“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here.” – Silicon Valley
I hear Elon Musk’s car insurance premiums are astronomical.
I’m a fan of Elon Musk. Singlehandedly, he’s shown that even though getting to space is very, very hard, that he can do it. Beyond that, when working with NASA®, they noted that working with SpaceX™ they accomplished in a month what would normally take NASA™ a year. NASA® kept saying the work was too Falcon Heavy.
Musk has also proven that if you focus on getting things into space, you can do it. NASA® gave up on getting things into space right after Von Braun died and is now a jobs program that hires gender and grievance studies majors. I’m not kidding. Really.
Instead of, oh, going into space, NASA© chases imaginary offensive names of astronomical features (NASA© corroborates this here – LINK). From the press release: “The Agency will be working with diversity, inclusion, and equity experts in the astronomical and physical sciences to provide guidance and recommendations for other nicknames and terms for review.”
If Elon Musk’s wife breaks up with him while he’s on Mars, will that make her his Space X?
Because that’s the important thing, right? We don’t want people thinking of the Eskimo Nebula or Siamese Twins Nebula. Because . . . colonialism? I forget. Is there a scorecard I could download?
One thing I’ve been fairly consistent about, though, is that Elon Musk’s car company, Tesla® is a scam. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great scam. I’ve heard that the cars are wonderful. And from a speed standpoint, the Tesla™ can go from 0-60mph (that’s 27.39 parsec per eon) nearly as fast as any car on the planet.
But the price of Tesla®, even after losing 25% of its value in the last few days, is ludicrous. Tesla’s™ market cap is $307.7 billion dollars. Volkswagen® is worth $77.5 billion, Toyota™ is worth $210.8, and Ford™ is worth $27.5 billion. So, if Elon looked under his couch cushions for some spare change, he could trade Tesla™ for VW®, Toyota©, and Ford™.
But at least communism means always having enough to eat, right?
Is Tesla® a good company? Sure. But Tesla™ made 367,000 cars last year. Ford©, Toyota® and VW™ combined made 27,000,000 cars. That’s nearly 74 times the number of cars that Tesla® makes.
I think most people have invested in Tesla® because Elon Musk gets things done. And, it amuses me that Elon Musk takes the money he’s earned from Tesla™ to work on arguably the best space program since Apollo, back when NASA™ had real engineers working on real engineering problems and done it in his spare time.
Tesla® is a symptom.
I hear that Coronavirus symptoms start right off the bat.
When money is flooded into a market by bankers looking to prop the market up, it flows oddly. The faster the flow? The bigger the imbalances. When people are rushing to put money into the market, they look for the shiny objects. One of the shiny objects in this case is Tesla®. There are others. Dozens of them.
It is my theory that the entire market is filled with imbalances right now. The money that was flooding in to prop the market up is leaking everywhere. Reasons don’t matter. That’s the way that markets work over the short term. Silly things happen – you’ve seen it earlier this year with toilet paper. What I’m saying is that, yes, Tesla® is just like the toilet paper of the stock market.
The best way to steal a Tesla® is to put it on auto-pirate.
The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 was just that – markets working in a panic. The world is ending, so what do I do? Make sure that I can poop in comfort. Like getting into a war with Italy as one of your allies, it’s not a great strategy, but is a strategy. In mid-late 2020, the market is flooded with money, attempting to buy whatever looks best and prettiest.
Just like the TP 2020 Terror®, the Reinflation Bubble of 2020© isn’t at all rational. And, like Tesla™ lost 25% of market value in a few days? It’s my theory that will happen across the whole market. Note – I’m not a financial advisor, so use the advice of a random guy on the Internet as just that. I pulled my money from the market, mostly, in February. After that, I’ve been spending my time collecting the three precious metals: gold, silver, and lead.
As I get older, I’ve discovered a simple truth – I have no idea if my kids will enjoy getting shares of Tesla® when I die. But I do know that if they each got a suitcase of untrackable gold and silver, half a dozen rifles and a few thousand rounds of ammo at my funeral, they’d smile.
My buddy Ty won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics®. China won’t give him the medal because they won’t recognize Ty won.
I know this column is short, but I stared at that last line for about an hour and wouldn’t change a word. Not a bad place to end. Let’s call it a day. I know that NASA already has . . . .
Sigh. You made me waste a few minutes verifying that yes, 60 MPH = 27.39 P/E. Kudos for your technical accuracy, John. Then you made me waste even more minutes answering the question of just how much juice would it take to run a Tesla for a billion years to cover those 27.39 parsecs = 89.33 light years. That’s about what it would take to get to the star Algol in the constellation Perseus. A Tesla cruising at 60MPH apparently has a power draw of 20kW and there’s 8.76 trillion hours in a billion years. So you need 175.2 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy. At 10 cents per kW-hr that’s 17.52 trillion dollars of electricity. Of course it would rear-end something on the curb long before you got to Algol.
Musk is an interesting guy. Paypal. Tesla. SpaceX. Neuralink. Grimes. Any of these would be a full-time relationship.
Since he was born in Pretoria, South Africa and became a US citizen in 2002, Elon Musk is literally an African-American. SpaceX is NASA’s version of a minority set-aside.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-girlfriend-grimes-relationship-photos-2018-8#since-then-grimes-has-taken-to-twitter-several-times-to-defend-musk-and-tesla-in-since-deleted-tweets-grimes-said-musk-has-never-tried-to-stop-tesla-workers-from-unionizing-and-claims-she-encouraged-a-union-vote-among-tesla-employees-7
You gotta wonder what Elon will be leaving his six boys at his funeral besides $15 billion each. Probably not very many memories of happy times with their father.
Keep in mind no friction in space. So, given relativistic speeds, what fraction of C would the Tesla be going. (I actually did figure that out in my PEZ-Anti-PEZ powered spaceship post.
Dunno. I wonder if you’re right. I hear a lot of famous men are like that . . . .
Crackpot theory on the stock market. The stock market isn’t really run by (stock values determined by) millions of investors, but by the dozen (or few dozen) investors that buy millions of shares. There’s a clever analogy that an individual investor in the market is like a mouse running around on the floor while two elephants are, um, dancing. Yeah let’s say dancing instead of that “F” word. The mouse can get killed by something the elephants do even though the elephants have no interest in hurting the mouse.
The money managers aren’t idiots. They know they’re playing with make believe money that’s only worth something because they get it before the average people. They also know they’re managing money for hundreds of thousands or millions of those average people who are their customers. The end result is that bidding up the price is adjusting for inflation before it happens.
They’re correcting the price on the stocks to preserve the assets of those customers, just as they’re required to do as their fiduciary responsibility.
So when you see the price on stocks go up beyond reason, like Tesla’s, it’s a sign of what’s going to happen to the real things you buy to live on.
Not a bad theory. It would explain, at least in part, all the high frequency trading – attempting to get free dollars by crushing mice.
Don’t forget the constant flow of money into 401k that’s essentially tied to funds, some of which are just S&P proxies . . . most are buys and little selling.
For now.
Societies with governments existing to redistribute wealth can’t have nice things such as a space program.
Tesla vehicles are so limousine liberals can feel good about saving the earth with their lithium batteries and cars that only Starbucks sippers can afford.
The electric power is provided by unicorn flatulence and rainbow colored solar panels with Solyndra stickers on the back to cover the hecho in China logo.
Maybe comrade Elon can use government money to build the NYC to Hawaii train that Occasional Cortex (h/t/-Dr. Savage) will be the conductor of.
Yup. It’s still impossible to beat fossil fuels on price or efficiency, at least for the next decade.
Last line-Well played sir! Keep on keeping on.
Thank you! Will do!!
The Moon rang like a bell
Between 1972 and 1977, seismometers installed on the Moon by the Apollo missions recorded moonquakes. The Moon was described as “ringing like a bell” during some of those quakes, specifically the shallow ones.
Hollow Moon – Wikipedia
Goes to show that thousands of people can be easily deluded, and that millions are stupid every day.
It has a pretty different geology than Earth . . . cold to the core. I do think they’ve found some pretty interesting things with the gravity survey work they’ve done . . .
Americans scream anyone who loves war, debt, and tyranny is normal and anyone who loves peace, balanced budgets, and freedom is a nutjob.
“Americans”