Is Elon Musk Nuts? by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Is Elon Musk Nuts?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 17, 2026 12:14
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Friday, June 12, 2026 7:28 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme

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

Elon Musk promised that each of the following services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.

Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.

OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.

But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.

We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.

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

SpaceX is going public. Its initial public offering (IPO) debuts today on the Nasdaq at a price that implies a $1.77 trillion valuation for a company that had revenues of only $18.7 billion last year and lost money.

How can this, um, astronomical valuation be justified? The IPO is premised partly on the assumption that retail investors will buy in, not because they have made any rational assessment of SpaceX as a business, but because they believe that they are buying stakes in Elon Musk’s genius.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 14, 2026 1:56 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Science fiction? Musk's lofty SpaceX goals unrealistic, skeptics say

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-science-fiction-musk-lofty-spacex.html

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 3:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Will this deflate Tesla’s laughably inflated stock value? No, because stockholders are investing in Elon Musk, not cars.

Tesla retroactively added ‘supervised’ to “Full Self-Driving” contracts that owners signed years ago

By Fred Lambert | Jun 3 2026

https://electrek.co/2026/06/03/tesla-retroactively-modified-fsd-contra
cts-supervised/

From 2016 through early 2024, Tesla sold “Full Self-Driving Capability” as a software package for up to $15,000, with the promise that it would become fully autonomous through over-the-air software updates. CEO Elon Musk repeatedly claimed unsupervised self-driving was imminent — promising it by the end of every year since 2018.

In March 2024, Tesla formally renamed the package to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” with the release of FSD v12.3.3. The word “supervised” appeared for the first time, and the fine print now states the system does not make the vehicle autonomous.

By September 2025, Tesla had fully changed the meaning of “Full Self-Driving”, giving up on its original promise of delivering unsupervised autonomy. The new CEO compensation package even redefined FSD with vague language that the current supervised system could satisfy.

Then, in April 2026, Musk confirmed that HW3 vehicles — produced between 2016 and 2023 — simply cannot achieve unsupervised FSD due to hardware limitations. That means every vehicle sold with the original “Full Self-Driving Capability” promise on HW3 hardware will never deliver what was promised without a hardware retrofit that Tesla has no concrete plan to implement.

A pattern of disappearing evidence

Making original purchase agreements inaccessible fits a broader pattern.

In August 2024, Tesla deleted a blog post from October 2016 that stated “all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory — including Model 3 — will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.” The post was removed without explanation while lawsuits were building. It is still accessible through the Wayback Machine.

More at https://electrek.co/2026/06/03/tesla-retroactively-modified-fsd-contra
cts-supervised/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Hype and Glory
The SpaceX frenzy continues

Paul Krugman
Jun 17, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hype-and-glory

While I don’t know anyone who loves Microsoft or its products, it’s a wildly successful company with a long track record. Last year Microsoft earned $125 billion in profits on $318 billion in revenue.

In that same year SpaceX lost $4 billion on $19 billion in revenue. Robin Wigglesworth, editor of the Financial Times blog Alphaville, memorably described Elon Musk’s company as a very successful but fairly small satellite launch company, bolted onto a stagnant money-losing social media company [X, formerly Twitter] and a money-incinerating AI company [xAI, operator of the widely despised model Grok], and then sprinkled with a lot of hype about humankind going interplanetary.

And yet at the end of trading yesterday the stock market placed almost as high a value on SpaceX, which went public last Friday, as it did on Microsoft, and slightly more than it placed on Amazon, which made $78 billion in profits last year.

What can explain this valuation? Many investors appear to believe that Musk is a wizard who can conjure up world-conquering inventions on a regular basis. But while Musk has done some impressive things, his track record for more than a decade has been one of failed venture after failed venture. And his current big ideas, like data centers in space, fundamentally don’t make sense. A recent Government Accountability Office report is carefully worded, but as I read it basically says “this is another Hyperloop [Musk’s absurd, failed attempt to reinvent public transportation].”

Granted, Musk has enormous political influence through his close ties to Donald Trump. So might SpaceX’s valuation be justified, not by Musk’s technological prowess, but by his access to the fruits of crony capitalism?

Nobody should doubt the Trump administration’s willingness to tilt the playing field in favor of its friends, especially those who enrich Trump personally. But there are limits to what even blatant favoritism can deliver.

Consider the current fate of the crypto industry. Trump, who once called Bitcoin a “scam,” became a passionate booster of cryptocurrency once it became clear that it was a channel through which he could profit from the presidency. The fighting cage he had erected on the White House lawn was “wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements.” And cryptocurrency valuations soared after he won in 2024.

But the Trump bump for crypto has now vanished. Here’s the total market capitalization of Bitcoin over the past two and a half years:

At its peak, Bitcoin had a market capitalization similar to that of SpaceX now. Yet the fact that Bitcoin is economically useless for anything other than money-laundering meant that its soaring valuations rested on the belief that the crypto-friendly Trump administration would subvert regulations in its favor, for example by allowing crypto companies to effectively operate as unregulated banks. Hence, as I wrote last year, crypto became a Trump trade, operating under the belief that Donald Trump’s patronage would overcome both economic logic and the opposition of the banking industry and many Democrats in Congress. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-crypto-became-a-trump-trade

Sure enough, as Trump’s poll numbers began to sink, along with his political leverage, so did the value of Bitcoin. But those who got in on the Trump trade early, and sold their holdings to the Trump believers, made big money.

The particulars of SpaceX are different from those of Bitcoin – SpaceX does have one profitable division, Starlink, which was touted as the money-engine behind the SpaceX IPO. Only incredible growth in Starlink can justify SpaceX’s valuation. Yet an analyst who has dug deep into the numbers has shown that the Starlink valuations in the SpaceX IPO imply that Starlink will eventually dominate 80% of the global internet service market. That’s not remotely possible,

So the moral here is that SpaceX is essentially all about hype. It is, in effect, a $2.75 trillion meme stock. The only winners will be those who got in early, stoked a market frenzy, and exit before the bottom inevitably falls out.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 12:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

They've even got you shitting on EVs now.

It's just too easy.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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