Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

When some people see a Tesla in West LA, they think, "Call 911!"

 

One man's "whistleblower," was previously another man's "sabatuer."

 

These are tweets from the lawyer representing Tripp in the case Musk brought. He is trying to get the SEC to investigate.





One other thing he pointed out in another tweet. It's interesting that Tripp went to the SEC On Tuesday or Wesdnesay, as a whistleblower, and if the allegations he made public are true, it is devastating. It's been a few days, and not a word from Musk about it yet. The lawyer said that is "not an accident," Musk suddenly isn't talking, and "Let sunshine be the cleanser for $TSLA."

 

Musk took down his tweets. But I know that what we saw was the real Elon Musk.

He was going to insert himself into the situation, and thought he'd be fawned over as a a genius who has saved the day. It was about him.

That diver, who was actually serving a purpose there, made some remarks to CNN that were brutal:

“He can stick his submarine where it hurts .It had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like. It just had absolutely no chance of working. . . . The submarine I believe was about 5 feet, 6 inches long, rigid, so it wouldn’t have gone round corners or round any obstacle. . . . It wouldn’t have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point. It was just a PR stunt.” He said that Musk was asked to leave the cave as “he should have been.”

And when Elon Musk isn't fawned over as a genius, he lashes out. Whether it's an investment analyst, a reporter or this guy.

For what it is worth, I think Musk is a very bright man. Intelligence wise. He was bright enough to be accepted into a PhD program in applied physics at U Penn, and I am sure he was a good self-taught computer programmer when he was younger. But what makes him a guy anyone should expect to have answers to life's unsolvable quandries, the way a bunch of evangelicals / cult types started acting 7 or 8 years ago?

Musk made a bunch of money during the dot-com bubble. He didn't revolutionize the world in any way. To some degree, he was in the right place at the right time. I am not taking anything away from that. I admire people who MAKE their luck. The Mark Cubans, the Elon Musks. But that doesn't mean their talents are greater than what they are. They are people who were willing to take small risks, dream a little, and then got REALLY lucky. In the case of Musk, he founded a web software company that created city guides for local newspapers, which gave them an online presence that they could use to sell advertising. We were in a period of ridiculously cheap money, thanks to Alan Greenspan's stupidity, and that meant there was a lot capital chasing every idea -- dogshit or otherwise -- and bidding up valuations. Musk was able to raise angel investment money, got the business going. . . .and then right before the dot-com bubble burst, he sold his business for $340 million to Compaq, which thought it would make Altavista into what Google eventually became. That business didn't revolutionize the world. Compaq just way overpaid (by a multiple of a gazillion) for something that is sitting in the dustbin of history. And Elon Musk got wealthy. It's similar to Mark Cuban. He sold broadcast.com to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock. Because Alan Greenspan had turned our real money into the equivalent of monopoly money. The dot.com bubble burst. Yahoo! looked ridiculous. And Mark Cuban is rich. Musk actually was smart enough to strike again, because he took that windfall that fell into his lap, was an investor in paypal (he did not create paypal), and turned that $340 million into even more money when eBay bought paypal in 2002.

I am not taking ANYTHING away from Musk -- or Cuban -- when it comes to their timing and savvy. They were both smart enough not to be so wrapped up in the late 1990s tech hype that they didn't take their lottery winnings and risk them in more speculative things that within a year or two were worthless. They banked their windfalls. But let's be real. Their biggest talent, really, was cashing in on Tulipmania at the right time.

In the case of Musk, though, he has spent his life trying to convince everyone of what an innovator and genius he is. It has a created a man who is used to being calling a genius, seems to need to be fawned over as a genius, and won't abide anyone who doesn't give him the genius treatment. And maybe he is innovative. But just because he throws out futuristic sounding ideas, doesn't mean they are realistic. And to the extent he tries to follow through, with all of his companies since he cashed out, all he has done is take handouts and loans from others. ... and burn through the money. That inevitably means (even if a new monetary induced bizarro world, similar to how Musk made his money in the first place enables him) his lenders (to the tune of billions of dollars) and investors aren't going to sit and fawn forever because he's a genius. When reality fully takes hold, whenever things deflate, and the inevitable worldwide deleveraging happens, he's just some guy who was a steward of other people's money and really sucked at it.

 

Jim Chanos at the Delivering Alpha conference with some CNBC talking heads before. It's 7 minutes of him on Musk and Tesla and his short position and the BS that is the Boring Company. Nothing groundbreaking, but I have always found Chanos to be so straightforward. He is the guy who says the emperor has no clothes, and he sticks to his guns, even when it takes a while for everyone else to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, these videos don't embed.

Top Tesla short-seller Chanos responds to Musk's inside trading accusation

The whole interview is interesting, the first part related to Musk making a veiled accusation about insider trading, the way he attacks others with BS when they don't hail him as a genius. But if you want to skip ahead, a good place is the 4:08 mark or so.

 

So this is working from memory, because I really didn't pay a ton of attention at the time to the short selling in Fairfax. I mean, the names involved were huge, and I was interested from that standpoint. But I never really looked at the company. .. . . I'd start by saying it is nuanced, because there were separate issues with the company (and Prem Watsa, who something tells me *is* a bit of a huckster) and there were several big name investors involved, including Dan Loeb and Stevie Cohen. Cohen does NOT have the integrity that Chanos has, so Cohen very well may have been doing Bobby Axelrod things to try to drive down the price of the stock. That is why it is complicated. You can't paint the short sellers in that stock with too broad of a brush.

Chanos is very good at sniffing out fraud. His track record speaks for itself. Honestly, he had Fairfax as the next Enron and it never turned out that way. And that was with them really putting the squeeze on the company and trying to force the ratings agencies to dig down. So he may have been wrong. Or it may actually be a giant fraud that has yet to implode. Canada is in a giant credit-induced bubble still, and that tends to hide fraud. . . . .until it doesn't.

Either way, the shorts were winning the battle against the company until the company sued. I really believe it saved its ass with that lawsuit, because everyone who tacked on bailed when they saw that it might not be a quick buck. Chanos himself, as far as ever came out, had done nothing that short sellers don't do all the time when they talk their book. He spoke to the media and made the case for why he thought the financials were bunk. There is nothing dishonest or illegal or wrong about that. But Fairfax essentially sued him for telling everyone what their own 10K said. The case was dismissed pretty easily.