Political Memes

It’s largely theoretical money based on obscene overvaluations of his companies. Thus the title “paper billionaire”

Teslas market cap, for example, was 1.46 trillion dollars in 2024. This is more than the valuation of the next thirty five largest automakers combined. One could possibly argue a slight increase in valuation based on the IP held and the future moving towards battery powered cars (and basically everything) but to argue that this makes them more valuable than Toyota, GM, Honda, ford, Hyundai, Kia, etc all combined? Asinine.

Basically the stock exploded years ago on hype that Tesla would be a pioneer in many key domains: battery storage, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, AI, etc and blew up based on the hype that in 10 years time at least some of that would come to fruition and result in a company with insane revenues. The future is here now though and we see the reality: significant competition in all those areas that almost always outshines teslas offerings. There are better players in AI and autonomous driving (Waymo simply works better and a number of Chinese options like Baidu are the same). There are better electric cars that are better built and more affordable (the Hyundai ioniq is a better bang for buck in America, BYD destroys Tesla across the spectrum from cheap to insane hyper car prices). Tesla does have an edge in battery technology in capacity but in manufacturing both China and Korea destroy them, and China is quickly catching up in terms of capacity (and leads exponentially in patents). On top of this, declining sales year after year now that musk is toxic and people realize teslas are built like shit

This is why the government steps in to protect tesla. If BYD was available domestically Tesla would eat shit assuming BYD priced aggressively. The BYD seal is beaten by the model 3 in key factors like range (quite a bit) and efficiency (barely) but overall has a significantly higher build quality, more amenities, and a better warranty. Tesla wins on the supercharger but BYD has actually implemented battery exchange stations in China, which Tesla had looked at much earlier on, and are significantly faster than charging stations. Pricing is the key metric and a weird one: in Europe the seal is actually a bit more than the model 3 (~6k euro more) but in Asia it is anywhere from 20-50% less than the model 3 depending on trim level (though the 50% comes with worsening specs).

But Teslas protectionism comes from idiotic institutional investors and its listing in the s&p 500. They know it’s grossly overvalued, yet they hold almost 50% of available shares. If you have a 401k, pension, or an index fund you almost certainly have exposure to Tesla stock. So the valuation is propped up because if comes crashing down suddenly everyone’s retirement is notably impacted and exposes the piss poor state of the nationalized pension.

This is repeating several times over as well. With musk specifically the upcoming spacex listing is already widely regarded as grossly overvalued and it hasn’t even occurred yet. OpenAI and Anthropic will likely be the same story. Even with existing stocks: Microsoft, palantir, nvidia, etc, the same story has played out over and over

Fake billionaires that will inevitably crash the entire economy in a way that hasn’t been seen in a century because of their hubris. They bank on China never catching up (even though they’re making strides every day) and even if China does catch up having the government bar them from entering the market. But this only works as long as the captive audience of the us population has money to pour into their valuations; as the world shifts away from US products and into Chinese ones the squeeze will only get worse and eventually it will pop