It’s not like you can buy too much of an earning stock. I’m pretty sure elasticity approaches zero quickly if someone is dumping a well-known, profitable company. It might induce some paranoia, but big investors don’t get to where they are by panicking often.

By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.

Depends. Amazon doesn’t even have one; tech stocks are often driven by future potential. I wouldn’t buy a car from them though.

Nobody actually beats the market. I’m pretty sure the insanity was there all along; he just got lucky several times in a row.

If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse

Why? If the fundamentals are there, there should be a hard floor on stock prices. It would take a while for the market to absorb that much Twitter and SpaceX, but I see no reason it’s impossible. Actually, I bet Twitter’s (off-book) cap would go up if Musk was leaving.

If you’re trying to defend capitalism (whatever that means to you), keep in mind that you’re basically suggesting stocks have no actual, intrinsic value here.

Billionaires don’t actually do this, though, because liquid cash doesn’t earn.

Right now, if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash, then distribute it evenly among all of the employees at all of his companies, he could give each of his 146,000 employees $1.6M.

Fun fact that this doesn’t work for every billionaire. Tech companies don’t employ very many people compared to their revenue.

If you go by by profits returned to owners as opposed to sale value it’s even more stark. Amazon still hasn’t paid out anything; it’s all been plowed straight back into expansion.

I don’t necessarily think that billionaires should be abolished,

To piss off the remaining side of the political spectrum: Why not?

Investment-wise, luck. If you had 100 billion and put it all on one risky stock, you too could fail upwards, around half the time.

Public persona-wise, he’s basically a pro media villain. He’s invited to comment and interview on things because it will always get clicks, even if they’re hate clicks.

Past returns are no guarantee of future success. How many damn times do financial people have to say this?

Given that they’ve implicitly sampled only the most successful past performers to start with, I’m going to say this is a rare case where the gambler’s fallacy works. More likely than not, his future returns will be lower.

Exactly. COBOL still gets used in legacy stuff, but at this point you’d have to be either insane or a historical re-enactor to build something new in it.

I’ve used C more than anything else, for reference.

If you want to take crazy (or mild) risks that’s your prerogative, but skydiving is probably still cheaper than this, and has nice scenery instead of tasteless white goo.

I mean, of course it wouldn’t be fair to expect everyone to be migrated over yet, but at some point it’s going to be an obsolete language. Memory unsafety is a pretty nasty quirk; just one that was previously unavoidable, as far as I know.

That America starts wars for self interest is easier to defend, but honestly I’m not convinced of that, either. There was always a lot of that neocon ideology that democracy (or just capitalism) can be spread by force, and I see no reason to expect it’s just a facade. It would be hard to prove that either way, though, because once you’re an ideological actor your ideology losing means your national influence losing as well.

More relevant to the original topic, it’s fair to say that America doesn’t always start a war that would be in it’s national interest, at least. In the 90’s, they could have gone on an expansionist spree pretty easily, but they did triumphalism instead, and just kind of rested on their laurels until 9/11 (with the possible exception of Bosnia).

Y’know, there’s all these “[platform] used for [horrible deed]” headlines. It’s always weird to me, because yeah, people use Facebook for everything. I bet they wore cloths from Walmart while they did it, too! The horror!

Sadly necessary disclaimer that I don’t like social media monopolies.

You really should have put a /s on OP then, and maybe explained your actual point beneath.

“Fun” fact, before we routinely spayed and neutered animals, putting a sack of kittens or puppies in a pond was a normal chore.

It was either that, or fight starving street dogs.

Yeah, I never really felt pressured to drink by people my age. Occasionally I’ll be hanging out with older people and they’ll act like I’m lame for turning it down. That’s okay, before they know it it’ll all be prune juice, anyway.

Yes, I’ve heard the same. It’s a flavourless, hazardous form of conspicuous consumption. It’s one of those things where if someone dies from it, it’s really hard to feel sad for them.

It’s driving the reduction in prices in the manufacturing of so many things, EVs especially.

Really? Do you have a specific example of that? I would have thought that it’s one of those physical work things where either old school robots are already established, or cheap factory workers are still king.

AI causing deflation is an interesting thought. I don’t really feel confident commenting on macroeconomics except for the basics, though.

Playground zone signs where I live often read “slow children playing”. It’s supposed to be “slow (children playing)” but I always get a kick out of reading it as “(slow children) playing”.

At least OP knows it, I guess.

Sure, and that accounts for the first decade, however questionably.

Nah Americans don’t go to war over anything but self interest. That might be on the right side of history but there must be a gain to be made.

Disagree. There was nothing to gain in Afghanistan, especially during the second half after Bin Laden went down. It was an ideological war. That’s a major reason why they didn’t make more progress, actually; they could barely leave their own bases for fear of taking domestically unpopular losses.

However… wars start over perceived future weakness in comparison. If <insert country> thinks war with <insert adversary> is inevitable, and adversary will grow stronger over time, the best moment for war is… Now… or at some close future date. If the country thinks their adversary will grow comparatively weaker over time, war waits.

Neglecting domestic politics, yes. Not neglecting domestic politics, Americans are not psychologically ready for total war - they don’t even understand what that means - and would need to be ideologically massaged into thinking military world domination is cool again. Right now, there’s a powerful faction that wants to go back to straight-up isolationism, and the rest of the American political mainstream is for a rough continuation of the status quo, with the Western agenda being advanced through economic policies and (military or civilian) aid.

War has very high costs. The US knows what most of their costs are… since they have been at war for most of the last 100 years. But a first strike on china makes no sense… not militarily Nor economically. They need their allies in the fight… and that will not “just” happen.

Russia just found out the hard way how long a 600 whoops… 300 billion warchest lasts… or does not last. We’re down to ~50 billion now.

China however has no clue what the costs will be… just prognoses and projections.

That could be, although it’s obviously not public. Conquest still happens, though, because people want to build an empire, for money, ideology or just a place in history.

Это означает ли ты Русский? Всегда интересный слушаю людеи из других стран.