I wonder if Elon can fuck up his companies to the point where he actually stops being rich altogether. Doesn't seem possible at first glance, but then again most of us would not be able to fuck up a company with this good press this badly this quickly. He is truly an incredible man, and he belongs on Mars.
SpaceX is a key aerospace contractor, so as long as he keeps hold of his SpaceX stock he's not going to be allowed to fail out of being a billionaire,
He is probably among the least cash-rich of the extremely wealthy, nearly all of his wealth is tied up in overinflated stocks and he's been exposing himself as an idiot daily ever since he bought Twitter to the point that the myth of his genius has collapsed even in sectors that used to constantly blow smoke up his ass. It's unlikely that he'll stop being rich altogether but I could definitely see him get to just "regular" uber-wealthy.
He'll be a right wing grifter in 10 years, a jordan peterson of tech.
Sure, but he's also a right wing grifter today, so that's not much of a prediction.
ELI5: why does it matter if the value of a stock goes down? Like, does it change any of the on-the-ground reality of how many cars Tesla can make and sell? Just the concept of public shareholding seems kind of mystical and weird to me, especially for a company that doesn't pay dividends. I understand why it would be desirable to have sole ownership of a company, or be one of a small number of owners, as you can make real decisions about how to allocate the resources and efforts of that company. But if you're just a small individual investor, there's no pretense that you can cause any change in the company or re-allocate resources from it to yourself.
It's all a big shell game. Basically the higher the stock price the more money you can take out in loans that have favorable terms only accessible to people with billions in equity.
The really fun part is that because this is debt and not assets, they don't have to pay taxes on the actual money part of their wealth. And they don't have to pay taxes on the stock since they're not actually selling it.
It should go up because Elon chungus wholesome 100 will make cybertruck soon
In this case the loans he took out to buy Twitter used his Telsa stock as collateral. If he falls too far he can get margin called etc.
More or less, Elon didn't have 45 billion laying around in cash, so when he wanted to buy twitter, he put up a bunch of TSLA stock and said "If I can't repay the loan, you can sell these stocks and get your money back that way". However that also means that if the TSLA stock price goes down, and the banks can't sell them for what Elon said they would be able do, Elon needs to either sell more stock, or somehow come up with the amount he owes in cash. The big problem is that whenever a stock is tied as heavily to an individual as the TSLA stock is to Elon, if he suddenly begins selling off more of his stocks, the price goes down even further, since "the market" (i.e. other people who also own TSLA stock), will also begin selling their stocks, since they want to avoid holding on to stocks that are worth less than they (said people who also own TSLA stock) paid for them. This is further compounded by the high degree of automation, where even big funds/investors have bots set up, so that if a stock suddenly loses 20% of it's value in a day, then the fund/big investor automatically begins selling off their own stock at incredibly rapid pace. This further lowers the price of individual TSLA stocks and requires Elon to sell even more to cover his loans that he took out to buy Twitter.
Anyway, I hope my attempt to answer your question wasn't too mystifying, since specifically the stock market is deliberately kept obfuscated, so that proles never begin questioning too much.
As for your other remark about public shareholding for a company that doesn't pay dividends, I'm 90% sure that companies have stopped paying dividends mostly, and are now instead focusing on doing stock buybacks in order to artificially inflate their own stock price, since it's common for leadership of a company to be paid mostly in stock and by using any profits garnered over a year to buyback stock, you reduce the amount of taxes that the company owes to the government, while also letting the executives reap even more reward.
if it hits 100 there is a chance the banks will liquidate the Tesla stock he used as collateral right? This would then push the price down further?
