SpaceX, from a financial standpoint, is just an elaborate Ponzi scheme for Musk, who treats all of his companies as his private fiefdom and personal piggy bank. In reality, none of them are genuinely profitable, and depend on government subsidies and capital investments to survive. The goal is to just build a barely viable business and then scam people with bullshit promises. Any real cash flow is immediately converted into cash for his personal use. Though from time to time, he uses that cash prop up another of his ventures. Very likely, all of this will come crashing down at some point, and it will be revealed that his companies are nothing like what they seem.
I would argue that SpaceX is now to important to NASA, and therefore the US government, to be allowed to fail. It may not be under Elon’s control, it may not be called SpaceX, but it will continue to exist.
Then it would be another Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.
I feel like Twitter (I will always deadname it) was the beginning of the end for him. Unfortunately, things like this can take years or decades to resolve, but whereas 5 years ago he had the midas touch and could do no wrong now there seems to be nothing but a stream of negative news about him.
Time will tell
The “midas touch” is basically just securities fraud. Something he can’t get away with forever.
In what sense? Lying about the actual capabilities of the business? Full autonomous drive next year and Mars at 2022?
All of those statements existed to either drum up investment money or get people to buy non-existent products. So those things are examples of securities fraud too.
beginning of the end for him.
Naw, imho it was the Thai kiddy-submarine incident. He seemed at least semi-plausibly not horrible up until then; but then firmly established himself as just another piece of shit billionaire when he couldn’t handle some diver stealing the spotlight from him.
At that point he’d outed himself as an asshole to the general public, but he still got big results with SpaceX and Tesla. That incident could have been lost to time and a legacy of undeniable successes.
Hyperloop is where things went cuckoo-bananas business-wise IMO. The delays and broken promises at Tesla were weird, but anyone who’d heard of subways could tell the whole hyperloop thing was doomed to fail, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone who read tech headlines that he wasn’t just any asshole, but a clueless asshole.
They’ve literally made reusable boosters and have multiple operations to deploy satellites and go to the space station (not to mention starlink ) . While I’m not a Musk fan, those achievements are irrefutable. SpaceX may or may not be making money, but it’s a far cry from a ponzi scheme. It’s why so many are trying to copy their technological achievements.
It is a Ponzi scheme from a financial sense. In the end, it’s just a launch provider. It’s not suddenly going to become the next Apple in terms of market value. But it is valued like that, and they were able to raise billions of dollars by lying about its potential business ventures.
So, while Elon Musk is an asshole, and these terms are awful, there is more to it:
They involve stock awards, which are given by the company to the employee. They can either be options (which give you a choice to buy at a certain price, and presumably you wouldn’t do that unless you can sell for higher price), or outright stock grants . They are given as part of compensation, and vest on a set timetable. (So, if someone was given 1000 shares, the employee would still see 1000 shares in some account, but they may only be able to access 100 of them every six months). So, this whole discussion is about shares the company gave to the employees in the first place.
Then, the other wrinkle is that SpaceX is a private company. That means that employees can’t just go sell their shares on the open market. So SpaceX graciously offers to buy back these private shares at whatever they think they are worth at the time. While this sounds fishy, the only other real alternative is for the employees to hold on to the shares and sell them if they go public…
… However, simply receiving the shares when they vest is a taxable event. So if SpaceX didn’t offer some way for mere mortals to turn their shares to cash, then in effect they would be saddling them with an enormous tax burden and no way to raise the cash to pay it. So they have to do it this way.
Do they really need to confiscate an employees shares if they hurt Elon’s fee-fees? Of course not. But that’s the only dumb bit here. The rest is pretty standard for a private company who attracts workers with stock benefits.
I have read that the actuality includes a loophole you didn’t speak of:
Once someoen owns shares, they can privately-sell them, or give them away, or will them to someone…
Once enough people have done this, the “private” company becomes actually publically-traded, though not on any exchange…
…creating some legal difficulties, re regulations.
From that bit, which I never would have known to even consider ( some article I read, some years ago ), then it looks like people can sell their shares to another private-individual.
Maybe some jurisdictions prohibit that.
I don’t know, I’m just identifying an angle people apparently haven’t commonly considered.
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I mean… isn’t that also a legal thing?
If you know insider information that’s not public (A company misbehaved being one of them) you are not supposed to trade stock to financially gain from it.
Now that’s what you’re supposed to do… Politicians have proven that’s rules just for peasants, and most stock traders heavily benefit from this type of information, and unless your Martha Stewart for some reason, you get away with it… But my point is legally, if you know they misbehaved, that’s immediately insider information?
Edit: I misunderstood the headling/rule. Sorry. Quite a shit thing that granted stock can be revoked, especially after you pay taxes. I wonder how legal it is, because if they can revoke it, is it actually yours and thus do you have to pay taxes on it?
It’s if SpaceX decides that the employee misbehaved, not the company that misbehaved, that allows them to ban that employee from selling private stocks. Also if you leave the company for any reason you lose out on 6 months of them or if you are fired they will buy back all of your stocks at $0, all the while you are paying taxes on your stocks. So the employees could possibly end up losing money from taxes on something they never actually got because the company said so.
Oops I misunderstood the direction. (I think it was if the employee deems they misbehaved. (I assumed “It” was the employee, not SpaceX. More obvious in hindsight I guess, my bad.)
