Robert Anson Heinlein's novella, "The Man Who Sold The Moon", is about the rich industrialist Delos D. Harriman. Harriman has a dream, which is to go to the Moon and found a colony there. To achieve this dream, he adopts a single-mindedness that leads him to compromise business ethics and even break the law. Heinlein captures well here several themes about modern business, including its complexity: Harriman, as a successful industrialist of international note, must have a very expert grasp of law and corporate structures, finance and accounting, politics and international relations, and a degree of technical literacy in the enterprise itself. Heinlein also shows how there is often a thin line between a successful business and fraud, and the qualities required are virtually the same. Harriman represents perfectly the morally-neutral capitalist who puts up or finds the money for a project and dominates and motivates those around him.... Maybe, in fact, Harriman goes too far.
Elon Musk is on Drugs
Gordon Johnson, the managing director of Vertical Group, a New-York based investment research group told the Washington Post 16 July 2018: “This thing is unraveling. You had a very big shareholder last week say they want him to focus on executing and stop with the tweets — and then, this weekend, you get more tweets. What’s his angle? What is he doing? … He keeps promising all of these things, and he keeps missing, and he’s not being held to task.” Rattled investors sent Tesla shares tumbling, extending a losing streak for a company that was only weeks earlier America’s most valuable automaker, worth more than General Motors. The company depends on investor cash and confidence. It lost $2 billion in 2017 and had never earned an annual profit. Howard Dean tweeted, “If the CEO loses it, the company is not worth anything.”
Tesla Inc’s shares slumped nine percent after Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told the New York Times 16 August 2018 he was under major emotional stress and was preparing for “extreme torture” from short sellers. To help sleep when he is not working, Musk said he sometimes takes Ambien. Musk has on occasion used recreational drugs. The Times reported that efforts were underway to find a No. 2 executive to take pressure off Musk, who has struggled with production issues for Tesla’s key Model 3 sedan and has been criticised for behaving erratically on Twitter. One possibility under consideration was that SpaceX would help bankroll the Tesla privatization and would take an ownership stake in the carmaker.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast 06 September 2018 where he made a number of outlandish claims and comments while smoking a stupendous spliff [a doobie, ganja, aka weed] and drinking a large tumbler of whiskey with the host. Musk stated that the next version of the Tesla Roadster will have rockets — he then clarifies that flying cars would never work because they’re too loud.
Tesla’s Chief Accounting Officer Dave Morton resigned from the embattled electric vehicle company 07 September 2018. “Since I joined Tesla on August 6th, the level of public attention placed on the company, as well as the pace within the company, have exceeded my expectations,” Morton, who joined Tesla just one month ago, said in a statement. “As a result, this caused me to reconsider my future. I want to be clear that I believe strongly in Tesla, its mission, and its future prospects, and I have no disagreements with Tesla’s leadership or its financial reporting.” Moments after Morton’s resignation, Tesla’s Chief People Officer Gaby Toledano announced she would not be returning to the company after taking a 15-month leave of absence August 15.
Shares of the car company tumbled 10%, the biggest daily $TSLA loss since 2016.
After the episode, NASA required SpaceX to commit to federal workplace drug guidelines and allocate €4.6 million ($5 million) for employee training. On Sept. 27, 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Elon Musk, CEO and Chairman of Silicon Valley-based Tesla Inc., with securities fraud for a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private. On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted to his 22 million Twitter followers that he could take Tesla private at $420 per share (a substantial premium to its trading price at the time), that funding for the transaction had been secured, and that the only remaining uncertainty was a shareholder vote. The SEC’s complaint alleges that, in truth, Musk had not discussed specific deal terms with any potential financing partners, and he allegedly knew that the potential transaction was uncertain and subject to numerous contingencies. According to the SEC’s complaint, Musk’s tweets caused Tesla’s stock price to jump by over six percent on August 7, and led to significant market disruption.
Musk would settle a suit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission by paying a fine and stepping down as chairman of the Tesla Inc, the electric auto and battery tech company he co-founded in 2003. Musk will settle an SEC case resulting in tweets the tech exec posted that caused Tesla share prices to veer sharply. The SEC charges against Musk shaved about $7 billion off Tesla’s value. Investors in electric car maker Tesla were buoyed by news that Elon Musk will have to step down as chairman of the firm. The company’s shares surged 16 percent in trading following the decision. Musk was Tesla’s largest investor, holding a 20-percent stake in the company.
Communications between Tesla and the California Department of Motor Vehicles revealed that billionaire Elon Musk may be over-hyping the capabilities of his ‘Autopilot’ self-driving software. In a January 2021 earnings call, Musk said he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year.” A DMV memo – obtained through a public records request by PlainSite – claims that a boast from Musk about self-driving cars “does not match engineering reality,” based on a conversation with the director of the Autopilot software, CJ Moore.
The DMV reportedly does not believe this level of autonomy can be reached by the end of the year after its conversations with Tesla. “Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year,” the memo reads. It later stated that “the public’s misunderstanding about the limits of the technology and its misuse can have tragic consequences.”
This all appears to contradict Musk’s public statements in the past – and communications from December between Tesla’s associate general counsel Eric Williams and the chief of California DMV’s autonomous vehicles branch, Miguel Acosta, show there was just as much doubt about the so-called ‘autonomous’ cars then. Williams noted that “neither Autopilot nor FSD (Full Self-driving) Capability is an autonomous system, and currently no comprising feature, whether singularly or collectively, is autonomous or makes our vehicles autonomous.”
There have been multiple crashes involving Tesla vehicles and their Autopilot systems, including one in Spring, Texas that left two men dead after their vehicle crashed into a tree.
Mehdi Hasan noted : "there are a certain type of people — often young, male, anti-establishment, a bit libertarian — who hang on his every word. Especially online, where they defend their guru, their prophet, their hero — on social media, on YouTube — with all the intensity, and even viciousness, that you’d expect from cult members."
Jack Crosbie noted : "Similar to Donald Trump, he’s very, very good at projecting an image of himself and an image of the brand that he’s selling to his fans and convincing them, and that’s what they want to buy into. And that’s why you see such a strong reaction; both Musk and Trump have many, many people that are convinced that what they are offering the world is going to benefit them personally. Musk has thousands and thousands and thousands of, primarily, I would say that his fans are primarily men, who are, you know, sort of curious, future-forward, maybe a little nerdy, kind of guys who are interested in these concepts of renewable energy, of electric vehicles, of space exploration, and things like that. And they’re convinced that Musk is the one that’s going to be able to deliver ...."
The LA Times reported in 2015 that over the years Musk’s companies had benefited from roughly $4.9 billion in government support and subsidies.
With a net worth of over $288 billion, by October 2021 Elon Musk’s fortune was bigger than the market value of US energy major ExxonMobil. This came as Musk’s electric car company Tesla joins the elite trillion-dollar club of companies. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the wealth of the world’s richest person, Musk, jumped to $288.6 billion on the news that Tesla has landed its biggest-ever order from rental car chain Hertz. The automaker’s shares had been rising in recent weeks, even before Hertz's decision to order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022. The company's stock price is up by more than 40% in 2021, almost double the gain of the S&P 500 Index. Tesla was the first carmaker to join the elite group of companies with a trillion-dollar market cap that includes Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.
Elon Musk sold more Tesla shares than he needs to pay current tax obligations, and experts say he's either converting part of his fortune from stock to cash, or he's saving for bigger tax bills that will come due in 2022. As of 17 November 2021, Musk had sold roughly 8.2 million shares in the electric car and solar panel maker in the past nine days, worth a total of just over $8.8 billion. Of those, Musk sold 2.8 million shares worth about $3 billion specifically to pay taxes on three tranches of stock options that he exercised this week, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That means he has sold roughly $5 billion more in shares than he needed at present. Under a compensation plan from 2012, Musk has options to buy 26.4 million shares. The options expire next year, and the tax bill will come due. Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives estimates the bill to be $10 billion to $15 billion, depending on the stock price. Musk's options so far allowed him to buy shares at $6.24 each, and the stock is selling for around $1,080.
Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business and law professor, questioned why Musk would sell that many shares now to pay obligations that come due next year. He said accruing for future tax liabilities made sense only if Musk expected the stock price to drop.
In 2021, Musk was cemented as a celebrity when he hosted Saturday Night Live as a platform to poke fun at himself and to raise awareness of Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism, by announcing that he has it. He tallied 66 million followers on Twitter. Indeed, he has been known to move markets with a single tweet. Time magazine announced on 13 December 2021 that Elon Musk, the 50-year-old founder of Tesla and SpaceX, was its 'Person of the Year' for 2021. In a glowing article, Time's Walter Isaacson compared the South African-born entrepreneur to Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci.
Time magazine’s choice for 'Person of the Year' 2021 was called the ‘worst choice ever’ as billionaire Elon Musk had been criticised for opposition to unions, attitude towards tax and playing down Covid dangers. Time described Musk as a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman” while talking about his achievements. Musk opposed a “billionaires tax” floated by some lawmakers in US. He and some other super-wealthy people in the country paid tax at a very small rate in comparison to their significant rise in wealth from 2014 to 2018, said a probe by Propublica this year. Musk allegedly paid only a “real” rate of 3.27%.
With billionaire Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, experts believe that the exile of anti-vaxxers, QAnon loyalists, neo-Nazis, and former US President Donald Trump can come to an end. Musk, who had criticised the microblogging platform for its bots and content policy, presented an offer of $44 billion to buy it. Republican lawmakers, who had accused the social media platform of bias against right-leaning views, had welcomed the news that Musk was purchasing Twitter Inc. Trump announced his return on Truth Social with a post saying "I'M BACK!" Musk hinted that his political sentiment has shifted rightward over the past 14 years. As he explained “I strongly supported Obama for president, but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.”
Musk said he will buy the Coca Cola beverages company and suggested reintroducing cocaine to the drink, according to a Tweet on 28 April 2022. “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” he said in the tweet. When the drink was invented in 1885 by pharmacist John Pemberton, a report by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse states that the “recipe contained cocaine in the form of an extract of the coca leaf.”
Musk, a public figure with 145 million followers on Twitter, who has called himself "a free speech absolutist," has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories since he bought the platform in October 2022. His targets included billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the frequent recipient of antisemitic abuse; Nancy Pelosi, a US politician from the Democratic Party; and investigative journalism group Bellingcat. "I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of doing that is losing money, so be it," said Musk in an interview with US broadcaster CNBC in May 2023 after being challenged on his engagement with conspiracy theories and its effect on Twitter's advertising revenue.
On 03 July 2023 the world's richest man made public statements that denied basic science about the role of agriculture in heating the planet. Scientists said the level of abuse from climate deniers increased since Musk took over. Starting around July 2022, the number of tweets with climate denial terms rose from about 30,000 per week to about 110,000. Tweets included claims that climate change is a "scam" pushed by "globalists."
Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and an author of the latest report from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), called Musk a climate denier. Jordan Peterson, an influential Canadian psychologist with 4.4 million followers who describes himself as a classical liberal, said Steinberger was appropriating the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust by calling Musk a climate "denier." Steinberger is the daughter of Holocaust survivor.
Allegations made against Elon Musk over possible drug use are worrying executives within his companies, a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggested 08 January 2024. Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, has denied the claims, insisting no trace of drugs or alcohol has been found in his body during random tests over three years. The allegations followed a recent SpaceX meeting, when, the report said, an executive described Musk as "nonsensical," "unhinged," and "cringeworthy" after the chief executive officer turned up nearly an hour late, rambling and slurring his words. Sources familiar with the allegations over possible drug use said the claims referred to drugs including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine. Previously, Musk admitted to using ketamine to treat depression. In an interview with the independent Australian news website Crikey, Jackson Palmer, the co-creator of Dogecoin, said "He’s a grifter, he sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that. He’s just really good at pretending he knows." Palmer told Crikey “About a year ago when Musk was saying something about crypto, I said Elon Musk was and always will be a grifter but the world loves grifters,” pointing to Musks’s promise of full-self-driving Teslas as evidence.
Musk wants to be seen as the greatest visionary of the current century. He promised to save the planet from pollution and to conquer Mars. He promises a machine into which we could download our personalities and our brains.
Elon Musk is betting big on Tesla's Optimus robots. During Tesla's June 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, Musk made several ambitious announcements. In his opinion, Optimus robots will become the most important product that Tesla produces. According to the company's analysts, in the near future the market for humanoid robots could reach up to 1 billion units per year, of which, according to Musk, Tesla can count on a 10% share. With an expected cost of assembling one robot of $10,000 and a market value of $20,000, the company could expect a profit of $1 trillion per year. This, in turn, could raise Tesla's value to 25 trillion. Musk also said that next year several thousand robots will begin working at Tesla factories. Doing the artihmetic, Leon's numbers imply a total global market of $20 trillion per year, more than the current output of China and India combined. As of the first quarter of 2024, the global GDP was $109.53 trillion. Over the next thirty years, the global economy is expected to more or less double again. By 2050, global GDP could total close to $180 trillion.
Reports that billionaire Elon Musk has been talking on a consistent basis with Russian President Vladimir Putin are still reverberating among current and former U.S. officials, almost a week after news of the conversations first surfaced. Musk, who owns electric car maker Tesla and the X social media platform, also owns SpaceX, a commercial spaceflight company that has numerous contracts with the U.S. government, doing work for the Department of Defense and U.S. space agency NASA. Some of that work is so sensitive that the United States has given Musk high-level security clearances due to his knowledge of the programs, raising concerns among some that top secret U.S. information and capabilities could be at risk.
According to current and former U.S., European and Russian officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, such concerns may be warranted. During one conversation, those officials said, Putin allegedly asked Musk not to activate Starlink, a SpaceX subsidiary that provides satellite internet services, over Taiwan as a favor to China. “I think it should be investigated,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told the Semafor World Economy Summit on 25 October 2024, a day after The Journal published its report. “I don’t know that that story is true,” Nelson said, adding, if it is, “I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
“There is no doubt that Russia is cultivating many possible channels of influence in the United States and other Western countries,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA officer who now teaches at Georgetown University. “Russia would regard a wealthy and influential business mogul such as Musk as potentially a highly useful channel and thus a relationship worth nurturing,” he said.
Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA chief of staff and former senior director of the White House Situation Room, is also wary. “It does get the spider-sense tingling,” he told VOA. “If the reports of Musk’s repeated conversations with Vladimir Putin are true, I would definitely have some concerns,” Pfeiffer said. “Russia under Putin will cultivate support wherever it can be bought, cajoled or coerced. “Putin has equal opportunity security services that will take advantage of any opportunity to get foreign business leaders to influence their governments to align with Russian interests,” he said.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (“SpaceX”)
Elon Musk‘s SpaceX has done things that other space companies have not. SpaceX has not only demonstrated novel capabilities, but done so a costs significantly lower than those achieved by legacy competitors. How is this possible? Clean living and righteous thoughts? Is Elon Musk simply a lot smarter than everyone else? Or possibly just much better looking? Maybe it is all that ganja is is said to smoke. The simple answer seems to be that he is rich on a scale that Croesus or SpaceXCrasus could never have imagined. Half a century ago, oilman J. Paul Getty was said to be the world's richest man, worth some $1.2 billion (around $9.1 billion today). In 2021 Musk became the richest man in human history, with a fortune estimated at around $180 Billion.
As of 2021 Elon Musk‘s SpaceX was valued at about $74 billion. In 2018, the company had about $2 billion in revenues, according to an estimate from investment bank Jefferies. Company expenditures appear to remain above this level, probably financed by Musk himself through loans against his personal holdings in SpaceX and Tesla Motors. When his competitors submit a bid for a government contract, they generally budget for full cost recovery, plus some reasonable profit. Musk, in contrast, is perfectly capable of and evidently willing to "buy" contracts by pricing his bid substantially below cost recovery.
Other legacy competitors in the space business are publicly held corporations that face extensive public disclosure of their finances, and are seeking to turn a profit every years, if not every quarter. In marked contrast, apart from minimal tax reporting that is not publicly disclosed, Elon Musk confronts no obligation to disclose his personal finances. Musk is under no obligation to turn a profit every year, and he alone is the judge of whether expenditures are sensible long term investments, or frivolous adventure capital.
In early February 2021 SpaceX completed an $850 million fundraising round to raise capital for its ambitious Starlink and Starship projects. CNBC said that the private company had a valuation of around $74 billion. In addition to raising money for its large-scale projects, SpaceX also completed a secondary transaction in which SpaceX insiders and investors were able to sell an additional $750 million worth of their shares. Musk owned roughly 48% of SpaceX prior to this latest funding round, and if he managed to hold onto all 48%, his stake would be worth about $32 billion. SpaceX was valued at $46 billion in an August 2020 fundraising round.
In October 2020, a Morgan Stanley MS +0.2% analyst research note titled "SpaceX: Raising Valuation Scenarios Following Key Developments", gave SpaceX a bullish valuation of $100 billion — double what investors said it was worth in August. Morgan Stanley valued the SpaceX launch business at $12 billion, and its point-to-point space travel at $9 billion. The bank raised the estimated value of Starlink to $81 billion, up from $42 billion, based on a revised estimate of potential subscribers up from 235 million to 364 million globally by 2040. It would cost about $240 billion to build out the network. Other were skeptical that Starlink will work as advertised. Investment bank Cowan questioned Starlink’s value to “bandwidth driven” homes in the U.S. in a research note in late September 2020.
Elon Musk, already a multi-billionaire, saw his net worth quintuple over the course of 2020. His net worth grew to $187 billion as of January 2021, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, garnering him the crown of world's richest man. Musk officially passed Jeff Bezos in the wealth rankings. Bloomberg pegged Musk's wealth at around $158 billion as of 15 December 2020, with about $110 billion from Tesla stock and options, with another $18.7 billion from equity in SpaceX. A final $7 billion in Bloomberg's calculations is tied up in cash, homes, cars, and other assets.
Already the world's most valuable automaker, Tesla was worth nearly $645 billionat the end of 2020, a 690% increase since 01 January 2020, and Musk, with an 18% stake, was easily its largest shareholder. Much of the equity in Tesla and his stake in SpaceX is pledged as collateral for mortgages and other loans. That leaves his final stakes in the companies valued at somewhat less than their face value. Musk still relies on mortgages and credit for daily life. "Some people think I have a lot of cash," Musk told a major investor, Cathie Wood, on a podcast in 2020. "I actually don't."
Matt Levine noted that BitCoin is " as close to a free-money perpetual motion machine as you'll ever see in finance. You can quickly, easily, silently buy billions of dollars' worth of a liquid unregulated financial asset and then tell it to go up, and it will go up. Then you can sell it, tell it to go down, and repeat. ... here Musk is, the second-richest person in the world, either doing it — in which case it's one of the greatest trades, and also one of the greatest trolls, in history — or not doing it, rubbing the lamp and making Bitcoin and Dogecoin go up and down and up and down and up and down with his whims, just for fun,... He definitely has the money to buy lots of Bitcoin and Dogecoin before making them go up. If he did do that, he probably would not have much in the way of disclosure obligations, at least not real-time disclosure obligations. Similarly he could easily sell them before making them go down, without much in the way of disclosure obligations."
Founded in 2002, SpaceX is a commercial space transportation company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. SpaceX developed the Falcon 1 (no longer operational), Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy vertical orbital launch vehicles, all of which were built with the goal of becoming reusable launch vehicles. SpaceX launches commercial and government payloads, including the Dragon spacecraft, which was recently used to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and bring them back to Earth. SpaceX is currently developing a new rocket, Starship/Super Heavy, with the goal of traveling to Mars.
Elon Musk has served as Tesla's Chief Executive Officer since October 2008 and as Chairman of the Tesla board of directors since April 2004. Mr. Musk has also served as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chairman of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (“SpaceX”), a company which is developing and launching advanced rockets for satellite and eventually human transportation, since May 2002, and as Chairman of SolarCity, a solar installation company, since July 2006. Prior to joining SpaceX, Mr. Musk co-founded PayPal, an electronic payment system, which was acquired by eBay in October 2002, and Zip2 Corporation, a provider of Internet enterprise software and services, which was acquired by Compaq in March 1999. Mr. Musk holds a B.A. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in business from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
On January 20, 2015, Google invested $900 million in SpaceX, a space exploration and space transport company, to support continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing.
SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access. The majority of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which historically has flown only once. Compare that to a commercial airliner – each new plane costs about the same as Falcon 9 but can fly multiple times per day and conduct tens of thousands of flights over its lifetime. Following the commercial model, a rapidly reusable space launch vehicle could reduce the cost of traveling to space by a hundredfold. While most rockets are designed to burn up on reentry, SpaceX rockets can not only withstand reentry but can also successfully land back on Earth and refly again.
SpaceX designs and builds its reusable rockets and spacecraft at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. As a company, SpaceX is vertically integrated, building the vast majority of the vehicle on the Hawthorne campus. SpaceX headquarters remains one of the few facilities in the world where an entire launch vehicle or spacecraft come together under one roof. SpaceX tests its engines, vehicle structures, and systems at a 4,000-acre state-of-the-art rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. Outfitted with 16 specialized test stands, the facility validates for flight every Merlin engine that powers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and every Draco thruster that controls the Dragon spacecraft.
The Space Launch Complex 40 location on the southeast coast of the US provides access to a wide range of low and medium inclination orbits frequently used by communications and Earth-observing satellites and by supply missions to the International Space Station. The site also allows access to geostationary orbits, as well as departures to the Moon and interplanetary destinations. SpaceX is honored to launch from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A, home of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. In addition to commercial satellite launches and space station resupply missions, LC-39A supports crew launches of the Dragon spacecraft.
The Space Launch Complex 4 location on the California coastline provides customers with access to high inclination and polar orbits, frequently used by satellite communication constellations, defense intelligence and Earth-observing satellites, and some lunar missions. Launches from Vandenberg heading straight south traverse open ocean all the way to the Antarctic, by which time the vehicles have long since reached orbit.
SpaceX is building the world’s first commercial launch site designed for orbital missions at Starbase in Texas. Starbase is where build and test development for Starship vehicles takes place.
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