I realize you are passionate about this topic and maybe I am just not in that same bucket. I could take it or leave it. The valuation is absurd, the TAM is wild and I have no faith in the underlying business being able to grow that fast. Forward looking statements are rarely a scam no matter how silly they sound.

You may be passionate enough to say intentional deception no doubt. I would argue I am happy to let the market figure it out. It may take a while but eventually over a long enough horizon it should figure it out.

>No company officer should be allowed to make such claims without being removed from office.

Any other company officer in a fortune 100 company would be removed from office if they made claims like this. The single reason he isn't is because he owns something like 80 something percent of voting power.

The world is filled with shades of gray. Some folks like yourself take what I consider a very passionate view on these topics. I take a bit more nuanced view. I don’t like Elon, I would never invest in his companies at the current valuation but I also recognize he has built successful businesses, does a great job at financial engineering and overall is generally a really could hype man for this companies. All those things can be true at the same time. I think when folks become too passionate on either side it ruins the argument, I look at how you generally take a rude/attacking stance when all I am saying is I don’t think it’s a scam outright but I find the valuation to be silly.

I did not realize that is what we were discussing. Just because I don't like someone (I don't like musk) does not mean I will immediately jump to the harshest classification. I could never get behind the valuations, I don't generally like how he behaves but I also recognize that he historically has done a great job at financial engineering and serving as a hypeman, both can be true at the same time for me.

> just like Musk’s other scam, TSLA

Just so we're clear: You think that the only company selling EVs in the USA for a net profit is a scam?

What do you call Rivian, Lucid, Fisker, Bolinger, Lordstown, Slate, and Aptera?

Slate has been conspicuously silent about orders since the day after launch. Lucid is on the brink of bankruptcy. Fisker has gone bankrupt... twice. Lordstown no longer exists (with assets purchased for pennies on the dollar by their former CEO). Aptera has reorganized more times than I can count, and has been planning to release their product any day now for over 10 years!

Rivian actually lost a lawsuit this year for misleading investors about the potential profitability of their product leading up to IPO. An IPO which raised more money in one fell swoop than all the external funding Tesla had in their entire existence. By your own metric, is Rivian not a bigger scam than Tesla?

By the way, a bad fact for Rivian in that case was that they sexually harassed a female exec, who turned around and revealed (in her own lawsuit against them, just weeks before IPO) that the expected ASP of the R1 would be less than the production cost. Oops.

And, somehow, Tesla is the problem. Yea, that makes sense.

Definitely not and I think those types of opinions erode any rational discussion. It’s part of the problem with these discussions. There are extreme views that take a position that is not defendable but follow the hive mind for whatever side they are on.

I like to think in shades of gray and I am somewhere in the middle. Tesla? Amazing product, crazy valuation. SpaceX, some of the underlying products are indeed very valuable but the valuation is again out of this world, no pun intended. The market can stay irrational a lot longer than I can stay solvent. Would never take a short against Elon but I also would never invest into his businesses.

I don't understand what kind of media someone has to consume to not understand that SpaceX does completely globally dominate launch services. Like, it's not even close.

I have no opinion on whether other companies might catch up to them (either tomorrow or 10 years from now), but your quote is a completely accurate statement about the world as it exists today.

Why will my retirement savings be obligated to be part of it? No doubt it will be part of some indexes but I know for example mine it won’t.

So do many other CEOs and it’s near impossible to sift through overly optimistic statements and not. Agree he truly pushes the envelope but also we all see the numbers and are not forced to invest in the company.

Completely irrelevant to my point.

The point was just this: you don't need $100 trillion to actually exist for that market cap to be possible.