Elon Musk takes over Twitter

I just looked, and I have something like 4 pages worth of posts on here about Tesla's stock being the poster the child for the mother of all equity bubbles that started popping this year (and equities around the world are still massively overvalued, even with many of the high flyers down 60, 70, 80 or 90 percent). Starting in 2014, I was posting about Tesla. The last few years, I was calling it the poster child for what was going on. For several years, I had a couple of people just taking swipes at me whenever I posted about it, someone telling me I was being "idealogical," someone else just seeing a chance to be a dick toward me personally. These are just posts between 2014 and 2016, when the stock traded well below where it is today, but it was a company that was losing an astonishing amount of money at the time, was collecting masssive subsidies, and still living off a combination of junk bond debt with absurdly-low financing costs thanks to the Fed, diluted stock issuance a few times a year to raise capital also thanks to the Fed. ... and endless bullshit from Musk (when I kept calling him PT Barnum, people would argue with me). I also kept explaining why I wouldn't short Tesla stock. ... several posts saying that the Fed was powerful enough to blow a bubble that could keep taking the stock higher, and even though I knew I was going to be right, there was no way to time a trade like that. As it turns out, the insanity went on for years longer than I would have ever thought they would be as reckless as they were.

I know that the narrative that makes simple sense for people is that Musk's Twitter stupidity is the reason the stock price is getting clobbered. But this is happening because the Fed went from ZIRP (zero interest rates) to rapidly increasing overnight borrowing rates faster than ever in history to try to deal with inflation. They are trying to slowly undo the lunacy that blew bubbles, created consumer price inflation, and even though they have not drained much liquidity out of the system relative to what they put in, stocks (not just Tesla) are taking it on the chin without them being pushed higher by "free money." There is a reason that the most irrational plays -- the stocks with no earnings and drowning in debt -- have gotten hit the hardest. Tesla is the last to fall. In posts in the last year and a half, I was saying that it has been the poster child and when it goes down, it will be the end of a historical period that people are going to look back in with wonder.

 

Nah, not you. I know I was frustrated at the times, because I thought there was a real discussion to be had, and it was fine if nobody else was interested or really had a clue about what I was trying to say (yes, in way too many words. I know.). What used to get me was the responses I'd get that would just ignore anything I actually posted and just use it as a chance to do the message-board dick thing and try to find others to pile on me. I deal with that kind of thing better now. I don't remember ever thinking that about you.

One thing I always tried to make clear. ... anything I posted wasn't about Tesla as a car (although I did point out that they were delivering cars that had a shit ton of things go wrong; he was rushing cars out that were shoddy), or really about EVs themselves (although, again, I always pointed out that from a pure cost perspective, they are more expensive for the average person -- a reality people would argue with me about). I am not a car guy, and I don't look at the world that way. It's not personal or a preference for me. It's more that I get worked up by emperor's new clothes situations.

 

Wow. I just hit the search on here. First time I called Musk PT Barnum on here was in 2013.

Needless to say it was a minority opinion (including from you, as it turned out!). I was seeing an obvious charlatan, because I wasn't a car fan boi or an EV evangelist. I was just looking at the more concrete things about the company, along with his endless bullshit and hype (which was there then, too, and it baffled me why others wouldn't acknowledge it). I felt like a lot of people were deliberately blinding themselves about him.

 

Here is the thing. You are particularly clueless on here sometimes. Not in a "right" or "wrong" way the way you are trying to take it, but in that you do drive-by posts trying to mock me that never address anything I say. ... and then turn out to prove ridiculous anyhow. I mostly ignore you. And whenever I do post, I don't make it about you personally.

So let's address it. If "dollar collapse" is how you want to synopsize anything I've posted, it's on you. But one would think that at a time that the CPI has been up 7, 8 percent year over year each reading (and if you live in the actual world, your dollars are doing even worse than that) and any attempt at risk-free saving is still earning you a negative return in real terms (i.e. -- relative to that inflation), you wouldn't have tried to make that one your attempt at snark.

Whenever you try to take shots like that, yeah,often I end up being able to say, "I told you so." And it's not because I am the rightest guy on the planet, it's because. ... well, there was no reason for the snark, when you cluelessly don't realize that maybe I have an understanding of a some things that you don't.

Since I am hitting the search feature, here was a prime example of you being you (I don't think you even realize how stupid you were being in hindsight).

2018, I posted this when Netflix came up.

Your response:

Of course, my post didn't "propose a trade." I just systematically was pointing out that a company that was borrowing an astonishing amount of money at distorted interest rates, was trading at 255 times earnings (which was like 1929, 1999 kind of euphoria), and was riding a monetary-induced bubble. ... was going to eventually burn a lot of people.

So let's look back at what happened. ... the stock kept climbing (because, ha ha, lets be snarky!), peaked. ... and has proceeded to lose more than 60 percent of its value (and it is still going) because the Fed stopped pumping liquidity into markets via QE and raised the overnight rate by 400 basis points.

I am not making this personal, the way you seem to always to want to. ... but yeah, if you were holding Netflix stock as an investment because you saw value in it (despite it being insanely expensive on any historical basis), listening to what I was saying might have been "one that's gonna make people money."

But keep trying to snark me. Maybe I can use your posts as a contrarian indictator.