This is why using Tesla stock to source cash all the time gets hairy. If Tesla shares fall below a certain level, the banks can call in those personal loans — leaving Musk on the hook. And the quickest way for Tesla’s stock to drop off a cliff is for investors to get wind of a big Musk sale. And of course, he needs to make sure that he still holds on to all the Tesla stock he’s pledged as collateral to the banks. Unfortunately, though, the easiest way for Musk to fill the gaping hole in Twitter’s balance sheet is to sell Tesla shares. You see how this could be a problem.

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Every single one of the companies he touches would benefit substantially if he’d just fucking stop and shut the fuck up.

      Super genius clown truck isn’t going to though.

    • Cheems@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I unfortunately get the feeling that we’ll be hearing from him for the rest of his life

    • Prunebutt@feddit.de
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      7 months ago
      1. You wish tha he went away.
      2. Even if he does: People like Musk will never go away under capitalism. The only difference is that Musk wants to be liked by the plebs.
  • jaybone@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Sadly, he would capitalize on his name alone to somehow make a comeback. Might start as some political pundit or “business expert” on Fox News or something.

    • mrbubblesort@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      A comeback to where though? That might put him solidly in the millionaire category, but he’d never reach 2018/19 billionaire heights again.

      • Art35ian@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        He’s never not going to be a billionaire. He could liquidate tomorrow and live off $30M a year in interest alone.

        People don’t quite get how insane the number $200,000,000,000 is. If you counted out one dollar of Musk’s money every second and never took a break or slept, it would take you 8,000 years to count it all.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Yeah I don’t buy it. First of all, Business Insider is trash. Written by 20 year olds making minimum wage + bonus based off of impressions. Until Musk’s bottom line actually takes a hit, he’s not going anywhere. Also, can we drop the pretense already that he bought Twitter because he thought he could make it better?

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      7 months ago

      I read the article and found the arguments compelling. Tesla has a market cap of 750B and everybody knows that’s a fiction. Since Musk’s debt is secured with that funny money, a correction could easily cause a death spiral as creditors did a “run” on his debt.

      You have to admit, Musk is certainly behaving like a man under tremendous pressure.

    • schmorp@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      Who owns business insider btw?

      Edit: looked it up, it’s Axel Springer SE

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        7 months ago

        Axel Springer. Those guys used to publish a good gaming magazine I used to read in my youth. Sadly, that went away.

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          7 months ago

          Axel Fucking Springer is of German trash newspaper BILD of ‘WE ARE POPE’ title fame.

          There is no large online journalism that I would still read without so many grains of salt that everything tastes like shit. Still hope the muskrat goes down and some of his billionaire bros with him. There will be banks going down, as usual, and then governments will ask us people to pay for all the shit that went down. I hope this time we tell them to pack it.

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            7 months ago

            The gaming magazine was good though, but it deteriorated over time. And the publication ceased 2019. I stopped reading well before then.

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    7 months ago

    Unrelated question!

    In the phrase “Now he -and his empire- are cracking[…]” as written in the title, should the “are” have been “is” or do the - instead of parenthesis mean we include the empire when we conjugate “to be”?

    • Lesrid@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      If two concepts are joined by “and” then prescriptively the article should be “is” not “are”. However most US speakers either don’t like the sound of that or don’t know the difference.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I’m asking because in this discussion case they added the em dashes (didn’t know that’s what they’re called) before and after “and his empire”, separating this part from the rest…

        • doleo@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          In this case they used the dashes for dramatic effect. It’s sometimes used to mimic spoken English, in that the cadence of the sentence is changed by the information contained in the dashes. Often, it’s replaced by commas in the form of a non-defining relative clause (The man, who lived in the house next to me for many years, was coming to visit). Think of it like a cue to take a pause before saying/reading the information.

          Here’s a link, if you want to read a bit more: https://writingcommons.org/section/grammar/mechanics/punctuation/dashes/

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            Interesting, I interpreted it as a replacement for parentheses instead of a step in-between commas and parenthesis.

            Always funny how people who learn a second language learn by the rules so much that they sometimes see things that doesn’t seem to work that the language speakers don’t notice…

            Thanks!

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I think ‘are’ would be correct despite it looking awkward because it is talking about two separate, but related, things: Musk and Musk’s empire.

      I am not a grammarian, however.

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    7 months ago

    Elon Musk’s luck has finally run out

    LMFAO, you can keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel any better, but he could lose both tesla and twitter and still be one of the richest and most powerful people to have ever lived, who wouldn’t have to ever work again even if he lived a thousand years more…

    This article 100% a distraction that serves to make the oblivious and/or wilfully ignorant feel sorry for him and/or look at others while he keeps finding more ways to fund and grow fascism wherever he goes…

    Honestly… 🤦‍♀️

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      If you had read the article you would have learned that Musk himself doesn’t own any money, and is even in debt because of its personal expenses, in particular its private jet flights.

      Now you can face palm yourself as much as you want, but the only thing you’ll do is putting bigger blinders on your already blinded brain.

      I won’t feel sorry about the fate of the most horrible person in the world. As a matter of fact, this is the kind of news that’s bringing me joy, because it doesn’t come from haters like you and me, but from the people that gave him the money in the first place, aka the banks.

      I can’t hide my impatience to see him fall quickly, but I guess we’ll get to wait a little more. The end of the year is coming, he won’t be able to pay the $1.3B annual interest fees to the banks and we should begin to see the beginning of the end.

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        7 months ago

        Maybe so, but a person who’s reached that level of notoriety and ability to be so polarizing will never truly go broke. He’ll always have enough media profile to make egregious amounts of money and live in luxury.

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      The premise of the article isn’t “he’s going to be homeless soon”, it’s “his luck has run out” and specifically in regards to Twitter. The argument they make is that he won’t be able to retain ownership, and Twitter will have to declare bankruptcy. We’ll see. But your comment comes across pretty combative and it’s not obvious why.

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      7 months ago

      Stephanie Sterling once said that he could be considered a god with all the power our society lets him have.

      He has absolutely no frame of reference of what it is like to be an actual human with bills to pay and chores to do.

      Which is what make dunking on him so satisfying. I can’t hurt Bill Gates’ feelings by making mean memes about him. But Musk reacts to people being mean to him.

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        7 months ago

        But this isn’t “dunking on him” it’s bullshit designed to give people a false sense of security and a dopamine hit, while he goes on to do whatever the fuck he likes which is already costing millions of lives (via him hoarding hundreds of billions alone, as foes Gates, who is just as dangerous, if not more, because people like you have been convinced that he’s benign, never mind the direct results of his operations).

        You’re being just as childish as him, except he has all the power of the world to fall back on, and you have probably fuck all in the grand scheme of things and are fighting to survive along with the rest of us. Getting him to react to this bullshit achieves nothing, you’ve been given bread and a circus, and it’s working exactly as intended to keep you paying any real attention.

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          I agree that it doesn’t achieve anything… But jeez, let people have their fun. It’s not like anybody confuses this shit with actual activism.

    • Hypx@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      No one cares how rich he is. Only that the illusion of “wealth = ability” has been debunked. And it will continued to be debunked until people learn to realize that all of these ultra-wealthy people are total crooks.

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      7 months ago

      II wanted people to discuss if they felt it was true or not and see if anyone had insight as to whether Saudi Arabia factors in to his finances or not. Normally, I think you would have a point, but they brought experts to the table to discuss it even though the tone is flippant. He has to dance with the money and loans and he’s running out of options. I do not have sympathy for him at all, he’s a POS

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    7 months ago

    Why would he invest even more of his money in Twitter? If Twitter goes insolvent he loses all of his money he has invested in Twitter, but not a dime more. Currently Twitter looses so much in value that every dollar he invests is just lost money. No reason to increase his investment.

    • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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      Because he’s stubborn, and vain, and also stupid. Losing Twitter to bankruptcy is likely to be one of those great historic failures in consumer tech history, like the IBM PC Jr. and the CueCat from Radio Shack and that Mixer thing from Microsoft. Once the history books are written, it’s going to be right there in black and white, without spin from Musk. “Elon Musk ruined this once successful social media platform with one wrongheaded, self-serving decision after another. He’s the New Coke of IT.” Once it happens, he can’t claw it back. History will have judged him, and the verdict is “guilty by reason of being a dumbass.”

      Elon wants to stave that failure off for as long as possible, but it’s gonna happen, mon ami. The longer you wait, the more painful the bruise from your massive tech blunder is gonna get. You can either make this a noble failure, like the ambitious but outrageously expensive 3DO, or it can go down in flames like the Atari Jaguar. Actually, it’s probably way too late for Twitter to become a noble failure. Musk could at least make it a less humiliating one.

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        On top of this- he will always be rich. He will die rich. There is no way he will never not be rich barring some very unforeseen circumstances. The only way to hit him is by humiliating him. And he really wants everyone to think he’s awesome, so that will really hurt.

        On top of that, the reason why he renamed Twitter to X is because he has had this years-long dream of an everything app/site with even more options than Weibo. He thinks people want that. He thinks people want Twitter to be a bank. He thinks people want Twitter to be a dating site. He thinks people want Twitter to be a place to order pizza. He really doesn’t understand that most people don’t want a single app for everything. Especially when it’s really not a challenge to have 150 apps on your phone and find the one you need.

        That’s why he’s clawing on to Twitter for dear life. It was his one and only chance to make his X idea work ever since PayPal said that X was a stupid name.

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      7 months ago

      If Twitter goes insolvent he looses all of his money he has invested in Twitter

      He has also lost the money other people invested with him, like the Saudi Royal family.

      Money comes and money goes but bone saws are forever…

        • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          Exactly. Money for influence, except without twitter there is no influence or money and the Saudis are used to getting what they paid for.

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            7 months ago

            Then they still got rid of a bad influence.

            For them, Twitter dying, leaving the far right Twitter clones to do their thing or Twitter turning into what Elon was trying to turn it into is both an agreeable outcome.

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              The “far right Twitter clones” are nowhere the influence Twitter had and none of it is sustainable because of brand safety concerns. Threads and Bluesky are solid contenders already to get Twitter’s level of influence. Twitter’s killing was absolutely pointless, like cutting a head of the hydra. Once it died, people who made Twitter’s influence will move to another platform. End of story.

    • 520@kbin.social
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      If Twitter goes insolvent he looses all of his money he has invested in Twitter, but not a dime more.

      Actually, he’s also on the hook for any debts the company accrues in the process of going insolvent.

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      If Twitter goes insolvent he loses all of his money he has invested in Twitter, but not a dime more.

      Read the article. Everything is connected in Musk’s World, so he might lose way more than just Twitter’s money.