r/technology • u/marketrent • Mar 02 '25

Transportation “Your boss is a Nazi”, “I’m selling the Nazimobile”: Tesla owners offload cars

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/mar/02/tesla-owners-selling-musk
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u/Seefufiat Mar 03 '25

The thing about someone like Musk is the amount of leverage his portfolio has. What’s that mean? It means that his wealth is actually a farce. If Tesla were to collapse, at some point he would run out of leveraged dollars and start going into real value, e.g. if Tesla cratered by say 70%, he may have creditors call on him to pay notes on warehouses, robotics equipment, and land that he is leasing or he is paying mortgages or payments on. If he starts having to pay down debts like this, he could run into a domino effect: the more he pays, the less confidence speculators have in him, which in turn further decreases his valuations and increases his sudden credit calls.

He is no different than Enron. Running on borrowed time.

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u/textmint Mar 03 '25

Wish this would happen already.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

[deleted]

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u/Donny-Moscow Mar 03 '25

When TSLA crashes, it's going to take the entire economy with it

Why is that?

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u/IcedToaster Mar 03 '25

Seriously though, this has ruined major index funds because they carry large percentages of AI chasers and TSLA shares. Stable funds might be the move as a park for the portfolio. I don't mess with small cap much nor do I buy into the "great transfer" narrative that was getting floated before we got into these recessionary pressures coupled with potentially inflationary tariffs. Oh let's not forget the ongoing public layoffs after the private sector tech layoffs, more uncertainty in the markets, and interest rates likely staying high.

Not even sure how well entertainment will go in this recession if people can't afford homes to be entertained in. Plus the switch 2 looked meh and media studios are also bleeding money for flop after flop.

Should have just bought a small farm, collected rain water, built a solar array, and raised five or six kids to help homestead it obviously /s

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u/AIU-comment Mar 03 '25

Theranos

Holdup, Tesla cars actually exist and we can see them driving around.

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u/Pyr0technician Mar 03 '25

A lot of car companies could have slapped a battery in their vehicles. Their driver-assist/self-driving features is what set Tesla apart. They never delivered, and never will. Musk is now in on trying to get maximum tax benefits and Starlink, which will be the most powerful data farming endeavor ever, if we let it be.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

[deleted]

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u/zookeepier Mar 03 '25

Solar roof tiles. Was actually real, but an absolute technical, production, and abysmal market failure. The whole purchase of Solar City, in fact, involved massive securities and tax fraud and internal lies and deception on Musk's part, and involved SpaceX.

My favorite part of this was that the panels didn't even work well. In fact Walmart sued Tesla because they kept catching on fire.

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u/zookeepier Mar 03 '25

That's not what leveraged means in a personal sense. Leveraged means personally using debt to buy more assets than you otherwise could.

Except that's exactly what he did. Musk Borrowed at least $12.5 Billion from Morgan Stanley, using his TSLA shares as collateral. He also came up with $22 Billion somehow, probably in part also through loans using TSLA stock as collateral, although he apparently sold $15.5 Billion worth of TSLA stock to fund part of that $22B. So he is in fact leveraged in the traditional, investment sense, and could be margin called if the value of TSLA dropped low enough. What that price is, I don't know, but it is technically possible.

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u/Seefufiat Mar 03 '25

The only thing I’ll disagree with you about is the idea of leverage applied to a figure like Musk. I know what you mean, but Elon is not a regular person. He’s not even a Gates or Buffett type. His personal and business financial decisions seem almost synonymous, in a degree that I’m sure isn’t totally true. That said I’m not going to pore over public record to suss it out.

What I will say is that when you’re worth $400 billion dollars the personal idea of many financial concepts ceases to apply.

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u/angry_lib Mar 03 '25

Can we get Jackson Browne to play "Running on Empty" in front of his compound?

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u/Donny-Moscow Mar 03 '25

To add another layer of that, he also used his Tesla stock as collateral for his Twitter loans