Elon Musk takes over Twitter

Yeah, I understood what you were saying.

In the case of Elon Musk, honestly he's not even really a master shoemaker. His business is ostensibly Tesla, and it's not the company most people think it is. Up until sometime within the last year +, it was selling every car at a loss of a few thousand dollars. The company lost money every year of its existence (while running up debt and collecting subsidies) until 2 years ago when it finally posted positive net income. Even there, the source of that income was a subsidy by which the government is forcing other car companies to buy emissions credits from Tesla in order to operate, and on buying and selling bitcoin, when he essentially made that Tesla's main business in a fit of him being him (and the company still has a stake which it is holding at a current loss). The only reason the company is actually in business is that it has received hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies when you add it all up, including a government "loan" that he essentially defaulted on. He has been bailed out multiple times like that.

After that, he rode zero interest rate policy that had people desperate for yield reaching into risky lending situations to make what they were being robbed of, and it allowed him to run up billions of dollars of debt that he could keep rolling over because interest rates were being suppressed. That zero interest rate policy also pushed people so far along the risk curve that he was able to keep diluting Tesla's outstanding stock, even as the value of the equity kept going higher and higher into bubble territory (which is the source of his paper wealth) -- it defied all reason (when you dilute your stock, the value should plummet, but that was how much liquidity has been sloshing around by all of the misguided "policy" and the type of malinvestment it spurred).

The short of it is that he is a chaotic guy, and he has been the biggest beneficiary on earth of government gladhannding and a central bank that spent more than a decade blowing bubbles and creating a survival of the unfittest environment that he thrives in. And people still don't get it, even as that era is coming to an end and the bubble is slowly deflating (which is what made his Twitter offer so funny -- he made an insane offer right as funding costs starting shooting higher and taking the air out of the bubble; he was biggest beneficiary of the batshit environment and then his Twitter offer likely will go down as having signalled the top). Right now, Tesla's business is slowing rapidly. He's not a master shoemaker. People could afford $75,000 status symbols when everyone was getting fabulously wealthy on paper from a bubble environment. He sold a lot of them -- at a loss for every one he sold! But just as Tesla's ability to sell those cars was peaking and they were able to start turning a small profit on each car, last quarter they produced thousands of cars that they weren't able to sell. His business in China has fallen off a cliff, for example. It's over for that business; there are competitors and people are more strapped now -- it may be viable as a niche car maker under someone else's leadership if it can cut costs, shed the remaining debt somehow and run way more lean than it has under him. But he knows about as much about running a car company as he does about running Twitter.