> His companies are doing fine and he's still super rich.
Tesla sales are down a lot , even as they give up margin to lower price in an effort to boost sales.
Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
Down from super high is still high. Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap.
> Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
Twitter's market cap hasn't change much. The perception of it losing value and being in trouble has a lot more to do with people's personal feeling (ironically expressed on X), rather than economics. It wasn't profitable when he bought it and it's not profitable now. It's still worth roughly what he bought it for.
> SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
By your own admission, profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable. Governments are the least risky clients there are.
> The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
That he spends relatively little money on, hardly worth mentioning, either positive or negative.
> Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap
A market cap that has more than halved in the last year. And market cap isn’t everything. Plummeting sales amid higher competition, layoffs, etc don’t paint a great picture.
> Twitter's market cap hasn't change much
Since what time period? Since after he shaved 70% of it off? [1]. It wasn’t and still isn’t profitable, yes, but it now has a far higher debt load and a drop in advertising revenues which make it worth less.
> profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable.
Oh I said rarely and barely profitable. That doesn’t imply much profit, nor potential. It has promise, yes, but clear profits… no. Sorry for the confusion. They turned a profit only for one quarter. The structural risks are due to government subsidies that can (and are) being pulled from SpaceX. Starlink has been a huge boom to its revenue, but those subsidies were part of that. His errant behavior could jeopardize additional contracts (eg his drug use).
> hardly worth mentioning
The trail of headline worthy businesses are worth mentioning because they add to his allure and image. That they have little business potential, amount to trivial cost to him, and are for vanity, makes them meaningless.
SpaceX wanted more subsidies ($900M) to build starlink. They wanted ISP subsidies to reach "last mile" customers. The reason given for the subsidy rejection: SpaceX over-promised, under-delivered (an Elon theme).
Generally, Tesla built its sales on the EV subsidy, Solar City is based on Solar Installation subsidies. Starlink was going to be subsidy-driven. Most of the factories/land for Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity were based on where the government would provide tax credits or other subsidies.
As Elon gets more politically active (and controversial) his ability to attract politicians for publicity will be scrutinized and harder to come by. Especially if he under-delivers on commitments.
You can't pull something you never gave. If you understand the RDOF bid and how Telco subsidies work you'll understand there's nothing political and talk about under delivering don't make sense because the time of the test is in the future
Tesla and Twitter are not doing fine. He's trying to get Tesla to agree to his original compensation bonus that was rejected by the Delaware courts. But that bonus was for bringing the valuation over $650 billion. The valuation has now dropped to under 500 billion
Musk's performance award included 12 tranches of stock options that were unlocked at $50b intervals from $100b to $650b of market cap, with a few other requirements. At Tesla's current price, 8 of the 12 tranches would still be unlocked.
Which occurred primarily before he took over Twitter and ran it into the ground while at the same time tanking the goodwill people had for Tesla.
It really seems unlikely one human can split themselves between so many projects and keep all of them successful unless they dis-engage from a few and let those they hired run the show (mostly how he's behaved with SpaceX). If the person is like this they likely don't deserve the sort of compensation talked about in this article.
Before you reply about the obviously lower valuation over the last few years, take a look at some comparable companies: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The economic realities of Musk's ventures does not align with what seems to be the zeitgeist opinion of him as a person.
Your first link doesn't show what you think it does, but there are quite a number of articles about Musk losing advertisers on Twitter (and even telling them to go f themselves).
That's all fine, opinionated stuff. I too cackle at the thought of Musk walking away from this whole ordeal with nothing. My post simply corrects the factual errors in the other guy's post.
Entirely true, in fact. I've read what Matt Levine wrote. I've also read the actual proxy statement from Tesla, which Matt Levine cites and links! You too can read it, here for example, in the summary on page 17: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
Tesla sales are down a lot , even as they give up margin to lower price in an effort to boost sales.
Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.