I mean, arguably, most of the valuation of his companies are dependent almost entirely on his presence on social media -- Twitter being an essential piece of that.
I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6.
Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks.
Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM.
Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself!
This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple:
1. Be Elon Musk
2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter
3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture;
4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible;
5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture.
6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)!
If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.
All essential parts, but I guess the really key part that makes this okay is #4 - 'make the venture possible'.
I don't buy in at those PEs, but I clearly should have as the track record has shown has shown. The future remains uncertain, his goals are still incredible to the point of being uncredible, and his delivery on those goals has been real and incredible. What a conundrum, no wonder people are talking about it so much. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the meantime we have reusable space rockets and actual progress on a process of transformation away from ICEs.
On the one hand, my god what they are doing at SpaceX, Starlink, (and even some parts of) Tesla are incredible! And I suppose without Musk playing carnival barker, these things aren't possible.
On the other hand... the approach is so slimy and really should not be celebrated the way it is.
It's a similar feeling with Martin Shkreli. He did some fraud, but he also gave all the money back to investors and started the ongoing conversation about Rx pricing.
I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6.
Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks.
Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM.
Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself!
This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple:
1. Be Elon Musk
2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter
3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture;
4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible;
5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture.
6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)!
If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.