I wonder if you could provide a citation for the “fact” that “Twitter kicked off a general round of layoffs in Silicon Valley”.
Twitter started layoffs November 4, 2022
Twilio laid off 850 Sept 14
Docusign laid off 670 Sept 28
Intel (habena labs 100 Oct 11
Microsoft 1000 Oct 17
F5 100 Oct 21
Stripe 1000 Nov 3
Twitter Nov 4 3750 (initial round)
The reason you didn’t hear of the previous layoffs is that they were done properly, not via a tweet from a fool.
ETA: Meta announced 11,000 layoffs on Nov 9. The timeline is just too tight for them to have just made this announcement in response to a tweet from the chief twit. They already had these plans in the works, and accomplished the layoffs without fanfare because they did them properly.
Look, I said $1 billion to $10 billion, recognizing that these kinds of valuations have huge error bars around them. And of courae lots of high valued companies turn out to be turkeys. So what? By standard methods of evaluating such things, it’s a reasonable spread. In any event, it’s small potatoes. Musk goes up and down in net worth by more than that on a good or bad day. But a $1 billion valuation would basically mean it’s done nothing since it has received a total of $938 million in VC funding.
But for the record, here is Crunchbase’s page on the Boring Company:
The Vegas loop is operating, and moved 100,000 people during CES. The company just got approval to expand the Vegas loop to 65 miles.
I’m skeptical about the future of the company, and thought it was a dumb idea at the beginning. But now I’m not sure. I still think the idea of cars in timy tunnels is at best niche feature like in Vegas, but I’m not sure that the development of a small, cheap tunnel boring device won’t turn out to be very useful for other infrastructure like underground pipelines. Time will tell. It’s like the Mars colonization idea: Stupid, but attempting it requires building things like reusable rockets that have tremendous value on their own, and which may have been the point in the first place.
For the Boring company, given that outside of Vegas they seem to have little going on I’d personally assume the valuation was closer to $1 billion than $10 billion.
You think? Do you know anything about The Boring company’s (lack) of accomplishments? Other than scamming Las Vegas out of the cost to build a subway, only incredibly less efficient than an actual subway it hasn’t done anything.
That you consider a valuation of between x and 10 times x to be a reasonable valuation speaks for itself.
I’ll put an imaginary $1000 into a stock of my choice, and someone else can put $1000 into The Boring Company, and we’ll see where we’re at in 10 years time… Edit… or even 5 years.
It’s not my opinion, it’s the best estimate of valuation at Crunchbase. I’m guessing you didn’t read the link? I never said it’s ‘reasonable’ in terms of using it as investing advice or something, but reasonable in the sense that it’s probably the best estimate we can do given that we’re talking about a private company that doesn’t have to report much about its operations.
There is value in the company. They have actual boring machines, and probably a whole bunch of patents. They also have a contract for 65 additional miles added to the Vegas loop, which has value whether the idea is stupid or not. If they build it, they get paid.
The fact that they are selling ‘burnt hair’ perfume and taking Dogecoin, however, would be serious alarm bells for me. It smells either of funding desperation, or an attempt to find new things to justify their existence, which would suggest that the car tunnel sales job may not be going so well. Especially now that VC capital is drying up.
None of this evaluation has anything to do with my opinion of Elon Musk, and it shouldn’t. Other than evaluating his potential to do great damage or great good. I can’t understand why people turn their hatred of Musk into a need to denigrate everything he has ever done.
It is possible to hold two things in your head at the same time: That Elon Musk is a giant horses’ ass personally, and that nonetheless he has done an awful lot of good for the world. And it’s possible that the same characteristics that make him a weird, sometimes cruel person personally are what enabled him to break through conventional wisdom and take giant risks no one else in the world would have attempted.
And the same characteristics sometimes cause him to miss badly. If you swing for the fences, expect to strike out more than most, but if a homer is worth ten strikeouts, It’s a great tradeoff. But it takes bucking the establishment, which might require an overconfident asshole to pull it off. I don’t have to like the guy, because I’m not looking for a friend or a political ally. Most businesses I invest in, I couldn’t tell you the political orientation of a single person in it.
A lot of this was already shown to be not accurate or exaggerations; in any case, I noted that having a lot of money means that guys like Musk can make gross mistakes and still come ahead, with a lot of money burned in the middle of that effort of course. Still the issues with Twitter are still very bad.
Of course “tanking” is relative, as I said before, Twitter will remain… As a weird place filled with right wing conspiracy yahoos, kept afloat by the money coming from wealthy yahoos.
Neither did you. The $1b to $10b is the range they give you unless you subscribe to get the actual number.
Says so right on the page
The Boring Company has a post-money valuation in the range of $1B to $10B as of Apr 20, 2022, according to PrivCo. Sign up for a free trial to view exact valuation and
Why bless your little heart @Sam_Stone. Just the accusation coming from you of not reading links was enough on its own to explode the irony meter. That you didn’t yourself is well… par for the course I guess.
I’m sorry, I forgot that anything you write comes with the tacit assumption that you don’t actually consider it at all reasonable. By the way, the reason the Boring Company doesn’t have much to report about its operations isn’t because “we’re talking about a private company”, it’s because it doesn’t have any operations outside of having scammed the city of Las Vegas out of that ~$1 billion to make something like a subway, only worse in every conceivable way.
This isn’t just you, the media does it as well, but that’s misleading. TSLA was $300/sh last August. It tanked after that, and was $113/sh at the start of the year. It’s still down from its peak.
I’d link an excellent video that goes into great detail about just how stupid this ‘’‘’‘brilliant solution to traffic’‘’‘’ is, but then someone might realize that it’s not his ankles getting sore from the biting that’s his problem but his knees being taken out from under him with cites.
I hope you noticed I didn’t have anything nice to say about the Boring company. All I said is that they have some assets and a contract that has value, but nothing else I could see. I said they looked desperate for cash or another product linem, and that at the low end of the valuation estimate they are worth about the value of the money put into it, which mens essentially no value. The investors would be lucky to get 25 cents on the dollar if it liquidated.
But that’s just the Musk fanboi in me saying that.
And when it went down, every other EV maker went down as well, some by much more. So the question is, (and I don’t know the answer because I haven’t looked yet), did Tesla recover as well as the other EV makers? Better, worse? If worse, you might make a case that Musk’s behavior cost them. But if it went down less that other EV makers and recovered better, it’s hard to see how Musk’s behavior could be at fault for anything, unless you think Tesla would have done even better without it, in which case… he built a hell of a company, huh?
Now to look up the numbers:
Last July 11, Rivian was at 29.93. Today it’s at 25.51. Down 14.77%
Last July 11, Tesla was at 234.34. Today it’s 269.61 Up 15.05%
Now, I wouldn’t claim that this means much, other than that the claim that the stock price tanked because of Elon’s Twitter behavior is not supported. It’s entirely possible that Tesla would have gone up even more had Musk not alienated people, but the share price doesn’t obviously show it.
To clarify, though I know you never take off your Elon goggles, this wasn’t about TSLA or EV makers in general. It’s about misleading phrasing used about investment performance using the Janet Jackson metric (“What Have You Done For Me Lately”), rather than quoting 1-year and or 5-year returns that give a more realistic idea of what’s going on with a stock. It’s wrong to tell noobs that TSLA has “grown” $150/share since January without including the context that it dropped ~$200/share in the months prior.
And, imo, it’s typical when talking about Tesla: the 5-year return is 1168%, nearly quadruple Apple, so fluffing or cherry-picking the numbers is unnecessary, but Elon’s fans can’t let even baseless claims slide. They’re worse than the Chinese gov’t.
The context was the article comparing Musk to Zuckerberg, and their numbers started from the beginning of the year. Semed like a reasonable enough starting point since I didn’t pick it. But then I was accused of picking the wrong date, so I just went YoY, a standard measure, and which captures the whole period from when Musk took over Twitter, and nothing before that which would just muddy the data. So it looks ike a perfectly fine measure.
And if I have to mention the context that it dropped $200 in the months prior, we should also add the context that the amount is less than the average for the EV industry at that time, right?
Looks to me like you’re the one trying to cherry pick. I think my selections are better and more fair: To discover if Tesla was hurt by Musk, take the share price of Tesla and a major competitor, check them the month before Musk bought Twitter to today, and see how their performance compared. We can do it with other EV makers if you like:
Lucid Motors was at $18.52 last July 11. It’s at $7.93 now. A 57.2% drop.
BYD: Was at 324.30 last July 11. Now $263.55 Down 18.73%
Of the major EV makers, only Tesla’s stock price is higher today than it was the day before Musk took over Tesla. That doesn’t seem like evidence that Musk’s antics are ruining Tesla. It’s not surprising, since TSLA was the third best performing stock on the Nasfaq this year. Also not great evidence for Musk destroying the value of the company.