You didn't say it was more likely, your phasing was that you can see his other ventures failing in the next five years, his main other one being Spacex.

Yes, the TS routine, handwaving about how the bears will be right as soon as we get the zombie apocalypse or the next great great depression. Spacex and Tesla both already survived the great recession in much weaker less accomplished positions. And most recessions are rather boring and short lived, it would actually be very unusual for the next recession to be a historically major one. Aside from that Spacex has accomplished way to much to die at this point, worst case it would also be acquired, much like Tesla.

Disagree on SpaceX dying. It's part of the military industrial complex now, it's not going anywhere. Nothing to do with Tesla though.

With SpaceX Musk has hooked himself up to a permanent source of taxpayer funds - it's what he does, since he lacks the big-picture intelligence to compete successfully in the commercial space.

Nothing says "lacks big picture intelligence" like starting up a rocket company from nothing and ending up with huge government contracts that resulted from that stunning success. Don't have an opinion about Tesla but trying to spin Musk's incredible success with Spacex as illustrating Musk's lack of intelligence or foresight is ludicrous.

Success and visibility breeds praise. It's how the world works. The Enron team were hyped to Mars and beyond. The Valenat CEO was the darling of all Wall Street and a good number of firms besides. Means nothing.

There's Bezos genius - needed to succeed in the cutthroat business world taking on the majors from behind - and Musk genius - capable of disrupting an industry that's tiny and noncompetitive and pork-barreled and bureacratic and just begging for disruption by hiring talent and giving it a free hand.

Musk is a distant shadow of someone like Bezos. Or even someone like Bill Gates.

So musk is a genius but he lacks big picture intelligence. Got it. One might think it takes big picture intelligence to start a rocket company from scratch, but one would be wrong. Competing with small niche uncompetitive firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin is obviously pretty trivial.

Trivial? No. But far easier than competing in the global car space, or doing what Amazon has done.
Musk competed with tiny subsections of these firms, side projects that existed to suck up tax dollars and who had to follow bunches of bureacratic safety rules handed down by the government. Musk came in, cowboyed it up on safety, cosied up to the right people (he's brilliant at PR), and got government money. Then hired a bunch of disenfranchised rocket scientists and gave them free reign. Musk is good businessman and brilliant at PR, but that's about it.

What *precisely* has he done at the moment apart from this? I think you're putting the cart before the horse.

I'll be 100x more impressed if he can create a profitable car company competing sustainably with the majors. THAT is a hard job that takes a genius.

Apart from revolutionizing the space launch industry, what has he accomplished?

GOOD QUESTION

He's an alternative rocket provider who hasn't even halved the price of a launch compared to the competition, despite cutting lots of safety standards. This is a largely noncompetitive pork-barrelled bureaucratic industry, which means there's a lot of fat.

You and I have have very, very different views of what "revolutionized" means.

I think you're buying the spin, not the reality. Which is why Musk does the spin, talking in excited tones about "revolutionizing" space travel just like he's going to "revolutionize" tunnels and "revolutionize" the electric car and "revolutionize" electric trucking. People buy it. Who wouldn't get on board with a charlatan giving them hope and promising them the stars (in Musk's case, literally).

However you want to characterize what Musk did at Spacex it was a tremendous achievement, and one that no one thought he could pull off. You trying to minimize that achievement is hilarious.

Again, what, exactly, has he accomplished? Be specific. He's used a bunch of tax money to fund things, and cut safety standards on rockets to bring their costs down not even than 50%. Is that revolutionizing?

He might accomplish a lot, he might even revolutionize the industry, but he hasn't so far.

What has he accomplished? Bro he started a rocket company from scratch! Everyone thought he was nuts but he accomplished just what he set out to do.

BUT WHAT ELSE HAS HE DONE

http://www.spacex.com/missions

eh no. Plenty of commercial enterprises in there. Plus so far they reused a bunch of rockets, which has not happened before.

There is a real upwards trend in cheaper smaller satellites. With very expensive large satellites you want to use a more reliable company that has been around longer. Since the cost of losing it would be much larger than the cost savings. But with cheaper satellites they have a real cost advantage.

And you contradict yourself. You say that he sucks up taxpayer money. But you admit that he knocked out a lot of costs. Which is good.. since that saves taxpayer money.

lol exactly

It's not a moral thing - it has to do with commercial viability. Name an industry Musk has succeeded in without government handouts? He's a total failure.

The closest to "no government handouts" is SolarCity, and that was so close to going under that he had to have Tesla buy it to stop it from going bankrupt.

I'm not sure people appreciate the extent to which all of the efficiencies have been squeezed out, in a two-player government-teat low commercial size rocket industry in the billions, as compared to a globally competing car manufacturing industry in the trillions, which has dozens of players in all niches. Take vertical integration as an example of a business strategy. Nearly certain to fail badly in cars, which is why no car maker does it. Quite likely to do well in rockets, given that they're very limited production custom built units in which economies of scale don't exist.

That's what this is about - what does SpaceX say about his ability to pull off Tesla? The answer is, it says very little. One is a place where grandiose claims and risky bets and doing things a different way can pay off; the other is a place where they're likely to run face first into the reality that there's few ways in which in the global car industry can be made better at what they do.

TS is the f*cking king of trolls or an amazing spam bot...SpaceX views are pure gold

Lockheed martin's market value is $85 billion. SpaceX is valued at $21 billion currently. With your logic, all they should have done is take someone who is good at marketing and knows some physics, get together some rocket scientists, and they could have created $20 billion of value with only a few billion $ of capital. Yet they did not do that. If only they knew it was that obvious! Instead they are struggling to compete with SpaceX currently.

Also you talk about safety, but so far they did not kill any people with their rockets. So I am not sure why you use that word? They have a 94% success rate which will probably go up, and knocked out about 50% of the costs. If they can keep up the reliability with their reused rockets, they will knock down the costs further. Apparently those dummies at Lockheed and Boeing really failed to grab some of that easy money.

Lol did you ignore that part in my post where I showed that SpaceX launched tons of rockets for private firms?

Also the oil industry received loads of help when they started out. And when they got that loan from the government they paid it back within a year or so. And that does not really count since loads of companies that had very viable businesses and balance sheets were struggling to refinance.

And because the government provided liquidity in his firm in a time when the entire financial system was about to implode, he is a total failure?

https://electrek.co/2017/08/11/tesla...-3-production/

To be fair, junk bonds trade at about 6% currently:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/16/junk...ng-scared.html

So not that big of a discount. And the above is an average number.

edit: actually at 5.76% actually:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A0HYM2EY

So only a 9% discount.

Yeah except at a B- rating they're six tiers deep into junk rating. So something like 72% of corporate junk bonds have a higher credit rating, 11% have the same rating, and 17% have a worse rating. So just based on their rating they should have a higher than average interest yield.

That is pretty crazy. I guess investors trust equity market more than Moody's.

He would be nuts not to issue them lol.

honestly seeing how people buy their junk bonds and equity i just don't get why they keep raising cash in small steps. at current runrate we will be talking about their next capraise or bondissue before the year ends... just raise 5-10b$ and be done for a year or two.
unless elon strikes gold or oil while tunneling LA they're gonna need it anyway.

Man this post is so bad, like I begin to understand why Trump is our President bad

If you trust bond ratings, why are you interest in bonds at all?

Bond ratings are the dumbest thing ever, they mean jack ****.

This is not how oversubscription works. You cannot go ahead and say:
"We are going to offer $1.5bn what would you pay for a bond that pays 5.75% p.a.?"
"Well, we found $15bn worth of interest, we are going to raise $15bn."

The first guy would get a completely different deal. Oversubscription means that more people bid money than they had to offer. This is common and it drives up the price. With stocks this means that a company can actually raise more money because they get more money for a single stock.
With bonds, the offering starts with the notional and the coupon. Then people bid how much they would pay for it, which eventually determines the yield. The oversubscribed people for Tesla bonds wanted a yield higher than 5.25%.

Again, this means jack ****. People don't buy the fact that that many companies are worse than Tesla. They assume that Tesla is actually way better than that and I would agree with them.

Those bond ratings don't mean anything. They have a financial statements scraper type those things into a calculation engine and get a result. This result is the rating and that's what they publish. Then they receive money for it. If you want to talk about fraud, maybe start with the big three rating agencies.

You might wanna post some actual content. So far none of your posts have shown any signs of intelligence.
I agree with TS when he says that people should post substance so you can learn from each other. Personal attacks alone are the complete opposite of it.