Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Crazy_Ivan80]

it's pretty disgusting.

The trillion dollars or the thousand baby mommas? 

 

The trillion more than the mommies as that isn't particularly unique in human history. But it's still pretty odd.

[Valmy]

Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire with SpaceX's IPO

So... now he can leave of his children a billion dollars?

And...why? For making a mediocre car company, a reasonably profitable satellite company, and a bunch of money losing disasters? How far can you get in this country just on bullshit? Pretty fucking far I guess.

It causes me to lose faith in our entire system.

[Valmy]

The IPO raised $75 billion. The trillion + is an implied valuation based on the public per share trading price of the available public shares.  That doesn't mean there is a ready and willing buyer out there prepared to pay a trillion plus for Elon's shares.

Musk tried to downplay the trillion dollars yesterday by saying that only .1% of his wealth is in cash... which is a billion dollars in cash.  He's down in the struggle like the rest of us.

"You never give me your money
Your net worth is only funny paper"

But it is not even paper these days. Funny spreadsheets.

But he basically has infinite money as he can borrow any amount he wants using his paper wealth, but that hasn't really changed since he only had 100 billion.

[HVC]

You'll never have a mars colony with that attitude!


Actually, is he still peddling that, or has he moved on to AI butlers?

[Valmy]

I just want to point out the the right wing nuts were convinced that George Soros was able to control the world with his vast wealth of only 15 billion dollars. According to them Elon Musk could rule 60 earths.

[The Minsky Moment]

Musk tried to downplay the trillion dollars yesterday by saying that only .1% of his wealth is in cash... which is a billion dollars in cash.  He's down in the struggle like the rest of us.

I do have sympathy for his plight.  Sure he probably can cobble together enough cash to build the world's largest supersuperyacht or a controlling stake in most S&P 500 companies.  But he probably can't buy Argentina without financing.  He's doing OK but he's still got a while to catch up to Lex Luthor.

[Josquius]

It is true to an extent. He's not actually a trillionaire. He's just a trillionaire in terms of how much his fanboys and those relying on them believe he is.
Isn't it the thing that wealth for these mega rich people is more accurately measured in terms of how much they can borrow rather than how much their assets are technically worth?

[Syt]

How much of the IPO valuation was down to pie in the sky dream visions that Musk is promising?

[HVC]

Can the answer be more than 100%

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I just want to point out the the right wing nuts were convinced that George Soros was able to control the world with his vast wealth of only 15 billion dollars. According to them Elon Musk could rule 60 earths.

That's actually a good one to remember if some one starts yapping about soros again

[Savonarola]

"You never give me your money
Your net worth is only funny paper"

But it is not even paper these days. Funny spreadsheets.

But he basically has infinite money as he can borrow any amount he wants using his paper wealth, but that hasn't really changed since he only had 100 billion.

Le crédit illimité, just like the Count of Monte Cristo.  Be careful bankers!

[garbon]

Can the answer be more than 100%

Isn't it just people know it will make money and they buy in planning to cash out before they are the one left holding the bag?

[Savonarola]

Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire with SpaceX's IPO

So... now he can leave of his children a billion dollars?

And...why? For making a mediocre car company, a reasonably profitable satellite company, and a bunch of money losing disasters? How far can you get in this country just on bullshit? Pretty fucking far I guess.

It causes me to lose faith in our entire system.

The BBC has an article breaking down his wealth in charts.  The vast majority of his wealth (or paper wealth if you want) is from SpaceX.  It's also remarkable how quickly his wealth has grown from $23 Billion at the beginning of 2020 to $1 Trillion yesterday.

[The Minsky Moment]

Looking at it seriously, Elon has done a very good job of leveraging ownership of a decidedly second tier LLM model, by pivoting into providing computing capacity to first tier models.

If you assume de-duplicative AI revenue of $150 billion for 2026 that quadruples each year, you hit $30 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.  On that assumption, Elon being worth a trillion seems within reason. 

But that analysis just seems to highlight the dubiousness of assuming that level of continuous revenue growth.  Right now xAI is running its data centers using masses of improvised temporary gas turbines.  The company is pell-mell trying to rush through permitting and construction of larger and more permanent generation capacity, but the prospectus acknowledges (while burying in a mass of text) the limitations:

We currently rely significantly on natural gas and gas turbine technology to power our data center operations. As such, our ability to scale our infrastructure depends in part on our continued access to natural gas supply at economically feasible prices, the availability of gas turbines and related equipment, and the maintenance of a regulatory environment that permits and supports the use of natural gas for large-scale power generation. In addition, water scarcity, drought conditions, competition for local water resources, or regulatory restrictions on water use could limit our ability to obtain sufficient water for cooling, constrain data center cooling capacity, increase our costs, delay or limit expansion of our data center infrastructure, or require us to implement alternative cooling technologies that may be more costly or less available

Put simply, even if you assume (heroically) AI data center usage can double energy efficiency each year and even if you assume (heroically) that revenue/AI output stays the same, you still need to double energy capacity each year to quad AI revenue.  And that's not going to happen.  Electrical generation and water availability are hard constraints on this exponential growth model.

[Tamas]

How much of the IPO valuation was down to pie in the sky dream visions that Musk is promising?

Iirc about 90% of the valuation comes from exorbitant estimates on future AI revenue. So people are buying into Grok.