| ▲ | h2zizzle an hour ago | |
I would say yes and no on Tesla. Entities that survived becaue of the rehab environment actually expected it to fail, and shorted it heavily. TSLA as it currently exists is a result of the short squeeze on the stock that ensued when it became clear that the company was likely to become profitable. Its current, ridiculous valuation isn't a product of its projected earnings, but recoil from those large shorts blowing up. In our hypothetical alternate timeline, I imagine that there would have still been capital eager to fill the hole left by GM, and possibly Ford. Perhaps Tesla would have thrived in that vacuum, alongside the likes of Fisker, Mullen, and others, who instead faced incumbent headwinds that sunk their ventures. Bitcoin, likewise, was warped by the survival of incumbents. IIUC, those interests influenced governance in the early 2010s, resulting in a fork of the project's original intent from a transactional medium that would scale as its use grew, to a store of value, as controlled by them as traditional currencies. In our hypothetical, traditional banks collapsed, and even survivors lost all trust. The trustless nature of Bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, maybe would have allowed it to supercede them. Deprived of both retail and institutional deposits, they simply did not have the capital to warp the crypto space as they did in the actual 2010s. I call them "ghosts" because, yes, whatever they might have been, they're clearly now just further extensions of that pre-2008 world, enabled by the our post-2008 environment (including ZIRP). | ||