The coming fall of Elon Musk isn’t showing up in the Forbes 400 yet. Democratic momentum isn’t showing up in the polls yet, either.
But it’s coming. This dude is just too weird.
Musk’s fortune is built on Tesla. The Cybertruck was Tesla’s Edsel. Sales of EVs are soaring, but those at Tesla are rolling over. Battery sales won’t compensate. Pumping the stock is like doing drugs. Each pump does less good. If you’re still in it, sell.
While Musk holds 13% of Tesla, and his planned stock payoff would give him much more, it’s unclear how much of that is free and clear. He did have to put up stock as collateral to buy Twitter, whose value is falling toward zero. Despite a shareholder vote approving his mass theft of Tesla equity, the Delaware Chancery Court can still nix it. In any case when Twitter becomes worthless, Tesla stock is going to its bondholders.
Then there’s xAI, which hijacked Tesla’s Nvidia servers (on Musk’s orders) for work on the Large Language Model (LLMs) called Grok. As I’ve noted before, LLMs are like the metaverse. They can’t deal with hallucinations. They’re not getting better as they get larger. A new approach is necessary, based on new algorithms, things that can’t be rushed and that can’t be bought like servers can. What Neuralink is doing is just plain ookie. We seem to have memory holed how the Boring Hyperloop was a scam.
SpaceX is also far from trouble free. It turns out that getting into space, and staying there, is harder than even Allen Steele imagined. At some point investors are going to recognize this.
Do I Have to Go Into Politics?
Musk has destroyed his public reputation by coming out as a fascist, racist, and sexist bastard. He’s now busy antagonizing Europeans as he already has Americans. Where are his buyers going to come from? Certainly not China.
When I compared Musk to Henry Ford almost 3 years ago I had no idea how prescient I was. You tell your advertisers to go away and then sue them when they do? This is three steps beyond crazy.
As a rule, it’s wrong for CEOs to get involved in politics. You wait for the politicians to call upon you, then you serve them. You stay in the background as much as possible. You don’t put a corporate reputation on the line for your personal preferences. Especially when they’re extremist.
Elon Musk thinks the normal laws of political and business gravity don’t apply to him because he’s so rich. How very Trumpian of him.
The fact is they do.
The fall, when it comes, will be sudden. The November election may be as important to Musk as it is to Trump. And they’re both going down.
