With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/elon-musk-human-ponzi-scheme

by aanet • 1 month ago

114 55 1 month ago

paulkrugman.substack.com

apparent3• 1 month ago

But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee.

This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.

TMWNN2• 1 month ago

According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.

Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news.

Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?

tastyface5• 1 month ago

Yes, some great things happened in Belfast in response to that post. Boy, isn't it great that the totally centrist Twitter is still relevant.

(History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)

tastyface5• 1 month ago

Nate Silver with the receipts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...

Most of the top engagement on Twitter comes from the right.

apparent3• 1 month ago

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning.

This is very different from X is "an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool".

WarmWash• 1 month ago

If you listen to Elon speak, and you don't have much technical knowledge, or even maybe have some mild technical knowledge, Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it. He can very non-nonchalantly rattle off a plan to pull off the impossible like it's no big deal. And he does have some significant achievements under his belt, but quite a bit easier things than what he promises (and promised, often a decade ago) ahead.

I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.

jordanb2• 1 month ago

It's funny he's only able to do that because he has so little real technical understanding. A real engineer wouldn't be so flippant.

tristanj4• 1 month ago

[Elon] has so little real technical understanding

This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870

jazz9k• 1 month ago

What I think is funny is that Steve Jobs also had very little technical knowledge and was just as much of an asshole, yet he's worshipped in the tech community. The only reason comments like yours are being made is because of Musk's politics. He was also loved in the Tech community, before supporting Trump.

Musk doesn't have to be a 'real engineer'. Most 'real engineers' would obsess over mundane details and rarely think about the bigger picture or making a profit.

kklisura• 1 month ago

Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it

In 2015, Elon Musk on Hyperloop: "it's no that hard", "it's like a tube with an air hockey table...", "I swear, it's not that hard" [1] Eventually, it was hard. You can literally go on and on with these examples.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQcfi8HK1i8

focusgroup0• 1 month ago

guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop and whose career amounted to taking potshots from a paper calling one of the greatest capital allocators of all time a fraud

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

throw0101c3• 1 month ago

guy who predicted that the internet would be a flop

1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time.

2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b...

3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC).

4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct:

* https://archive.ph/DUDEw

* https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

starik36• 1 month ago

You should probably read the snopes article, because nowhere in it does it say that it was a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla.

You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.

goldenshale• 1 month ago

I used to respect Krugman, but as time has gone on he seems like yet another New York Times style leftist monkey just whining about people they have disagreements with. Pushing the frontiers of science and technology is an unknowable endeavor for which accurate predictions can never be made unless they are not really pushing the limits. It's attitudes like this which restrict us from actually doing real R&D, and instead focusing on quarterly profits and simple stories that nincompoops can understand. Has he not seen how Tesla transformed the global perspective on EVs? Has he not driven in one in FSD mode? Has he not seen the constant launches and innovation happening at SpaceX, or the XAI leap from nothing to having hyperscaler class datacenters and near frontier models. Sure, they haven't gotten to the lead yet, but jesus christ, what's Krugman bringing into the world from zero. The world would be a far better place with 1,000 brilliant kids taking their inspiration from Musk than from taking this pessimistic, whining NYT perspective on science and technology.

BoggleOhYeah• 1 month ago

“Hey kids. Morality doesn't exist as long as you make enough people money.”

You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.

mrkstu2• 1 month ago

Its hilarious that the left, the home of the Weathermen, masked Antifa terrorists, assassins cheered by their base, studiously ignoring rape by favored groups, and a list I could continue for paragraphs, so weakly grasps for morality as some kind of new Puritans.

The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother.

Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left.

Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk?

Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion..

Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.

mc32• 1 month ago

You have to take Krugman with a big grain of salt.

It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.

throw0101c3• 1 month ago

It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong.

He was never in a policy position (perhaps one year under Feldstein in Reagan's CEA?).

In a 2011 paper examining talking head / pundit prediction accuracies, Krugman came out on as most accurate:

* https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...

CGMthrowaway• 1 month ago

Krugman's brushing off genuine engineering wins here. SpaceX got space launch costs down to unheard of levels and built Starlink. Tesla built and scaled EVs at a time when no one else was willing to really try. Musk has a habit of overpromising, but there is real output that we can measure as well.

I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.

maxdo• 1 month ago

He revolutionized car and rocket industry , internet industry , military industry in a very dramatic obvious way. Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Yeah they do deliver to you goods from China and help you to tend hardware with some decent soft on it .

You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .

zaat• 1 month ago

You can type in whatever sequence of keys you want, but Amazon preety much created and shaped that Cloud thing, if you ever heard of it. And that's just one of their side-projects.

There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.

bigyabai3• 1 month ago

Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize?

Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?

mamonster• 1 month ago

internet industry , military industry

This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century.

I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.

myvoiceismypass3• 1 month ago

AWS powers a significant portion of the websites in the world

bix6• 1 month ago

It’s hard to imagine it all crashing down for him tbh. He has so many ways to conjure money and his mafia has immense resources. Why people love him so much I will never understand.

tim3332• 1 month ago

The tech is kind of cool - cars that do 0-60 in ~2 seconds, reusable rockets etc. And back to trying to make cool things. I was around during the Space Shuttle era when it seemed things had been reduced to stuff that sort of worked and cost 5x what it should due to all the companies and politicians wanting their profits. It was a bit depressing.

circadian• 1 month ago

A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator.

I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?

It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.

Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.

CodingJeebus• 1 month ago

The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output.

Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.

tim3332• 1 month ago

That's not quite right. TAM is the total addressable market so if SpaceX's share of that is 10% in means they'd have to give SpaceX $2.85K every year forever.

To sane wash things a bit, the assumption, I guess, is AI will surpass human level and so increase world GDP.

Glyptodon• 1 month ago

Musk is kind of fascinating.

On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.

Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...

...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.

For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.

...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.

Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.

Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.

bigyabai3• 1 month ago

"In this world some people born are like keys that move the world and exist having no connection to the social heirarchy established by man." - Kentaro Miura

I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs.

They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.

Zigurd2• 1 month ago

Starlink and Falcon 9 are the most impressive technological achievements in their domains. But people are getting way ahead of themselves claiming that these are business successes. EBITDA is a metric you can defend when applied to software. That's because incremental sales have near zero cost. And you don't have to replace the satellite constellation every five years.

Similarly it is remarkable that you can land a booster that wasn't designed to do that. But can you actually refurbish and re-fly it for a meaningful savings? This is another instance where software accounting practices don't work when you're dealing with big expensive tangible objects like rocket engines.

SpaceX has been around for 20+ years. And they are still their own biggest customer for launch capacity by a very large margin. Where is the demand?

ekjhgkejhgk• 1 month ago

Enron Musk.

oska2• 1 month ago

Here was my parsing of the submission title :

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

(paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

albatross79• 1 month ago

His innovation has been to show that you don't need to make a product that works or makes sense. You just need to make products that get oceans of fools excited and get 30% of the way there. By that point you've locked in their childish fantasies and their money comes with it. Institutional money follows and you're on your way to being the richest man in the world. The tech product fetishism that the iPhone brought about has enabled a lot of it. A lot of people are still looking for the high that a new phone used to bring.

Zigurd2• 1 month ago

You do need to put in the effort to turn the pool of potential fools into cult followers. Elon had a head start on creating a cult. He turned the Tesla social media campaign into a cult following. Credit where credit is due.

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

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