Is Elon Musk Nuts? by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Is Elon Musk Nuts?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, June 21, 2026 07:48
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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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Sunday, June 21, 2026 6:42 AM

SECOND

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

Elon Musk @elonmusk
The reason they call me a Nazi is to encourage people to murder me

Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie
It was actually the multiple Nazi salutes, constant use of Nazi rhetoric, and vocal support for Germany’s far-Right political party which includes Nazis.

10:05 PM · Jun 19, 2026 692.2K Views

https://x.com/DarrigoMelanie/status/2068092949141881036

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 21, 2026 7:48 AM

SECOND

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

What Has SpaceX Become?

The Myth of SpaceX

The company has mutated into something that defies both comparison and logic.

By Charlie Warzel

June 20, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/spacex-starlink-ipo-elo
n-musk-trillionaire/687651/

SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.

But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.

Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.

SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space tourism, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” An adviser to the deal told the Financial Times last month: “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream.”

What do you get when you combine SpaceX the business with the financial instrument and the meme? An unfathomable amount of money, it seems. Last week SpaceX opened trading at a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. The scale of Musk’s own net worth is now almost impossible to comprehend, such that, on Monday, SpaceX’s stock rallied, and Musk’s one-day gain was more than the net worth of Bill Gates, once the richest person in the world. In short order, SpaceX has become the sixth-most valuable public company despite the fact that it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced it is using some of that value to purchase Cursor, the AI-coding start-up, for $60 billion, all in stock. In reaction to the news, Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager (and inveterate poster), wrote on X: “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” Ackman’s reasoning rings true in a financial sense: According to the deal, the price that SpaceX will pay for Cursor will be set by its own share price in the seven trading days before closing, which in effect will mean that the more valuable SpaceX is, the less Cursor will cost it. But Ackman’s koan is also correct in a more absurdist way. It highlights the irrationality of the modern stock market and reflects a lesson of the past decade: If a person or group of people is able to marshal enough genuine attention toward an idea—no matter how ridiculous it might seem—they can usually bend reality toward their preferred outcome.

Other than perhaps Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue anyone has been more successful at this than Musk. Musk excels not because he can’t stop winning, but because he understands that, in the financialized logic of our age, winning is less important than the perception that you will win. Speculation beats fundamentals. One way to look at Musk’s personal brand is as somebody who has borrowed obsessively against his own reputation, each loan used to invest in and service the debt of the last, until it becomes impossible to follow the money. One of the things that makes Elon Musk so valuable is how valuable he is.

With SpaceX’s IPO, you could argue that Musk has either won or broken capitalism. His wealth, in our current system, makes him a chaos agent with no real comparison. He is virtually impervious to fines. His money, should he wish to spend it, has the potential to drastically influence the outcome of elections. That leverage could be used to benefit Musk’s businesses, securing further contracts with the government and entrenching him deeper into the infrastructure of everyone’s lives. This power isn’t theoretical; Musk’s dominance in satellite connectivity has already made him geopolitically relevant in places including Ukraine and Iran.

SpaceX and Musk are, of course, not inevitable. Analysts are predicting volatility for the stock as lockup periods end and people sell shares. The AI bubble could pop. Musk could mismanage the company as he did with X, or he could become so radioactive that institutions stop associating with him. But you can also imagine the SpaceX flywheel spinning out of control, perpetuating itself as Musk and SpaceX become fully untethered from reality. On X, Will Manidis, a start-up founder and investor, argued recently that, given the dynamics of SpaceX’s stock, it could continue to purchase some of the internet’s foundational software companies at a cost of basically nothing. Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on SpaceX’s direction, and such tweets, at this moment, are little more than fan fiction. But they represent the absurdity of Musk’s current position in the modern economy. Musk has long fantasized about creating a massive, vertically integrated constellation of services—from banking to social networking—he once dubbed “the everything app.” So far, he’s failed in that quest (the phrase trust Elon Musk with your routing number would still strike fear in the hearts of most people). But it’s not difficult to see Musk using his cheap and abundant money to build toward the Everything Holding Company.

Is any of this possible? Would it even be legal? That’s unclear. But as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine once noted, it seems like “Elon Musk’s recent career is a long experiment to prove that, if you are successful enough, the regular laws do not apply to you.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman Sachs, he wrote, “positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble,” enabled by “a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules.” Revisiting that article in the age of Musk the trillionaire feels almost quaint. Musk and SpaceX have a true nose for money, including sniffing out government infusions and contracts. The aerospace company has figured out how to position itself firmly in the middle of the speculative hype of the AI cycle, and numerous financial organizations have amended rules designed to protect retail investors.

The vampiric Goldman Sachs that Taibbi describes is an institution, a system that became too big to fail, and thus ungovernable. Musk is a person, not a system or institution, but he owns more than 40 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 80 percent of its voting shares. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to SpaceX’s IPO Musk was dictating terms to Goldman Sachs and other banks.

If Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid, what does that make SpaceX and Musk? The natural world offers few good comparisons. What we’re seeing in terms of hype, valuation, and fortune is without precedent, even when stacked up against the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. SpaceX and Musk are better served by a mythological comparison, in part because the entire enterprise is built on a story told over and over until it transcends reality. SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system. It is the seven-headed Hydra at the end of finance, the teleological endpoint of money. It is a myth kept alive by blind faith, devotion, and even aggression, which makes it dangerous whether you believe in it or not.

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

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