Vocal Voices

Elon Musk really is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOMcCNNdSl0

Worth remembering, if you take 20 minutes to watch it, that this guy took his $30m he "made" by building paypal and used it to create two of the fastest growing companies in the world. Which broke down barriers to innovation and expanded our horizons and gave us choices.

If you look a little deeper you might see the guy who jokes about buying Coca Cola so he can put the "coke" back in it.... When they suggests he buys McDonalds so he can fix all the ice cream machines, he jokes that he can't do miracles.

Have a look behind the mask and the banter. The person who, on a talk show, called the SEC bastards because he provided his evidence and they prosecuted him anyway. Probably why he bought Twitter. Certainly why he bought Twitter for 54.20 which contains the 420 meme which is a F.U. to the SEC. (Musk wanted to take Tesla private again at $420 per share. Tweeted that funding was secured. It really was but when the SEC got involved the funding ran away). Those shares, post the 5 way split, are now worth over $4,300 at pre split prices. More than 10x the $420 take private price.

Or not.

You do realise that about 7.7bn people couldn't give a stuff about St Elon of Musk. Just saying.

I realise that you don't like him but have never really looked at what he does or who he is.

So you reply with comments like St Elon.

I was just showing that there is actually some information about Musk which shows who he is.

7.7bn might be a bit high, today. It won't be too many more years that more people care about what Musk does. If they want to know more about Tesla cars, then they're going to fall over musk a lot more. When Tesla is selling 6m cars a year, that number of people who "give a stuff" about Musk will be a lot higher than his current 80m followers on Twitter.

Let's put that into perspective. Biden's Potus account has 7.9m followers. We can assume that more than 7.9m people "give a stuff" about Biden.

Musk was the FT's "Man of the Year" in 2020. That might be an obscure and business related publication, however it is hardly low profile.

The man works 80-100 hours per week, 7 days a week, doesn't take holidays and, for Tesla at least, doesn't take an income. He has an incentives package where outstanding performance for the company gives him an opportunity to "buy" shares at a dramatically reduced price. So he takes no pay and in order to leverage his incentive package he actually has to put out money before he gets any money back. Even then when the package came out in 2018, the short sellers fell all over themselves laughing. "valued at $640bn they said, falling over with laughter, it will be bankrupt by next year". Yeah well over $30bn in losses later and Tesla valued at $1tn or more, depending on the market, Short sellers are laughing on the other side of their face.

This is the person you sarcastically call St Elon. Really? I think Elon's friend is right about Bezos. He needs to spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in his hot tub. Then he might be able to get into SpaceX's slipstream and make some headway in progress instead of taking NASA to court and failing to deliver rocket engines to the United Launch Alliance. What is SpaceX doing? Quietly taking over more than 50% of all space flight launches and mass to orbit.

More Musk and less Hot Tub for Blue Origin I'd say.

NASA is struggling to get Boeing to deliver a starliner which can actually get to the ISS and struggling to get Boeing to produce a SLS rocket with valves that work. SpaceX are quietly delivering everything. To everyone. Much of this is down to Musk who is a self taught chief engineer for SpaceX. When something doesn't make it, Musk is in the thick of it. Not sitting in the board room asking why, but down in the engineering room with the engineers trying to work out why. Then back to the board room to sack the head of engines, then back to the engineering room.

We need a hell of a lot more St Elon's and a hell of a lot less Mary Barra's who stand there and take kudos for something her company never did.