[pjc50]

Someone is probably insider trading on this, but so far they look more like True Believers who don't expect it to go badly than 5D chess manipulators. In particular, Musk tying his reputation so strongly to the far right has been nothing but bad for his stock holdings.

[CamperBob2]

Musk's case is at least somewhat understandable. The critics who call him the "ultimate government welfare queen" are not wrong; practically every dime he has earned has either come from government contracts or subsidies, or depends on maintaining a good working relationship with agencies ranging from NASA to the Department of Transportation.

Following his takeover of Twitter in 2022, he would have been among the first to understand what was about to happen in 2024. Pivoting to the right -- not just pivoting to the right, but actively embracing it -- is something he had no choice in, if he wanted to keep his companies healthy. They were built atop a government that was about to disappear, so the only logical thing to do was to signal loyalty by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Trump campaign.

Of course, his Nazi salutes made no sense in any context, but then neither did cheating at video games or calling Unsworth a pedophile for dissing his submarine idea. I'd chalk his erratic behavior up to drugs or ongoing mental challenges that ultimately don't have much to do with politics.

Zuckerberg and Bezos were slower to catch on but they did catch on in the end. They understood that they had an enormous amount to lose by alienating Trump. If the wires of democracy, from Section 230 to the US Postal Service, were about to be ripped from the wall by Trumpers, they had to get in position to influence those events. See also Sam Altman.

I don't blame any of these people for acting rationally. The question I have is, when are all these big billionaire alpha moguls going to stop reacting to a chaos monkey and start pushing back, if only behind the scenes? Who has more to lose from tearing down the established world order than the people who succeeded so massively under that very system? Don't they understand that while they will continue to be players, their playground will become a much smaller, weaker kingdom, one surrounded by rivals who now have an incentivize to organize against us?

[spwa4]

Musk is explainable. Tesla WAS going to fail, and that became inevitable long before the election. Musk was going to lose big whether Trump or Harris (or Biden) got elected. Granted, probably less dramatic and slower failure than what we see now, but it was always going to fall big. Musks' new design, the cybertruck is a disaster, and he would have been the first to know. BYD is eating Tesla's lunch ... and BYD is merely the first and currently highest profile of 10 Chinese companies coming out with electric cars.

And yet, I do think Musk is actually worse off in his current position than he would have been under Harris. Which shows, yet again, what a "great thinker" he is cough. He acted, because he's under threat, that makes sense, but his actions made his situation worse than it would have been had he done nothing.

Then again, in this market, I bet a lot of people feel like that.

[CamperBob2]

Agreed that Musk would have been vastly better off with Harris, but I think his actions are purely reactive. It's not his fault that Harris lost. He's just trying to make lemonade, having seen early on that life was about to hand us all a lemon. For every normal person who refuses to buy a Tesla, he has to sell one to a MAGA cultist, and that is never going to happen.

The fact that his "lemonade" tastes suspiciously like pee is his fault, though.