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non_radical_centrist  1yr ago (astralcodexten.com)   2453 thread views

Book Review: Elon Musk[Scott Alexander]

astralcodexten.com

Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.

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He’s got too much money. This seems more like a gift to society.

I could imagine that becoming true, if he'd paid for Twitter with all his own money. But IIRC it was something like half his own money, leveraged with several billion dollars of other equity financing plus at least ten billion dollars of debt, under a plan which was set into motion in early 2022 (Fed interest rate and investment environment: "pay us back when you get around to it, borrow some more if you need it"), which he wanted to back out of when the environment changed over the year ("we have how much inflation now? okay, what to do..."), and which now has to be followed through in the current economy ("pay us back before Tuesday so we don't have to break any kneecaps"). A lot of the shakeup at Twitter was because they were legitimately bleeding money unnecessarily, but a lot of it is probably because he was expecting to have decades to get it far into the black, not years. If he has to choose between a public forum for the free exchange of conflicting ideas versus just something he can quickly monetize, he's got billions of reasons to go with "monetize".

He’s worth 250-300 billion depending on the day. He could eat his trading loss and be fine.

You can't eat market cap, especially not of companies where the stock price is based heavily on public confidence in predicted growth. If he tried to sell so heavily, specifically to bail out another of his companies failing, expect most of that price to evaporate.

He'd still be fine, sure, a decabillionaire instead of a centibillionaire [edit: hectobillionaire] at worst, but it's not what he thought he was signing up for.

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