none of them should have more than a few percent in them

Tesla makes up 2.3% of the S&P 500 and 4.5% of NASDAQ. Then you have business downstream of Tesla - Luminar Technologies sells the majority of it’s LIDAR systems to Tesla, Hertz’s EV fleet is plurality Tesla, Panasonic co-owns Gigafactory 1.

I was more speaking of the lenders who enable Musk’s bullshit like buying Twitter or fucking around with our elections.

They do it so they can be first in the door for future IPOs. JP Morgan has been a close ally of Musk’s for decades. And he’s repaid them with numerous opportunities to resell their debt. The Twitter loan was a small price to pay by comparison.

Big Tech keeps building smarter devices

Smarter or just louder?

It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.

Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company’s actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a “must buy” for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don’t think there’s any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don’t have a strong monetary incentive to try.

At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he’s going to Tulip Mania his company again or he’s going to fall far short of the mark.

I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.

NASA’s been a contractor’s boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.

I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we’ve largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.

For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That’s going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.

He’s gonna cheat to get his trillion

He’s going to try. Even then, the bar is higher than just nibbling at the margins. And everything is stacked on the shoulders of an overall positive outlook for the US economy in total. He can’t insource all his car sales in any practical sense. And he can’t use options markets to outrun the perpetual gaggle of Tesla bears nipping at his heels. He also can’t reliably expect Congress to bail him out when he’s made this many enemies inside both the White House and Congress.

That’s not to say he won’t get a piece of paper with “$1T” written on it from his company at some point. But nothing in the Tesla financials suggests he will have anywhere to cash it.

He placed loyal people on the board and had them vote to give him control of the company.

He could place loyalists on the board because he bought a controlling interest in the company.

And now he has been having them vote to give him absurd unseen before “salaries”

The latest compensation package has virtually unattainable sales targets. And the compensation is almost entirely in equity that assumes a monumental increase in stock valuation.

If he can manage it, I’d be tempted to say he earned it, except I know he’ll only “hit” the target by lying and market manipulation that will collapse as soon as he hits his mark.

I mean, “stealing” is a strong word. Elon bought them out, and they’re both enjoying a net worth in the hundreds of million.

What’s more disturbing about Elon’s tenure as head of the company is how social media manipulation, insider trading, and blatant SEC violations can pump a company’s valuation into the stratosphere.

Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard both continued to contribute advances in engineering that far exceeded the Tesla project. But they’ll never have the kind of easy credit Elon secured through politics and media manipulation. So don’t expect to see them included among the ranks of “billionaire” any time soon.

Americans are going to mandate retractable handles in response

The big question is why we started adding computer operating systems to our vehicles to begin with.

Originally, automakers tried to shoehorn proprietary subscription services into their vehicles for GPS and roadside assistance and satellite radio. But the opt-in for these services was scant, because they were obnoxious to set up and overpriced relative to - say - a TomTom or a cell phone’s core features. And you could get after-market integration added to your vehicle through its entertainment system, so why bother with the clunky manufacturer options.

CarPlay and AndroidAuto were concessions that automakers began to adopt because they sold more vehicles that way. Reversing this out will likely have the same effect it did the first time - by driving people to foreign car companies like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Kia.

I already see Kia cars on the road fucking everywhere. And moves like this will only accelerate the trend, I’m sure.

So, by utilizing built-in systems, the car manufacturers would indeed be able to collect more data about how you use the systems in place, while also possibly getting more money out of you through subscriptions.

deleting my account

When the 25lb bag is mostly weavels?

90% of Spotify is trash. Much like Audible, it’s just choking on AI generated content and similar worthless vanity projects

Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that’s dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.

The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.

Humans caused ALL of this!

A handful of humans with deep roots in the financial sector and the government contracting space.

AI popping won’t change this. These losers will still be in charge in every way that matters.

AI is more likely to generate code that’s hard to follow and therefore harder to check.

Sure. It’s making the errors faster and at a far higher volume than any team of humans could do in twice the time. The technology behind inference is literally an iterative process of turning gibberish into something that resembles human text. So its sort of a speed run from baby babble into college level software design by trial, evaluation, and correction over and over and over again.

But because the baseline comparison code is, itself, full of errors, the estimation you get at the end of the process is going to be scattering errant semicolons (and far more esoteric coding errors) through the body of the program at a frequency equivalent to humans making similar errors over a much longer timeline.

Kinda. It’s a novel technology and one that hasn’t been well analyzed or exhaustively tested.

A computer is a machine that makes human errors at the speed of electricity.

You seem confused

CEOs are probably hedging on LLMs adapting faster to scammers then video versa

Racing towards the Singularity, a thing that is definitely real and exists and is achievable in our lifetimes.

We are reaching a convergence of accuracy, and once a critical mass of investors realize it, this whole thing implodes.

Industrial dinosaurs have a way of sticking around in strict defiance of market forces. The O&G industry is a great example. They’ve been able to outrun more efficient and cost-effective methods of production and application of energy for decades, in large part thanks to lobbyist-lead state investments in long-term infrastructure and buying out / shutting down of competitors.

I do think the AI boom is facing bigger headwinds than the automotive or airline industries, in large part due to their bloated balance sheets and highly speculative asset prices. But in the same way the big 2008-era investment banks were saved by a multi-trillion dollar bailout from the Fed and the Treasury, I have no doubt Silicon Valley is simply Too Big To Fail in the long run.