Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”Me: “Yup.”Student: “How did he get that much money?”Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash.
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Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”
@nswigger it’s weird how Scrooge McDuck (and even his „evil“ competitors like John Rockerduck and Flintheart Glomgold) are less horrible people than our actual crop of billionaires
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@huntingdon @nswigger as I've gotten older and been exposed to more of the world, it's become impossible to see economists as anything more than bootlickers for whichever powerful status quo needs a pseudoscientific veneer of validation this decade (the concept of "revealed preferences" is about as damning for their field as "oppositional defiant disorder" is for psychiatry).
Unfortunately, you can't really say that kind of thing at an average cocktail party without sounding like one of those people who drinks their own urine and thinks 5G puts a chip in your head. But we're slowly getting to a place of deserved skepticism for fields that have long played fast and loose with academic rigor.
Anyways, the Economist is a hilarious example of exactly the material you'd expect, from people who would name themselves "the Economist" without a hint of self-awareness or irony.
I say it out loud, publicly traded corporations eventually do evil. Backup question: ask them for examples of benign traded corps or ones thst advance welfare of citizens.
Its the "traded" distinction that matters
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@nswigger nitpick: Elon Musk is the only billionaire. Everyone else claiming to be a billionaire is only a milliardaire.
I thought this battle was lost in the 1980s, but recent self-immolation by the country that foisted the incorrect definition of billion on the rest of us has encouraged me to revive it. -
today's wall str journal
3.4 trilion in revenue would be about , roughly, 1% of world GDP
this sounds absurd to me, but
we shall see what happens when reality meets expectation@failedLyndonLaRouchite @nswigger SpaceX loses money because the only profitable arm is StarLink. SpaceX and X.com lose some money, and xAI loses a ton like every other AI company.
LLMs are very expensive to make and operate. All LLM companies have burned through billions trying to hook customers through subsidized pricing. Datacenters have physical world realities that software does not and bringing them online is slow. So compute hungry LLMs are getting real world limits imposed, so LLM companies are moving to usage based billing. Enterprise customers are getting a taste of what’s to come with exploding LLM costs. Learning these tools are actually not cheap.
So SpaceX hiding xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. need to IPO before the truth comes out. Their investors want a return ASAP so they don’t take huge losses when the truth is exposed. To do this they changed the rules of the Nasdaq to allow these upside down companies to be placed on the index so index funds and other algorithmic buyers push the risk to the public.
The public buys and takes on high risk, early investors can cash out to a level of risk they are happy with. A handful of billionaires and new trillionaires laugh all the way to the bank because their latest confidence game worked.
Privatize profits and socialize losses at its finest.
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@pixelschubsi @nswigger empathy is no warden against insight
@lritter @pixelschubsi @nswigger uuuuh huh?!
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@lritter @pixelschubsi @nswigger uuuuh huh?!
@kookie @pixelschubsi @nswigger i mean, if there were any.
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@nswigger *does* gen z hate capitalism? they're big stock buyers.
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Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”
@nswigger Capitalism is in that stage in which they make far more money when they let everyone believe they'll make money than doing actual money - the fun thing is that there is actually someone making money; well, not making it, just moving it...
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@nswigger Not to let facts get in the way of your lols but in 6/2020 Tesla became profitable after four consecutive quarters in the black.
Yes, Elon is an asshole and a huge disappointment but there would be no US EV industry without the pressure #tesla put on legacy manufacturers
I know I know buses and bicycles, I use them frequently but the majority of Americans never will but are more likely to drive an #ev
@woodenmachines @nswigger And why will they not? Because people like Elon successfully convinces everyone that projects like Hyperloop are viable, funnelling money away from trains, buses and safe cycling projects.
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@woodenmachines @nswigger And why will they not? Because people like Elon successfully convinces everyone that projects like Hyperloop are viable, funnelling money away from trains, buses and safe cycling projects.
@ahltorp @nswigger anti public transit sentiment in America goes way back, before Elon was even born. Yet another class distinction that we wrap in racism. We had loads of street car suburbs in the early 1900s, it was other industrialist that ended that, to sell us cars. #transit #streetcar #urbanism #electrifyeverything
Edit: before Elon went full fascist, who do you think was trying to convince you EVs weren’t possible? This is all the same struggle
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@ahltorp @nswigger anti public transit sentiment in America goes way back, before Elon was even born. Yet another class distinction that we wrap in racism. We had loads of street car suburbs in the early 1900s, it was other industrialist that ended that, to sell us cars. #transit #streetcar #urbanism #electrifyeverything
Edit: before Elon went full fascist, who do you think was trying to convince you EVs weren’t possible? This is all the same struggle
@woodenmachines @nswigger Yes, he's someone in a long tradition.
And we might agree (I do at least) that every car should be an EV, but mass car culture is still mass car culture, EVs don't help one bit there.
Noise pollution, tire pollution, huge paved areas for roads and parking, driver's desire for pedestrians and cyclists to keep out of the way, thus making threats of death and injury a required part of the culture.
All these problems are still there with EVs.
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Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”
@nswigger I share your dismay at the current US economic system.
The thing is Elon and his dad make it worse with their toxic political ideology which they insist on shoving down everyone’s throats. If they kept their mouths shut the world be a little better.
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Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”
-
Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”
@nswigger "He doesn't actually *have* that wealth in cash, we just let him behave as though he does... Also GenZ needs to buck their ideas up and start living in the real world"
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