I’ve said this before, and it seems especially apt now. Elon is the modern version of Henry Kaiser. He develops all sorts of ideas and starts all sorts of companies, but the only successful ones depend on government contracts. When he tries to satisfy a broad range of customers, he fails.
Twitter is part governmental, but also depends on a wide variety of customers and advertisers. It was starting to fail when he took it over, and it’s still failing now. He managed to spoil all of the previously seen “advantages” of Twitter. He drove away its main Democrat customers.
Tesla is a success because it depends on subsidies, not simple customer liking. SpaceX and Starlink are purely NSA surveillance contractors serving spies and tyrants, not humans.
His recent efforts like the Cbrtrk and now the Cbrtxi are just STUPID designs. The Cbrtrk violates every safety regulation in the book, and has no use as a real truck. Yesterday’s Cbrtxi holds only two people, and is designed to be impossible to get in and out. It has the weird up-opening doors of a million-dollar supercar, which will be puzzling and dangerous to the people who need taxis. It’s designed to be hard to maintain, which disqualifies it for use by real fleet owners.
Now that Powell has turned off the free money, venture capitalists are no longer going along with every STUPID idea to burn up free money and dodge taxes. Tesla’s Share Value goes down every time he announces one of these STUPID ideas, and the Holy Share Value of competing stupid ideas (like Uber) goes up. Wall Street’s weariness with Elon after years of slavish obedience is a healthy sign of the gradual return of real economics. Faster, please!
Later after looking at another picture, the supercar doors are even stupider than I thought. If they opened only upward, they would at least be handy in tight parking spaces. But they open both upward and outward, so they’re just as bad as ordinary doors, PLUS they can’t be opened in garages.
Polistra's Mill 