As opposed to Apartheid Manchild: Fairly unbalanced. 😀
Yeah, researchers for programs like this must need intense therapy sometimes.
Yes. Your recent elections aren't even slightly a hint of a profound social illness. Nor is the more than one daily mass shooting. All y'all are doin' just fine!
In the US it is.
The USA is less than 5% of the world's population. The USA's demented notions can get fucked, rather like they've already fucked the world.
If you want to understand billionaires, just go through this mental exercise.
You're handed a million dollars today. You have to spend it all in a day; you can't carry it forward. (And no charity donations for this mental exercise!) Easy, right? There's things you want. A fancy house. A fancy car. Pay down all your debts. Anybody could spend a million dollars in a day.
Tomorrow you get another million. You have to spend it all in a day. Still possible.
And the next day and the next day and the next day. Every day you have to spend a million dollars. You're beginning to run out of things to spend it on. Most people would run out of ideas after 30 days. You're doing stupid things now like buying an "ultra-rare" collectible that will just go into a vault with all your other "ultra-rare" collectibles never to see the light of day. You're just out of ideas.
But the money keeps coming in. Day after day. A million bucks. You have to spend it. For almost two years and nine months.
That's a billion dollars. Nearly three years of spending a million bucks daily. Spending a ludicrous amount of money daily, it still takes you almost three years to get through it all.
A billionaire is a person who thinks that isn't enough.
Does that give you some insight into what a billionaire is?
There are several problems with this report.
As others have pointed out, this implies that Tesla (and to a significantly lesser extent his other enterprises) continues its valuation increase at the current rate. This is not going to happen. Indeed looking just at this graph should show that this is unlikely:
The 2024-09-16 close isn't even the highest of the past 52 weeks, not to mention the highest of all time (which is c. 2021-11-05). (It isn't even the highest close of the past 30 days—or of even the past 5 days!) It is, in fact, 55-56% of the all-time high, and that was almost three years ago.
And the pattern of its financials will prevent that line from going up:
See, most investors invest not because they're cult members (like the fanboi day traders Apartheid Manchild grifts so well) but because they expect to see ROI. And the fundamentals of Tesla are not showing ROI potential.
So the line isn't pointing up.
And on top of this, this is all "paper wealth". All of the Manchild's stocks and five bucks buys you a small coffee at Starbucks. To actually buy more than that small coffee at Starbucks (ideally without an extra five bucks handed to him) the Manchild would have to cash in those stocks. And when he starts selling stock, the stock value will drop. The more he sells, the faster it will drop. That stock bonanza he has is not cash and its valuation is purest fantasy. It's points for score-keeping, not something you can actually spend.
Basically the only thing you can spend are "liquid assets" and most of Apartheid Manchild's assets are not liquid (which is why he had to borrow to buy Xhitter). Attempting to liquidate them will drop their value like a concussed bee.
Apartheid Manchild is not the Tony Stark of Real Life like he seems to think he is. He is a guy who started rich and fell upwards. His most valuable company is not one he founded. It's one he paid for the right to be called the founder of. He didn't invent electric cars. He didn't invent reusable rockets. He didn't invent much of anything, in fact. He has 29 patents to his name. Compare and contrast with James Dyson¹ and his almost 550 patents. The most cited of his patents (with 202 citations) would be #10 on Dyson's list of influential patents. How about a more recognizable name: Sergey Brin at 141 patents.
And when you look at Apartheid Manchild's actual patents, the 9 that are actually currently active (9 have expired, and 10 are pending) are singularly unimpressive for such a "world class genius". Again Dyson will eat his lunch for sheer volume of practical patents, as will Brin (who himself looks like a playing toddler next to Dyson).
Yet if you listen to the Manchild, he is the leading expert on everything that Trump isn't the leading expert on. He's the leading expert on logistics (says the man who has chronic supply problems). On manufacturing (says the man whose cars frequently have major quality issues). On electric cars (says the man whose cars are beginning to look positively quaint next to the competition's). On robotics. On AI. On rockets. On ...
And he's not an expert in anything. Except falling upward in a system whose feedback loops guarantee that once you crack a certain level of cash you fall upward.
This is unsustainable, and once it stops sustaining, his net worth will fall like so many wealthy idiots before him. The higher he sails on the crack of his quisling's praise, the harder and faster his inevitable fall will be.
As a special case of being a moron, a few years back Apartheid Manchild was something that you could kind of find adorable if you had a certain personality type. He seemed like the bumbling nerd made good. Further his fiction of the self-made billionaire tackling the Big Names with gumption and talent is the kind of stuff the American (Opium) Dream is made of. If he'd kept his mouth shut and kept himself out of the spotlight he might not be in the pickle he's found himself in now.
But he has too large an ego for that, and a serious grudge against the world to nurse.
So instead he mouthed off on Twitter. Then he trapped himself into having to buy Twitter for waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much. Then he turned Twitter into an echo chamber to amplify his real personality.
And his real personality is repugnant to most people.
He is damaging the Tesla brand. He is damaging the SpaceX brand despite the herculean efforts of Shotwell and co. He has a long string of business failures behind him that are making people think he isn't the genius he claims to be. And all of this is going to negatively impact his wealth.
So he won't ever be a trillionaire.
¹ Who? Exactly my point.
…
My flashlights use replaceable chargeables. I want to say "16550" but I'm not sure of the numbers. They're larger than AAs, longer than Cs but not quite as thick.
To me the anonymity of voting is the problem, so the solution is to make them public for all, not to find ways of making them more private.
I stumbled over this today. Apparently it was inspired by listening to his most recent analyst earnings call.
Weirdly I find Catan suffers exactly from this, and you have the added problem of if you fall behind you're just waiting for your turn so you can offer a trade nobody wants and then do nothing. Hour after hour, doing nothing. But you can't leave the game because that would throw everybody else off.
I won't play Catan any longer.
Star Fleet Battles. On paper it was a gateway game for me to get into wargames (a genre of game I'd always found tedious and lacking any fun of any sort) because it was a subject matter I was interested in. My SO introduced me to it because I liked old school Star Trek and he was a fanatic player of the game.
Four hours later and we were on, like, turn three. The game systems were inconsistent and incoherent. Planning out your moves made the game into a career bureaucrat's wet dream of paperwork. And when, finally, the two ships actually REACHED each other, there was about two minutes of dice rolling and ... while the game wasn't formally over, it was clear that there was no point in continuing; the victor was a foregone conclusion.
But we still played another two hours before the game ended.
So not only did I hate the game, I also had my hatred of wargames in general hardened.
Let's see:
Conclusion: Troll. Just block and move on.
Nobody yet. Apartheid Manchild is just breathing hard for now.