price crater the last time he sold stock to keep Twitter afloat, and it only really recovered when he pinkie swore not to do it again.
Not to mention that if he sells enough Tesla shares he could lose majority control of it. If that happens and enough shareholders band together they could force all the Elon sycophants off of the board of directors, then the new board could force him out as CEO.
I understand the aversion to Musk coming out as a horrible human being, but Tesla is still pivotal to the EV industry. Or maybe we get a twisted view of reality in the US, but most EVs sold are still Teslas and teslas are arguably the cheapest, most compelling EVs available for sale.
Legacy manufacturers have always resisted the newer technology, and when they finally invested the money, took the first opportunity to step back away from them.
Rivian and Lucid have exciting technology and styling, and the opportunity to take the lead with compelling EV but are still too young. Neither have yet released a car that they can sell in volume. Remember all the stories of Tesla almost going bankrupt trying to scale up the model 3? They still need to get past that.
GM seemed to have a lot of promise but took a few years off from EVs, and really flubbed the new releases, so are returning their focus to ICE vehicles
Ford had a great strategy but too much dealer resistance and profiteering. No one is buying a car that starts off much more expensive than comparable models, has huge dealer markup, and salesmen steering yu away. They’re a good argument for Tesla’s approach of selling direct
does vw sell any EVs in the US? Technically I guess there are Porsche and Audi EVs, for the well off.
Toyota and Subaru compliance models aren’t even a blip
Is Hyundai/Kia our only hope if Tesla has problems? They’re coming in strong with relatively inexpensive and compelling models, but somehow always fly under the radar. For anyone understanding the importance of the technology shift from ICE to EV, we need Tesla
Profits stolen by Musk, that do not get reinvested into Tesla, are wasted for unnecessary and or harmful labour time and infrastructure (political advertising etc). Tesla workers produced those profits and now the products of their life-time gets wasted by decision makers like Musk Tesla workers have little power over.
Potential Tesla stock price crash aside - if he sells enough stock, the company will be less associated with him and people on the left (you know, people who actually WANT EVs and not coal rollin' pickup trucks) would be more likely to buy Teslas again. Because to be fair, they do make some damn awesome powertrains (and attach an aerodynamic smart fridge to it unfortunately, but eh, you can't have everything all at once, now can you)
Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
From when he bought twitter:
Mr. Musk has set some ambitious goals for Twitter, which he has said he will transform into an “everything app” called X. In presentations to investors about the deal this spring, he said he anticipated that Twitter would reach annual revenue of $26.4 billion and have 931 million users by 2028.
Uhh, not even close Musk. I guess he still has 3 years and 4 months to turn it around though. lol. I was told this man was a business genius.
If he sells it all, I'll buy a Tesla the next day. Until then, dinosaur bones for me. Unless an economical and very powerful aftermarket swap parts become readily available.
Whats interesting is the NRA spent billions in TV propaganda running a news channel and that venture ended up bankrupting the whole organization. It looks like musk is falling in the same trap
Why do you think he strongarmed Teslas shareholders into that big pay day? He's known this was coming, y'all. Tesla's just paying for his misadventure.
What conspiracy theory? The Saudis and Qataris have stakes in Twitter.
Qatar Holding, a sovereign wealth fund, is contributing $375m, while Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had initially opposed the buyout, also confirmed he would retain his $1.9bn stake in Twitter, writing that Mr Musk would be an "excellent leader" for the site.
From what I understand, they're trying to (mis)use a law to the effect that companies cant all get together and boycott a competitor in order to try to drive it out of the market. If my understanding is correct then, for example, if say Ford and GM and such happened to also run electric taxi businesses, and those taxi businesses bought cars off the open market where in theory they should buy whatever they think gives them what they need at the best price, even if from another car maker, then it wouldnt be legal for them to all go and say "we make electric cars, and Tesla does too, so lets not buy anything from Tesla, regardless of how cheap or good their products are, so they lose business" (Assuming that the Teslas in question would in fact be perfectly suitable for said taxi companies needs that is). They're trying to sue an advertising industry group, claiming that they've done this kind of thing. Except the members of the group in question arent really competitors to Twitter, and in any case, the quality of advertising is thought to diminish if the ads are next to objectionable and bigoted content, since its thought to hurt the advertised company's image, so if my understanding is correct, it should be simple enough for them to argue "We're not colluding to hurt your company, your product just isnt up to our standards so we arent buying it"
Or maybe Twitter's debtors can place a lien and sell it right out from under him.
Kinda curious about what if Twitter were nationalized...? Like, make it a service of the USPS or something? Force it to become accountable to its users?
The only issue with nationalizing it is that it will be probably even worse for moderation than under Elon. Private enterprises currently enjoy protection for moderation decisions. If it were nationalized any moderator action would run up against the First Amendment directly. Elon could ban Nazis (he doesn't but he could). A government controlled entity cannot.
I don't know much about trading stock, but I do know SpaceX is not a publicly traded company. That means his buyers for those shares are super limited, so each potential buyer would likely be super wealthy and would have more say over the company than any one individual in the horde of public buyers that would buy up the Tesla stock. Plus, him needing to divest from Tesla might actually drive Tesla stock up a little (eventually), since he won't have as much control of the company as he did before. It seems he would still be the largest shareholder after the selloff, but this would close the gap between him and the next largest shareholder. He owns over 3x more Tesla stock than the next largest shareholder.
He's using Tesla, a publicly traded company, as a piggy bank and transfering wealth from it to the privately owned Twitter and SpaceX. This is stealing from Tesla shareholders but because they're fucking idiots they're just letting it happen instead of dumping their stock and suing.
I get challenged to provide a motive every single time I say this, but I've been convinced since just a few months after the purchase that the entire goal has absolutely been to destroy it. And with some of the moves he has made, I'm frankly surprised it took this long.
He continues to be hostile to most of the user base that made twitter popular, all the censorship/freezepeach stuff, how he destroyed verification, his bullying of advertisers, etc etc. I'm NOT a business genius but these seem like obvious glaringly awful business moves and they just keep coming.
That would require him to take Twitter public again, for the record (that may well have been your meaning, but I'm clarifying because a lot of people aren't aware of this). The odds of a second Twitter IPO doing any kind of numbers is basically zero at this point. It's been a very public trainwreck for the last year. Might as well try to sell tickets on the Titanic after the iceberg hit.
Don't really know about the legislation wherever, but usually it's quite possible to trade part ownership in companies even if they're not publicly traded. That's what most companies in the world are like. I know I've owned unlisted stock.
My privacy settings block Twitter embeds so reading low quality news is a nightmare. They should just quote it in the body of the article and hyperlink it instead.
Why did he fight a lawsuit to get out buying it? How many levels of 4D chess are we on in this demented conspiracy theory where he wants to buy something, so he sends a bunch of very expensive lawyers to court for months to try to get him out of buying it?
Why did he rename it to X? X is his baby. That's not hyperbole, the X brand is so important to him that the literally named one of his children X. He got kicked out of paypal for trying to make X happen. The man is absolutely obsessed with X. It is his white whale. You don't bequeath that legacy to something you're trying to kill.
Stop giving Musk credit by pretending there's some kind of genius plan behind everything he does. He's the richest man on earth, he does not need you to suck his dick for him. He can pay people for that.
He doesn't have a secret evil plan. He's just really, really stupid. He's a textbook example of how people who start with wealth and unearned confidence will frequently become even wealthier because we have a fucked up clown show of an economic system. That's all there is to it.