To put this in perspective, they lost an average of $2B per month in value. According to HUD, there were about 582,000 homeless people in the US last year. $2B per month is enough to house all of them nearly 4 times over if you assume $1k per month in housing expenses.
What a monumental waste of resources that could have made a difference. Musk just sucks
It’s not real money, though. It’s all just speculative value based on estimates of future revenue.
The real barrier to ending homelessness is the large number of real estate vacancies that are held open to prop up the price of the housing market. Twitter’s lost value has nothing to do with that.
But the 44B was payed, so they do/did exist. Now he could have just NOT bought twitter and spent half of this money on the poor et voilà no more homeless for at least 4 years.
According to a Reuters calculation, Musk had about $20 billion cash after selling part of his stake in Tesla through multiple transactions in November and December last year and April and August.
My mistake. I mistakenly thought he’d simply swapped the Tesla stock at face value, rather than cashing it out via a brokerage.
There is no “real” money. It’s all speculative based on what value people assign to it. For example, you may have noticed that the US dollar has become worth significantly less in recent years. Shares and fiat currency just have different volatility.
The US dollar has outpaced nearly every other global currency. Five years ago you’d get 100 yen to the dollar. Now you get 150.
But cartelization of the supply chain means we don’t get to see the benefits of low import prices. The difference all goes to business profit, while real increases in material and labor get passed on to the consumer.
Netflix buys anime for pennies on the dollar and sells it back at escalating rates. They spend less and we pay more.
The US dollar was just an example so this discussion is tangential to the point I was trying to make. That said, your argument does not support an increasing value of the dollar - it only says it has increased in value relative to other currencies. But I’m sure you know that inflation has been staggeringly high which means you get less food on the table for a dollar, and salaries have not been keeping up.
Or put in other words, if you were to invest in US dollars instead of shares then you would have seen the value of your portfolio going down, in terms of what it can get you at Costco.
all the people that imagine their home prices are as high as they are, will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. the empty house market is crazy, just look on a “social home sharing site”. houses are hotels for the few.
As someone who sees my property tax bill jump 10% / year, I have no interest in rising real estate prices. I’m not selling any time soon and I use my house to live in rather than to invest.
Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter and bring it into private ownership. I’m saying had he just left well enough alone, he could have used that money for other purposes
Your point on adding more supply to the real estate market to prop up prices is the opposite of Econ 101 - more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices. Mental health is a much larger barrier to receiving help for the homeless.
I used to volunteer weekly with homeless and housing insecure people in Philadelphia and untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.
Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society. Anyway, my point was simply to illustrate what a magnificent waste of resources it was to buy Twitter.
He raised $20B by using his own (highly inflated) Tesla stock as collateral. So this wasn’t new money, it was a swap. He covered the balance with Twitter’s own equity as collateral (which is a big reason why he’s been so cavalier with its devaluation). This new money was effectively just to keep a business in the red from running out of operating income.
more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices.
Not under a cartel. And real estate markets are increasingly cartelized, with large vacancies kept off the market clearing rate in order to prop up the book value of the rest of the market.
untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.
Which creates a vicious cycle, sure. But the solution is to reclaim vacant real estate from speculators and use it as real housing.
Building more investment properties and vacant luxury units to increase book value of real estate does nothing to reduce homelessness.
Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society.
All services that are best delivered to housed populations. What’s more, they’re services with a universal application. You don’t just need to be homeless to benefit from professional counseling, education, and public health care.
But, again, sky high real estate costs make these services prohibitively expensive to expand into neighborhoods.
Delivering these services at cost requires local governments to reclaim vacant real estate kept open at above market clearance rates and turning it over to public sector service providers.
Works hard to forward his companies like X which lost billions in value cos of his stupidity? Where’s his Hyperloop? I wouldn’t buy a Tesla if it were the only car in existence. I’m even tired of his name.
consider where the stock was trading at the year before he bought it. he got a discount, basically. a lot of people who had been holding shares lost money to the richest guy on earth. and then he threw the money away burning down Twitter.
That’s what X is valuing itself at, not what it’s worth. We’ll get a better sense of what it’s worth when it goes back on the market or goes bankrupt, whichever happens first. Right now I have a hard time imagining anyone would pay that much for it. For context Snapchat, which has had a lot more success with advertising lately, is worth about $16 billion.
Remember bidders that Twitter…ahem…X?.. X… Okay…X… Still has employees…really?…employees that are clearly loyal and easily controllable, as well as a nominal amount of IT equipment.
Its funny how this headline keeps coming up every couple of weeks with a smaller number each time.
I dont know how they generate these evaluations, and honestly I dont even trust they are accurate. Or care, my life is fully uneffected by the success or failure of that site.
But it is always funny to read the new nearly identical headline with the number shifted down by 1-4 billion from last time.
Fidelity does this because they invested in Twitter alongside Musk, and as a bank they are required by law to disclose the current value of their assets. They come up with a value of their stake, then the rest of us divide that by the percentage Fidelity owns to get the value of the company.
There’s a lot of drama around him, and some because of his own stupidity and pot stirring, but maybe the world could do with more like him.
Though he may not be self-made in the sense of lifting himself out of poverty into success. He does work pretty damn hard to forward his companies and the goals he sets, so that’s admirable.
Surely a big reason he gets so much flak is because he enjoys being in the public eye, unlike Bezos, for example.
Public figures like Musk draw an annoying and undeserved amout of attention, though. I mean there’s so much else happening in the world more worthy of our time, but that doesn’t generate ad-revenue now does it?
I’ve been with a very frugal start-up for many years and it’s amazing what a small team can get done compared to larger companies.
I think the fact that Twitter is able to run with so much fewer staff probably points to how bloated they were.
I think Twitter’s stock price was a huge bubble waiting to burst anyway.
Maybe things will turn around if we give X some time. I’m against platforms like what Musk is building with X, I don’t like their stickiness and the fact that the walls between functions are blurred and data can consequently flow between them. They become monopolies; they begin to regulate and discriminate against their users however they see fit and ultimately leave you with little real choice.
He was a white kid in South Africa. Even if he was dirt poor and born into a broken home, in he was still further ahead than most of the country. Born at least on first or second base.
He had an upbringing of privilege. Mental and physical healthcare, plenty of food, fancy trips and parties, tutors and tuition, as much money as he wanted to start businesses; dude never wanted for anything. Elon being self made is an absolute lie.
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