We’ve got 6 companies with a trillion dollar market cap, and one of them is a relatively small car company.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The market for exploding cars has surged since we lost the ability to leave the house. So, anyway, on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis...

      I also encourage you to look up DWAC, the SPAC that's hosting Donald Trump's fledgling social media project. 1000% jump in three days, once the acquisition was announced.

      • RandyLahey [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The market for exploding cars

        i think thats a little reductive and unfair, they can also use cutting-edge ai technology to automatically plow you headfirst into oncoming traffic, a significant market advantage over their competitors

  • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The day one of those companies finally gets busted for cooking the books super hard is going to result in thousands of working class people dying due to having their whole shit just wiped the fuck out, and that's insane.

    • Express [any,none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      No one in the US will go under until it’s obvious they have lost their “leadership” role to everyone and become a regular country. Unfortunately that means probably after they lose a war against a major power if history is any guide.

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I mean, working class people lose their ass every single time the economy shits the bed because all the costs are just spread out onto the people. I think it's very nearly at a point where a significant number of major American companies are getting dangerously close to the worldcom-tyco-peregrine-enron zone in terms of "creative accounting." I think the economy is also in a volatile enough state (which shows no signs of improving anytime soon) that a big company having an accounting scandal in the next couple of years leading to a huge crash.

        • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          yeah corporate debt is still at record levels. During covid it was a worry but the Federal Reserve deployed the money printer. That can only work for so long though sooo.... :soviet-hmm:

          • Three_Magpies [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Am I correct in thinking that the Fed printing money to cover stock losses at the beginning of the pandemic was literally them shoveling porky money on the promise that the working class would pay for it eventually?

            • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              basically. The cost of the money printer is inflation which now eats about 5% of everyone's money each year now. (Used to be ~2%) Wages have been depressed forever so it really crunches on workers and of course businesses got all the free money to cover any losses. Small silver lining is that debt becomes cheaper with higher inflation, unless you have some bullshit adjustable rate debt, but otherwise workers could maybe benefit that way.

              • Express [any,none/use name]
                ·
                3 years ago

                The first thing any serious “reform” candidate would do would be to force the rich to buy government bonds extremely hard and then crank the money printer hard. It would be very unfortunate for the people in the short term, but it would kill the massive class divide after inflation stabilized. There are a few historical examples of countries doing this and doing pretty well afterwards even within a capitalist framework.

                • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

                  Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting removed into a gamble and a lottery.

                  Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

                  -John Maynard Keynes

          • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There's like a hundred different possibilities all racing each other to blow everything up one after another. It's all gonna go boom one of these days, and it's gonna be really bad.

          • sagarmatha [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            is it really gonna stop working though? Sure inflation is up (though probably more shortages and pandemic costs than anything else) but is there really anything else that prevents them from running the printer forever apart from ideology?

    • Stancera [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I don't think that will ever happen again. The wheels almost came off in 2008. They still just bail out who ever they can.

      • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Since the neoliberal era began in the 70s, there's been one of these roughly every 10 years, usually near turnover of the new decade, and it used to be that the west's crisis was preceded a few years by one in Asia, but now they're just global.

        The first energy crisis in 1973,

        The '79 energy crisis that continued into the 80s,

        The Japanese Asset Price bubble and the Early 90s recession,

        The Asian financial crisis and the Dot-com bubble bursting,

        The global late 2000s crisis,

        Since the initial crash in 2020, the world's governments have basically just been sticking band-aid after band-aid over everything while sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalala" which has somehow to date prevented it from fully crashing. As soon as they run out of steam on that, shit's going to hit the fan.

        • MathVelazquez [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          There was the 2001 economic crash after 9/11. Bush literally telling people to buy hamburders to be patriotic.

          • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Yeah, that kinda fits in with the Dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, this shit really is just like every 7-10 years that everything explodes.

            • Mother [any]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Sure my house collapses with me inside every 7 years but every time after I rebuild it exactly the same way it turns out fine for six

              • 01100011101001111100 [she/her]
                ·
                3 years ago

                You literally cant explain to people that cyclic decadal crises arent a feature of human existance, they totally stem from capitalism. Capitalist realism is so baked in that people cannot conceive of any alternative that's better - even something as simple as imagine a future where growth is more controlled and there arent crashes all the time that wipe out your savings and kick you out of a job.

                • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  And every time it happens, people believe that it can never happen again. I remember people in '07 and early '08 once the instability had already started rearing its head saying "no no, that could never happen again! They passed Sarbanes-Oxley so businesses won't get overvalued or pop, besides we were hardly affected here in Canada!" and then wham, wow, it happened again!

                  Per my parents, people were equally shocked that the early 90s recession happened, and the recovery from that recession was just the dot-com bubble which went on to pop in the 2000s and the beginnings of the housing bubble which went off in the US in '08 and is still rising here in CA.

  • carbohydra [des/pair]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    We do not speak of Enron.

    EDIT: NEW NICKNAME: ENRON MUSK 😂🤣😂😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

  • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Their market cap went up $30bn off the back of a $4bn deal with a company that is bankrupt and unable to pay for the deal

    Alongside that, the market cap of the big gig economy companies is around $200m. None of them make money and are reliant on cheap money being printed to keep their VC flowing.

    Meanwhile, Bitcoin is at or around an all time high.

    The next 10 years are gonna be some to remember! :doomjak:

    • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      It went up by more than $30bn. It went up by $60bn, or - by one entire Ford market cap. You know, Ford, the company that has much more revenue and is more profitable than Tesla.

      The next 10 years are gonna be some to remember!

      IMO, nothing will happen. If there is a big correction when it comes to these big stocks, then the Fed will step in and give them free money. And there will be no inflation as a result of that action, since the Fed will just be making sure that someone with $100 billion in wealth stays at $100 billion and doesn't drop down to $50 billion. They can literally do this forever.

      • CrimsonSage [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Atleast the tulip bulbs would eventually grow into tulips.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        They can literally do this forever.

        At some point something has to give. I think it'll be low intensity warfare with Nazis attacking critical infrastructure.

    • Interloper [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The next 10 years are gonna be some to remember!

      i'm already trying so hard to forget

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The economy isn't real. It's a bunch of trust fund nerds getting high sniffing each others' farts

      • spectre [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        They've been waving their magic economy wands even harder and more chaotically since 2008, and things seem to magically stay afloat. Any rational view of "the economy" (the stock market in this case, but one could have a very similar discussion about the real economy) would say that it will all topple down any minute now. Even a liberal economist is happy to say that a recession is part of a "healthy" economic cycle. Nevertheless, the house of cards is likely to grow even taller and make the fall even more violent and deadly for the most poor.

      • Express [any,none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        As long as the US can use its soft and hard power to bully everyone else in the world then yes it can keep going because the downsides can be mitigated away.

  • Abraxiel
    ·
    3 years ago

    It's not an investment in vehicles, it's an investment vehicle.

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Sounds wasteful, tbh. We should have them do something more useful, like composting at the bottom of a particularly deep pit.

      • CrimsonSage [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I wish these ghouls would just do what the old ruling class used to do and start ingesting mercury.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    want to short it but the market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent

  • activated [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This is a cold take but it's just a MLM scheme / pyramid scheme for techbros

    • Nama [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      And it´s so fucking big, that it will not be allowed to fail. I´ll laugh my ass off if Tesla saves the world, not with its electric cars, but by crashing the entire world economy.

      • activated [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Imagining a Borges story about a company that produced almost nothing but so many people invested in it that held the economy hostage and so it eventually took the place of "the economy" insofar as people put their money in and out of it to reflect the vicissitudes of the market. And then eventually it took control of the world, and people continued to buy and share its stock. Your role in democracy was just a straightforward shareholder's vote, etc.

        • Nama [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          ...is it fair to compre Tesla stock to a crypto currency?

          • activated [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Absolutely, especially when BTC rises and falls with TSLA because of Tesla accepting it or buying bitcoins and whatnot

            • Nama [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Amazing. We truly live in the dumbest timeline.

              • activated [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                I could kill bitcoin forever.

                All I would have to do is invest heavily into it and it would crash forever.

                I am not ready to make this sacrifice.

  • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    hey the bigger they are, they harder they fall. The contradictions of capitalism will sort out Musk in due time...

  • Hoyt [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    My dad thinks that Tesla will eventually be worth all of this money because "look at what they're doing with batteries. they've got factories and stuff and batteries are the future"

    lol

    lmao

    • DontComeAlaHarris [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It's just a bunch of 18650 cells in a big pack. What exactly does he think they're doing with batteries that's so innovative lol

      • Hoyt [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        idk he just has a bunch of TSLA stock (that has made him a lot of money, to be fair) and I think he just wants it to mean something. but when I grill him on it, he admits that he knows the stock price is just meaningless anyways. he's just got MSNBC boomer brain and im afraid its terminal

      • Hoyt [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        fuck if I know. like there's a point to be made that cutting fossil fuels would be helped with like, better energy density/efficiency in batteries, but Tesla ain't doing that

  • zeal0telite [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Looking forward to the 2054 Best Picture winner called "T$LA" that people call "the spiritual successor to The Big Short".

    Also movie tickets cost $120.

    • mr_world [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Just the story of a rag-tag group of outcasts, weirdos, and underdogs known as...hedge fund managers...taking on the big dogs and showing society the truth!