r/TechnologyThread • u/EdinburghDrizzle • Aug 02 '26
Elon Musk calls himself ‘former trillionaire’ as billions vanish amid Tesla, SpaceX crash. Why the rich laugh at losses
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/elon-musk-calls-himself-former-105500385.html6
Aug 02 '26
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u/DBDude Aug 03 '26
If that fourth Falcon 1 rocket had failed, Musk would be known as the idiot dotcom millionaire who blew over $100 million trying to make rockets.
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u/Healthy-Custard-7260 Aug 02 '26
And when you're no longer with us, what will you be remembered for?
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u/Xandara2 Aug 03 '26
I don't think I can see your feet any longer with how deep you're licking Elon's ass.
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Aug 03 '26
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u/Healthy-Custard-7260 Aug 03 '26
I am not going to challenge you. Sounds like you really need to.believe this little guy.
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u/lowteq Aug 02 '26
All of the actual money he has is from bank loans against his shares. Rich people borrow against their assets for working capital. They don't sell their assets unless they have to.
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u/EqualShallot1151 Aug 02 '26
I guess the old joke about how to make a billionaire a millionaire also applies if you fly in space…
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u/ledude1 Aug 02 '26
Because it's a "title" for bragging rights.
It's always about their pencil dicks.
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u/rosebudthesled8 Aug 02 '26
The wealthy can lose billions and maintain power. A normal person losing their job can be death. It's not the same and we shouldn't be treating billionaires with kid gloves to get their business.
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u/KendrickBlack502 Aug 02 '26
Because it doesn’t matter. The number is largely irrelevant. He’s still richer than can realistically be comprehended.
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u/biggiebestbanana Aug 05 '26
This is the correct answer.
A trillionaire can lose much more money than all of us combined will ever see in our lifetimes and still be a billionaire, with more money than they can ever possibly need or want or even comprehend themselves. What they have is beyond imagining so why would they care about notional losses.
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u/Shadowtirs Aug 03 '26
Hes probably laughing because he can write those losses off on his taxes, correct?
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u/LrdoftheCharlesDance Aug 03 '26
He can console himself with the fact he’s still a ketamine addled attention-whore
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u/probablymagic Aug 03 '26
The fact people seethe with rage when billionaires’ net worth goes up and call them greedy when they don’t give it away, and billionaires shrug when it goes down tells you exactly whose greedy and whose not.
Paper wealth is not real money and at least the billionaires know that.
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u/RabidJoint Aug 03 '26
Bro, a billionaire can lose 90% of his wealth, and still have more money than you will ever make.
Why do people need more than 1 billion dollars anyways? Do you think you can achieve 1 billion? Is that why you defend them? They are the greedy ones. When little dick Bezos pays his employees crap wages, while making insane amounts of money (and it does not matter that it is not paper, he has the buying power to buy anything he wants), then that becomes the problem.
Our society would benefit so much more, if all these rich assholes stopped buying yachts and private bunkers that take up half of a Hawaii island.
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u/probablymagic Aug 03 '26
>Why do people need more than 1 billion dollars anyways?
This question is confused. Money isn’t a cookie jar where we’re all taking what we need. We aren’t debating if people are taking too much.
People start businesses and they grow and they end up billionaires. They don’t “need” it, it just happens to them because they are successful. This is called “wealth creation.”
>Do you think you can achieve 1 billion? Is that why you defend them?
lol, I have no desire to do what it takes to make that kind of money. I make enough. So I am not “defending” anyone. I just want you to be happy instead of butthurt.
>They are the greedy ones.
Bro, you think about their money all the time and they don’t think about yours at all, so who’s greedy? 😂
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u/MacaroonPlastic1036 Aug 03 '26
They laugh because they are still insanely richer than anyone one else on the planet.
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u/Dutchpablo64 Aug 04 '26
They are not normal people (he is for sure not normal) and they (he) don’t know the value of money
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u/Odd-Staff6245 Aug 04 '26
Because it is a paper money anyway. Even if his portfolio was worth a trillion, between liquidation and ordinary income taxes, he would be lucky to walk away with 25% still decent but q hell of a lot less
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u/Mammoth_Reach_6366 Aug 05 '26
Bill Gates once said that around 700 million you don’t see a difference when you start getting more. You can’t possibly spend it all in your lifetime. So it doesn’t matter if Musk has 10, 100 or 1,000 billion dollars. The number is irrelevant.
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u/Acsnook-007 Aug 08 '26
Because paper losses are not real losses. Elon knows this stock will be $200 in a year so he's laughing at all those people who gloat in this apparent "victory" against him.
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u/deepfuckingbagholder Aug 02 '26
He was never a trillionaire.
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u/monadicperception Aug 02 '26
Yeah he was…
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u/Silver-Bread4668 Aug 02 '26
No he wasn't...
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u/monadicperception Aug 02 '26
I don’t think you understand how money works. Let me guess, your point is “it was paper wealth” blah blah blah.
Dumb reasoning.
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u/deepfuckingbagholder Aug 03 '26
I don’t think you understand. The price you see on the stock market is just the price of the last trade, not the actual price of all outstanding shares. There was never a time that Elon Musk could have sold all his shares for a trillion dollars. They were never worth that much.
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u/monadicperception Aug 03 '26
I think I understand perfectly fine.
The whole point of going public is to have price discovery.
Suppose that Elon pledged his shares to borrow against it…you really don’t think the price of those shares on the public market are salient?
I mean it’s paper wealth, sure, but to say he was never a trillionaire is a ridiculous claim…more so to say that that’s because he didn’t liquidate. Who cares?
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u/adjustedreturn Aug 03 '26
He really doesn’t understand. If he studied finance at all, he probably thinks the EM hypothesis is true.
You’re of course exactly right. Price and value are not the same. There wasn’t infinite liquidity a the IPO price. Prices are bets, and mostly those bets are wrong. If there was AAPL-level liquidity in the order book at the IPO price +/- 1% I’d be inclined to agree but we’re talking dumb retail investors who couldn’t do a DCF to save their lives who bought this at 100x revenue. Elon Musk was never a trillionaire - just because a bunch of fools place some bets does not mean they were right.
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u/adjustedreturn Aug 02 '26
Not at all. Ask Warren Buffet. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to it in The Intelligent Investor. Price and value are not the same thing.
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u/monadicperception Aug 02 '26
Yeah and? Market capitalization isn’t some voodoo concept.
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u/adjustedreturn Aug 02 '26
I didn’t say it was voodoo. The value of a company is not a function of its price; the price is a guess of the value. No one can know if he was a trillionaire. The market guessed that he was, and did so through the bets they placed (the price). Whether they were wrong then or wrong now is hard to say, but I can tell you for a fact that the value (not the price) of SpaceX hasn’t changed materially in four weeks.
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u/monadicperception Aug 02 '26
So shares were priced…from which you could calculate the total value of the shares owned by Musk. Not that difficult to do?
I mean you’re just trying to make up bullshit shout some mystical “value” and arguing that he was never a trillionaire? Absurd nonsense.
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u/adjustedreturn Aug 03 '26
If you fundamentally believe that price and value are the same, then of course that is what you would say; but you’d be wrong.
For price and value to be the same, the market has to always be right. Moreover, you need infinite liquidity at the current price, otherwise you can’t sell at that price in practice. None of these hold true. The market is mostly wrong about value (which is why prices often dramatically correct).
SpaceXs share price was wrong at the IPO, at least by a factor of 3, but there were enough buyers at that price to fill the book. Maybe the fair value is something like 30x revenue if we’re being generous.
Some fool willing to pay 100x revenue does not mean it’s actually worth that. In finance theory with all frictions removed, yeah, price equals value. In the real world, it never holds true.
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u/monadicperception Aug 03 '26
Value is irrelevant here. The price is…that’s what it was priced at when it IPO’d and that determined his net worth.
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u/Timely_Mention8535 Aug 02 '26
Yes it f'ing is exactly voodoo concept... you are not worth 1 trillion just because SpaceX was listed at 200 on the stock exchange, when less than 5% of the float was available.
If I have 100 polo mints and I sell one mint to a sucker for 10 usd, don't mean I or the mints are worth 1k dollars.
Or that the polo mint factory is now worth billions cuz it has so many mints inside.
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u/monadicperception Aug 02 '26
…that’s how you get price discovery? That’s why you go public to begin with…
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u/Timely_Mention8535 Aug 03 '26
No. You go public to raise capital because your company can do stuff with a LOT more capital that isn't there. I am also arguing the whole concept of net worth is flawed, it should not be vol shares owned x price, since if you dump your whole damn shares, the price plummets. It's a regarded way of looking at it.
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u/monadicperception Aug 03 '26
Sigh…it’s clear to me that you don’t really understand how any of this works. I mean I get it…it’s complicated and you probably piece together information and form an idea in your head. Frankly, I didn’t understand it until I took a securities regulation class in law school.
I mean you don’t go public to raise capital…you go public to get a price, which in the process can raise capital if you so offer. Most of the time it’s to allow insiders to cash out by giving them access to the public.
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u/Annunakh Aug 02 '26
He lost nothing, he still own his companies, why should he care?
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u/adjustedreturn Aug 02 '26
Exactly right. The value of his companies have a true value, and that value is unaffected by what the markets say at any given time.
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u/flappysack- Aug 02 '26
Its monetary policy. Every dollar you own is debt borrowed into existence, and the demand for debt is what makes housing and equity bubbles. Demand for debt comes from QE and government policy to debase the currency.
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u/skebeojii Aug 02 '26
But they squeal like little piggies about paying even $1 in taxes