Elon's award is tied to growing Tesla's market cap - it's pretty transparent that he's just trying to ball-of-mud together everything he can to hit that target and grab the bag.
What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong. Tesla buying SpaceX just for hist bonus and then rebranding to X would be classic Musk.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.
>What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.
I took a look at the proxy statement as they have it outlined in this [0] document (Proposal 4). As currently formulated, Musk has 12 operational goals (like ship 1 million robots or hit 50 billion EBITDA) and 12 market cap goals. These need to be paired together for the shares to vest; so, if he reaches the first market cap number, he also needs to fulfill an operating goal for the first set of shares to be earned. These earned shares vest in ~5 years.
This comes with a huge caveat. If Tesla changes control, those operational goals go out the window and his stock award is based solely on market cap (along with the shares immediately vesting). The share price for this is the greater of:
1. The last traded Tesla price prior to the acquisition, or
2. The per share price outlined in the acquisition.
The "easiest" way to take advantage is to IPO SpaceX (which he did), pump up the market cap, acquire Tesla for a sizable premium, and vest as much of the stock award as you can. It means you get to avoid the operational goals entirely and vest a bunch of Tesla (but soon to be SpaceX) stock.
My understanding is that Musk doesn't have a controlling share of Tesla. So by the letter of the law, a SpaceX acquisition would qualify as a change in control (because we've gone to a new majority owner).
Fascists don't support free speech. Please, learn what that word means[0] and then use it responsibly. We're already seeing the effects of misusing and overusing several other important words for political/societal discourse, and this is one of them. It's entirely unhelpful and lowers the quality of conversation here.
[0] The Doctrine of Fascism is available, for free, in several places. Start there.
One doesn't need to be a free speech absolutist to not be a fascist, far from it; and the exceptions prove the rule - those examples are the definition of exceptional. "10 times…" I can remember people getting banned en masse for changing their profile pic to an NPC character. The difference is night and day.
Fascists do claim to support free speech while wielding the apparatus of state to ensure that any speech that they disagree with is suppressed, eg on college campuses.
I feel like it has to eventually become X. Just because he’d find it funny for the stupidest people in the world to post about how he’s turned Twitter into a $2t or whatever company.
> Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.
It counts and it's not wrong.
Sure, the Tesla award takes into account any M&A but growing a 2T company to 3T is a 50% increase.
While growing a 1T company to 2T is a 100% increase so it's expected to be easier for him to hit his award targets with the companies merged as opposed to not merged.
If we combine the market cap of the entire S&P500 we get close to 70T. That doesn't mean any of those individual companies are any more valuable or any of the investors are any richer. It makes no sense that Tesla shareholders would be ok with paying out a performance bonus just for M&A that doesn't grow the value of Tesla and would just dilute their shares.
Well yeah it doesn’t make a ton of sense but the shareholders already cast their vote on this. I’m not sure what they expect would happen but I also don’t think they care. Elons shareholders are a special kind of financial sycophant.
Because that's the grand plan from the start. You don't put a sentence like "In other words, upon a change in control where Tesla is acquired, vesting of milestones under the CEO Performance Award does not require the achievement of a matching Operational Milestone." if you didn't think Tesla could be acquired.
The goal is to give Elon his 2012 award package but making it his 2018 one.
No. He is making it an AI company. The prospectus makes that clear. Everything is in service of training and deploying AI. Twitter is data, distribution and marketing, space x is distribution with data centers and internet in space. Cursor is training data and hostile distillation.
That prospectus didn't make anything clear. It was pictures of rockets and rubbish about "the light of consciousness". The only real information was buried deep in the middle and it showed a company with poor finances and no clear path to success. Certainly not something worth the likes of Amazon.
How much mass do we need to put in orbit to radiate 10 GW of data center heat? How much rocket fuel does it take to lift the rocket fuel required to lift that mass? Which part of this is cheaper or more effective than building data centers 100 feet below the ice in Antarctica ? Other than serving workloads that are already in orbit, I don't see the point. How much addressable market do we have for AI compute that is already in orbit?
The appeal is solar power efficiency gains. And yes it is a notable amount of extra mass, but not a deal-breaking amount. Latency is pretty minimal regardless of location (sub-100ms) which is not nothing but it's minor for things like serving AI inference.
Not saying I think it's the best idea, but it is theoretically feasible.
When you say it is not deal-breaking - have you looked at any math? Real world data finds we need about 6kg of radiator surface to radiate 1kW. [0] . A 100MW datacenter would need about 600,000 KG just of radiator mass. ISS was only 450,000KG and it took 13 years to assemble. Meanwhile, we're projected to launch 600X that data center capacity on earth in just the next three years.
To say that this is pure folly is an understatement. It is not folly, and it is not foolishness. It is fraud.
It exists, but "works quite well" is only for a small amount of heat. It takes a big radiator to get rid of heat to ax vacuum. Much easier and cheaper to just keep the computers on earth and cool them with standard air or liquid cooling setups.
The required radiator for cooling isn’t that much larger than the required solar panel for powering the thing in the first place, and you don’t see everyone saying those are impossible. Is it easier to keep them on the ground? Obviously, but that wasn’t the claim. It just isn’t nearly as hard to cool things in space as a lot of people seem to think.
NewBird AI is an AI company which had an extremely irrational stock price bump because it's all about AI. It AI'd its AI with some more AI to AI harder with AI... and that equaled money.
If you're writing a prospectus right now and want a lot of large institutional investment you put AI between every letter. We are in a bubble, I don't think there's any disagreement about that, when the bubble will pop nobody knows - but while we're in this bubble everything is AI. I think it's unwise to read that prospectus in good faith given all the other factors (the court case against OpenAI, the race to IPO first, Google's additional stock grant, Elon's history of corporate bailouts) that are pretty plain to see.
To launch the data center into space and the satellites that deliver the data to users over star link. The same reason standard oil owned railways. Controlling distribution is a competitive moat no one else can replicate. Only antitrust stopped the standard oil monopoly. Not market forces.
Counterpoint: what if he lied in the prospectus? With Elons proven track record of misleading investors and customers I think that possibility has to be considered.
I agree with this, but it seems so crazy to me. How can money be a motivator when you're that rich. I'm not even "rich" but I'm already at a point where money is far from my #1 motivator.
I LOVE puppies, but if I had a trillion of them the last thing I'd want is another puppy.
An interview I recently read with Seth Rogen was very illuminating (from the NY Times):
"You know how every once in a while you read one sentence and it snaps your whole perspective into place? I remember reading that book “Going Clear,” about Scientology, and there was one sentence about how if famous people aren’t treated in a certain way, it makes them think they’re not as talented as they wish they were. Like, if I go to a restaurant and I have to wait 20 minutes for a table instead of them just seating me right away, am I not as talented as I thought I was? If someone has a nicer hotel room than me on the press tour, does that mean I’m not as good an actor as I thought I was? I think that’s how a lot of famous people interpret how they’re treated."
I think the same applies to Musk. The money is a proxy for how much everybody thinks he is a special genius. Anything in his life that makes him feel less special requires more validation that he is, and money is the easiest validation he is able to acquire.
Did he really win? His kids all hate him, his wives all left him, he has no real friends. Anyone he interacts with is purely after money and power they can get from him. He spends all day being angry on twitter.com.
I think the point of the Rogen quote is that there's no real way to win. This is not cope by the not mega-rich and famous. It's an inevitable result of wanting universal acclaim.
Musk has more money than most of us would dream of, but the game isn't over until it's over.
Speaking just for myself, I've lost respect from Elon Musk. I admire Musk's accomplishments, especially Starship and the Falcon rockets. But I don't respect Musk's personal judgement, his moral integrity or his ethics.
He doesn't know me, and he doesn't care about my opinion (or care about ethics for that matter). But there are a lot of people like me who used to respect him and no longer do. He's surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. At some level he's got to know this, and that the people pretending to pay him respect aren't themselves worthy of respect.
Musk is probably a clinical narcissist (NPD). If that's the case, no amount of power, status, or riches (or ketamine) will ever be enough
Their motivations are often cartoonishly superficial and... well... stupid. Stupid in ways that are baffling to most people (even most other neurodivergent). The kind of stupid that drives somebody to secretly pay pro-gamers to play games for them so they can pretend to be a pro-level gamer, only to then expose their own fraud by playing the game themselves on a live stream, without knowing how to actually play it. And then pretending to have connection issues when people start noticing.
I have no trouble believing Musk has simply internalized the identity of being the world's richest man and now has a pathological need to maintain that status, no matter what
It can't and it's just not. People use the word "money" for different things. He's not doing it for another bill or a number on some screens- neither are most employees of those companies. That's just projecting values on someone else.
The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
> The things they're trying to accomplish require extreme amounts of capital.
This could really cut either way. Like assume you mean he’s trying to do something good or noble (lmao) but the other obvious way to read this would be that he’s interested in becoming wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh.
It’s just funny how the markets seem to want to value him as some sort of AI visionary when his companies are not even in the top 5 for AI, despite his endless resources.
The way I see it, he's already well past the "wealthy/powerful enough to bend the will of a nation before him and burn the world for a laugh" but still needs to keep working to do his (and companies) stated "good or noble" goals. Why do the fervid anti-Elon people not even bring up his many flaws or mistakes and always concoct weird reality-orthogonal situations?
Ok sure I can be more more direct: how does aligning himself to the republican party and taking a detour to unwind as many social programs as possible in any way help his stated goals, corporate or otherwise?
The only answer is the dude is a self-service piece of shit. He has no principles and is not trying to accomplish anything other that exploit for the sake of exploitation.
That's not the only answer, it's just the one you want. There was a clear coup of the Democratic Party (or just shifting of values) that was jeopardizing both the actual climate change issues and the mission to mars. You can keep trying to find ways to justify the idea that he's just completely selfish, just wants money, or whatever, but you're going to have to do a lot more work.
I don't think you can describe his beliefs using booleans like that: you have to use a numeric scale. It would be be correct to say: Elon would need a hell of a lot of ketamine to believe a colony on mars is a possibility.
It's not exactly like Cookie Clicker. Many people definitely like seeing the number going up, but for most people that get to that point of wealth, the goal is power that the money represents. A human being may struggle to relate to them, but they really are motivated by the sole desire to own and control everything.
Yes you can. Money is a medium of exchange. Stock is a medium of exchange. But they buy the ability to effectuate your will in the world. If you have a vision of the world money, human capital, political power are not the measure of success or the goal. They are the instruments of executing a vision.
Some people aren't motivated by money, they are motivated by reputation, or pathology.
It's a game for him, but so ridiculous. While Tesla was pushing electrification and SpaceX pushing rapid rocket re-use I kind of tolerated Elon's antics, but since he got involved in politics and DOGE I can't bear it anymore.