Had a customer who apparently lives next to where he shoots off his rockets. Old lady wouldn’t stop singing his praises. Telling me how great of inventory he is on and on. I had to hold my tongue but goddamn it was hard.
Of course in the same breath talk how she had to sign a petition to keep him from buying there beach.
She claims he talks to them and once paid for their meal. Fucking nutty old lady. Of course she lives on an island were her windows rattle everytime his rockets go off.
Oh top off she hates Bezo because his rocket blew up and now their property are ruin.
I wanted to ask so badly about why not mad when Space X rockets have blown up too?
In the last 4 years, I haven’t met a single person who has liked Elon Musk
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Part of the problem is all the fucking morons saying that the world economy isn’t a zero-sum proposition. If the economy isn’t zero-sum then we can just give everyone a billion dollars on paper and they could just buy their own houses. Inflation, what is that?
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Have you misread my comment so much that you think I am in favor of billionaires? I absolutely know how much good could come from taxing billionaires on their wealth rather than their “income”. I understand that the world economy isn’t zero-sum and that every billionaire is a parasite that sickens society as a whole. Please re-read my comment and see that I am not a bootlicker.
Correction: capitalism is better than socialism because our taxes pay for one person to have a trillion dollars instead of everyone having health care.
worlds biggest cancer cell continues growing
Literally discovered an infinite money glitch that admins refuse to patch, despite severe balance issues
Canada is capitalist and has free healthcare.
Only by technicality, all the conservatives premiers want to privatise. They’re salivating at the US
It’s slowly getting chipped away though. Don’t get complacent.
Will no one rid us of this turbulent
priestElon Musk?Where’s his money coming from? Is it from his Tesla stock? Somebody said that he moved his company headquarters to Texas mainly because it’s harder for shareholders to sue him for his corrupt deals with the Tesla board if the headquarters are in Texas.
It’s largely theoretical money based on obscene overvaluations of his companies. Thus the title “paper billionaire”
Teslas market cap, for example, was 1.46 trillion dollars in 2024. This is more than the valuation of the next thirty five largest automakers combined. One could possibly argue a slight increase in valuation based on the IP held and the future moving towards battery powered cars (and basically everything) but to argue that this makes them more valuable than Toyota, GM, Honda, ford, Hyundai, Kia, etc all combined? Asinine.
Basically the stock exploded years ago on hype that Tesla would be a pioneer in many key domains: battery storage, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, AI, etc and blew up based on the hype that in 10 years time at least some of that would come to fruition and result in a company with insane revenues. The future is here now though and we see the reality: significant competition in all those areas that almost always outshines teslas offerings. There are better players in AI and autonomous driving (Waymo simply works better and a number of Chinese options like Baidu are the same). There are better electric cars that are better built and more affordable (the Hyundai ioniq is a better bang for buck in America, BYD destroys Tesla across the spectrum from cheap to insane hyper car prices). Tesla does have an edge in battery technology in capacity but in manufacturing both China and Korea destroy them, and China is quickly catching up in terms of capacity (and leads exponentially in patents). On top of this, declining sales year after year now that musk is toxic and people realize teslas are built like shit
This is why the government steps in to protect tesla. If BYD was available domestically Tesla would eat shit assuming BYD priced aggressively. The BYD seal is beaten by the model 3 in key factors like range (quite a bit) and efficiency (barely) but overall has a significantly higher build quality, more amenities, and a better warranty. Tesla wins on the supercharger but BYD has actually implemented battery exchange stations in China, which Tesla had looked at much earlier on, and are significantly faster than charging stations. Pricing is the key metric and a weird one: in Europe the seal is actually a bit more than the model 3 (~6k euro more) but in Asia it is anywhere from 20-50% less than the model 3 depending on trim level (though the 50% comes with worsening specs).
But Teslas protectionism comes from idiotic institutional investors and its listing in the s&p 500. They know it’s grossly overvalued, yet they hold almost 50% of available shares. If you have a 401k, pension, or an index fund you almost certainly have exposure to Tesla stock. So the valuation is propped up because if comes crashing down suddenly everyone’s retirement is notably impacted and exposes the piss poor state of the nationalized pension.
This is repeating several times over as well. With musk specifically the upcoming spacex listing is already widely regarded as grossly overvalued and it hasn’t even occurred yet. OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the same story. Even with existing stocks: Microsoft, palantir, nvidia, etc, the same story has played out over and over
Fake billionaires that will inevitably crash the entire economy in a way that hasn’t been seen in a century because of their hubris. They bank on China never catching up (even though they’re making strides every day) and even if China does catch up having the government bar them from entering the market. But this only works as long as the captive audience of the us population has money to pour into their valuations; as the world shifts away from US products and into Chinese ones the squeeze will only get worse and eventually it will pop
he combined 3 of his companies into spaceX, to obfuscate the other 2.
“Man”
Nope that’s a man. We don’t get to not count him just because he sucks.
It’s important to note that even with all that money he still is far less happy than the average American. Imagine having so much wealth, not knowing what to do with it, having spent it on a botched penis enlargement and now no amount of money can fix even that.
Not to mention that by now the list of failures and broken promises is getting very long: hyperloops to prevent investment into rail, colonies on mars to avoid deal with all the shit he’s help wrong on earth, full self driving if you don’t mention that full doesn’t mean full and the cemeteries full of people who have died believing it did mean that, and how could I forget
Lying about Epstein and rigging the presidential election so a childfucker can destroy the country you weren’t even born in and barely pay any taxes for.
It makes it a little better. I appreciate the analysis. It’s always good to get in something like “This too, shall pass.”
There was a 2010 study showing that money was correlated with happiness up to about $75k, then plateaued. The expectation was that once you could afford your needs and didn’t have to worry about the basics, the rest of happiness would come from the life you built.
Then a few years ago, all the headlines were screaming that it was debunked and money did in fact buy happiness. However, in true news media form, they screeched about the wrong thing - there was still a plateau, but it occurred past 100k. This isn’t really surprising - the cost of living certainly rose in the 13 years between the two studies. Inflation went nuts in the COVID era, and we definitely never deflated back.
But it does suggest how truly miserable some billionaires must be inside when they can’t find happiness with 10,000x more money than the average person’s threshold to find their joy.
Maybe he could try ending world hunger. Maybe that would make him happy. It would make other people happy at least
How is solving world hunger going to make his penis normal again?
I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him.
It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster. Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.
That’s what I keep saying about Taylor Swift, but people just tell me that I’m a crotchety old man.
There are degrees of evil. Just as some cancerous cells can be benign, there also can be less harmful billionaires.
It’s important to concentrate on the ones that are an existential threat to humanity first and foremost so we don’t lose the world pointlessly chasing after the harmless lumps.
I agree with you. But if that’s where we are, I feel that statements like:
…you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster…
Are unhelpful at best and actively alienating to potential allies at worst.
Even the most benign is unlikely to be an ally. When push comes to shove, they’ll choose their money over humanity.
I work with a Swift fan. They’ll cut you if you talk smack, lol. I don’t get her appeal but the observation of her fans is real.
A healthy society does not have billionares, indeed.
at least not ones that have a “good head on thier shoulders”
I don’t care at all about how they acquired their wealth.
Its just not in anyone’s best interest to have so much wealth horded and controlled by one person.
He’s using that money to influence social norms and political outcomes. It means he’s pretty much the unelected supreme leader of the terran empire.
Having power and wealth destroys empathy for less powerful people on a physiological level. That allows them to exploit people harder to get more wealth and power.
Taxing they wealth away doesn’t work. Maybe just put people in jail for every year they have x amount of dollar. You can be free or wealthy, not both.
Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It’s not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don’t think about them at all.
E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.
The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.
The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at “regression to the mean”. I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, “average” people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.
Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.
Your system has a flaw from my perspective. It ignores the effect of wealth on capability, especially in youth. People who are already less “exceptional” - say, mentally challenged - would stay poor through factors outside of their control. On the other side, people who are “exceptional” are most commonly so because of the benefits wealth brings, so the way i understand your system, it will cement the status quo - the rich stay rich because of virtue of being rich, the poor and uneducated stay poor because they are poor and unremarkable.
It’s not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.
If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that’s fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that’s fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won’t get the run away effect that happens currently.
A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.
It’s also worth noting that I’m also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.
For him, giving someone enough money to become a multi millionaire on the spot takes as much money relatively as handing some change to a beggar does for me for me. He could hand out $100,000,000 every single day (!!!) and even if he doesn’t gain wealth in any other way, it’d take him almost 22 years to run out of money. Or he could pay 400,000 people $100,000 a year to just go around and tell everyone how great he and everything he does is and the money would last 20 years.
Wealth like that is a serious threat to society, probably even the most serious threat.
I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him
No doubt about it.
It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster
Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.
As for a solution…
Have you considered that maybe he just works 1-10 billion times harder than the rest of us, and therefore earned that money fair and square?
/s
Oh, right, sorry, I completely forgot that this guy has amazing tech-genius superpowers and works as hard all by himself as millions uppon millions of us pathetically useless plebs put together…
Also /s, of course :)
that’s true but capitalism is better than socialism because capitalism is real, socialism is a “what am i thinking of today” fantasy where all your protest dreams come true
unicorns are rad
Get him!
Luigi was right.
Wealth hoarding is a psychological illness and shouldn’t be allowed in society
i just wish we had some kind of functional safety net for retirement such that individuals weren’t forced to hoard wealth out of fear like they are now.
Hoarding wealth with good reason is fine but someone like Musk isn’t doing it out of fear. He has more money than he can possibly use and could give away like 90% and still be safe. What even motivates him? It’s pure selfishness
It’s a mix of sciopathy and narcissism–sadly two traits most common among leaders.
He could give away 99% and have more than 99% of the population
So like, both my wife and I grew up washing and reusing tinfoil. We were never so poor we actually needed to tighten the belt that much until we had been together a while, but like I still catch myself doing it. Some generational traumas take really weird forms. The most generous interpretation of space Karen’s actions I can think up is that he’s acting out over traumas he was taught (rather than experienced firsthand).
Excessive wealth is 100% an unstudied mental health issue
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could buy every homeless person in the US a $990,000 house.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could eliminate world hunger for 24 years.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, We could buy every NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL team. We’d have enough money left over to also buy the top 20 European Soccer teams.
If we killed Elon Musk and took all of his assets, we could fund NASA at its current budget for 40 years.
These are true facts, however it’s also true that we already have a number of unsold homes on the market greater than we have number of homeless people. We already make enough food to feed everyone. We just choose to let people sleep hungry on the streets. That’s what our democracy has voted for.
So what does musk’s billions and trillions matter? He could have two trillion tomorrow, and we’d still have enough money as a country to take care of everyone, and we would count up the votes that say not to.
These are just examples meant to give context on how much money he has.
You couldn’t. You would have to sell stock that is at 350p/e ratio. The second you kill him the stocks would lose 800 trillion overnight and you couldn’t realize 90% of that.
Nah. Do what rich people actually do, take a loan out against the stock holdings.
But that wouldn’t work when the stocks lose all the value
Huh, I had no idea that bootlickers were allowed to post here, but here you are, showing your ass to the world.
That guy’s post history is so chock-full of awful bootlicker takes that it’s indistinguishable from an astroturf bot.
And yet no one here can actually figure out how to tax billionaires.
So smart.
The first part of their little equation might work, the second part though…
You had me a we could kill musk.
Alternatively if we just took all his assets and didn’t kill him we could put Elon Musk to work in an emerald mine in South Africa and get some added value.
Now that’s a capitalism!
I feel like that wouldn’t be a net gain. How does science feel about his fresh juicy organs?
Your plan is too bloodthirsty.
We just need the assets.
I don’t need the assets I require justice.
ju
sticeJuice!!
The execution part is a warning to others.
Yeah im against bloodshed generally as a rule but I bet the altruism would skyrocket.
Put this into a trolley problem and see the results.
When that one healthcare CEO got shot the health insurance companies paid out on their promises for like a solid week. How long do you think on Musk would drive “altruism”?
I mean, there are ~3,500 billionaires in the world.
So, to drive altruism we need to kill one per week, so that’ll last us some 67 years. Longer if we also qualify everybody over, idk, like a hundred million? Sounds like a glorious epoch of love, compassion and ritual sacrifice.
I would argue that the cult of wealth doesn’t work like that. Musk needs to die to fully separate from his assets.
Sounds to me we should kill this Elon Musk character.
