Clickbait title, I apologize but its Rule5 to keep the original titles.
This article performs a business analysis on Elon Musk, and where the money seems to have been going with regards to Tesla, SpaceX, and of course Twitter this year. With $1.3+ Billion interest payments coming up, Twitter is likely low on cash soon.
It seems premature to call Elon out (ie: the clickbait title is too clickbait), but this article makes a good case why Elon’s financial situation across these companies is in trouble.
With regards to Tesla itself: Cybertruck is a dud that is only there to hype the stock price at this juncture. With only 10 deliveries from the delivery event, “2024” for the start of the limited production $80,000 model and an unknown “2025” date for the cheaper mass production model, there’s no hope for Cybertruck to be financially relevant any time soon.
With Rockets exploding at SpaceX, with Tesla ramping up production (ie: $$$$$$ spent), and Twitter losing $Billions/year on interest alone (let alone all the other costs going on), the article suggests that a Twitter bankruptcy is in Elon’s best interest to keep things moving.
An interesting argument, we will see how it plays out over the next year.
It’s an interesting situation. Each of the ventures are in very different places.
I think that Space X is too big to fail at this point. It’s a key partner for NASA and a defense contractor with a monopoly on propulsive landing. I’m not a finance guy, so I don’t know what happens if the company gets overburdened with debt, but I think it’s fundamentally in a good position even if Musk isn’t.
Tesla is complicated. They employ a lot of folks, and a lot of powerful people have money in the company. Again, I don’t know the mechanics here, but based on my understanding of centers of power, I think that if Musk starts threatening the existence of the company they’ll cut him and keep going. They’ve got international factories, supply chain relationships, a distribution network, a brand, and so on, so I could see them falling hard, but I think there are enough people who have an interest in the company that it should be about be able to survive whatever happens to Musk.
Twitter would be in a similar position, but it’s taken such a hit, and it’s strongest asset is the user base, which is a fragile arrangement. It’ll survive until users no longer feel like it’s where everyone is. If that happens, I think all the money in the world won’t save it from becoming MySpace.