✨ 15 Jan 2022 | Value Investing Substack NEWS
Exposing the Fraudulence of Elon Musk, EM & Value analyzes CK Hutchison, Fabricated Knowledge explores TSMC's future, Crazy Rich Asian: Thai billionaire Nualphan Lamsam, Massive volcano rocks Tonga
HIGHLIGHTS
“It’s a tough one to quantify. There are so many dynamics that have contributed to its success that are tough to nail down. What I was trying to do with the book is show that they’ve been in these cycles kind of like booms and busts. They’ve run into trouble where they had to pull off some miracle to survive. But then they didn’t fundamentally fix those problems and continued to find themselves back there. There are countless times where they’ve been at the brink of bankruptcy, probably more than we even know about publicly, because we often only find out about them years later. There are a number of things you can say about this. Without full self-driving—which I think is absolutely a fraud—Tesla would have failed. This cycle accelerated to a whole new level that took Tesla into genuine fraud. But in terms of the government’s role, the almost half a billion dollar loan that the Obama administration gave to them absolutely saved them. Musk has tried to reframe it as if Daimler saved them, and then the government piggybacked. We now know that Daimler did not actually agree. They were not going to invest until they knew the government was on board, which is what caused Musk to pre-announce—he said, in an email to owners and investors (this is when Tesla was a private company) that the government loan (which, by the way, his predecessor, Martin Eberhard, had already been lobbying for before Musk was CEO) has officially been approved, and it will be dispersed within months. At the time he made that statement, Tesla had not even submitted a valid application for the loan program. They didn’t even have a complete application, let alone approval. Approval didn’t come until a year later or something like that, and disbursement even longer after that. And then we have the subsidies. In a lot of cases, the subsidies for Tesla have been rewarding people for choices they were going to already make anyway. The Tesla stretch is famous. People have stretched financially to afford a Tesla. And those subsidies have been an important part of it. The most overlooked thing is the battery swap. California’s credit thing has been huge. And what people don’t understand there is that the competitors have been subsidizing Tesla. Basically, Tesla is getting paid for them not to develop EVs. So the idea that Tesla’s presence somehow forces everyone else to make EVs is really not true. It’s the opposite. Tesla’s maximizing those credits by doing things like the completely fraudulent battery swap thing. A lot of things that have kept Tesla alive, and government is one of them. So now Musk says, Oh, there shouldn’t be subsidies for anything, and it’s totally hypocritical. It’s just another sign of who he is as a person.”
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Tonga tsunami, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption: Surging waves hit island nation (massive volcano eruption off the coast of Australia)