Quote: (08-20-2018 02:53 AM)Mr. Accuride Wrote:
Quote: (08-20-2018 02:45 AM)Simeon_Strangelight Wrote:
Wow - Accuride dishes out some good info. Never looked into Tesla that closely - just casually observed the products and compared it with even low-tier competition out there. And even that did not make sense to me as I detailed previously.
If Tesla exposure is that bad and he even put his own net worth into the company, then his money I mentioned won't last centuries - the entire project seems to have been a hubris-driven one.
It was hubris. Almost all of his money comes from borrowing money from the bank against his Tesla stock. He thought he could be the next Larry Ellison and just borrow against his stock to avoid paying taxes forever so long as the stock went up, and he probably thought he could con the world forever.
Now he can't even sell his shares on his own to cover his margin loan because the SEC is on his ass and will forbid any such transactions. So he is desperate to do anything to keep the stock price up to prevent the bank from conducting a forced sale. But it's only a matter of time now before the whole thing collapses.
I assumed that he got 1 bio. $ + in government and global warming financing, but it was probably much lower - those US-based solar panel companies usually went belly-up as soon as the founders spent the hundreds and tens of millions of dollars in subsidies.
If he leveraged the stock, then you are either:
1. A genius who has an undervalued product
2. Insane
That guy obviously believed the hype around him not unlike Elizabeth Holmes in that respect:
Just checked - almost hist entire 20 bio. $ fortune is in 3 startups that all don't make money:
Tesla, Solarcity (subsidiary, but also operating at loss) and SpaceX.
Essentially he has zero profits and no certainty that any of them will make money any time.
This is not comparable to even guys like Gates, because Microsoft is making money and he has long since diversified anyway.
Wow - talk about a paper billionaire. And he still buys houses for 30 mio. $ a pop. My guess is that he has at least sidelined a few hundred mio. $ just in case, but you never know....