This misses the point.  Most likely Musk’s empire is collapsing and he is intentionally doing things to make it look like it is collapsing for reasons other than the fact that his businesses suck.  Free speech is a canard. Â
Tesla is losing sales and was cash flow negative in quarter 1. Â It will get worse. And you can lose a ton of money fast in the car business.
Twitter has never come close to making money
We have no insight into whether SpaceX makes money. Â My guess is no.
Neurolink is a money sink.
Boeing is a money sink.
Folks- he just owns a bunch of bad businesses that were largely built on the government dime. Â
Musk’s greatest asset is the perception that he is a shrewd businessman.  You always protect your greatest asset.  That is what he is doing here.
Space X likely does make a profit only because the aerospace industry has massive costs even when not operating. It would be extremely obvious if they were losing money because stuff would actually start falling apart and out of the sky. Space X gets lots of huge government contracts, whether they deliver on them or not, aerospace government contracts are some of the biggest cheques in the world. It probably will go down the tube's eventually once the stubborn government catches on, but for now I think they are still at least turning a minor profit.
Twitter was at the edge of profitability when he bought it. They needed to improve the quality of the platform by reducing bots and increasing content quality/engagement to make advertisers willing to pay more. Elon instead took away all the tools to manage the bots/disinformation/racism and amped up the rightwing megaphone while demanding advertisers stay on.
Musk has been absolutely fine supporting censorship when it benefits his share price. He wrote an article for China's Cyberspace Administration, the organization responsible for their censorship of the web. He's repeatedly kowtowed to China and avoided saying anything negative while enabling Chinese propaganda and pro-PRC bots to proliferate.
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u/BabyDog88336 Sep 02 '24
This misses the point.  Most likely Musk’s empire is collapsing and he is intentionally doing things to make it look like it is collapsing for reasons other than the fact that his businesses suck.  Free speech is a canard. Â
Tesla is losing sales and was cash flow negative in quarter 1. Â It will get worse. And you can lose a ton of money fast in the car business.
Twitter has never come close to making money
We have no insight into whether SpaceX makes money. Â My guess is no.
Neurolink is a money sink.
Boeing is a money sink.
Folks- he just owns a bunch of bad businesses that were largely built on the government dime. Â
Musk’s greatest asset is the perception that he is a shrewd businessman.  You always protect your greatest asset.  That is what he is doing here.