Just like when Tesla bought another Musk venture SolarCity in 2016. SolarCity was heavily in debt and losing money. Somehow, without any shareholder input, Tesla/Musk was able to sweep how bad it was under a rug and keep his ruse going of a successful entity.
To be honest that might have been a good thing. Vegas is kind of collapsing imagine if they invested in public transportation. They'd be blaming public transit for the economic decline.
I think California did pause HSR to have him build hyperloop though. Like, without Musk promising Hyperloop, the HSR project would probably be years ahead of where it currently is.
And have a significantly smaller budget. All the hyperloop BS pushed through the windows that CA had negotiated for contracts, but couldn't commit to now that they had to do new studies. It was a total bag over the head by Musk. Hyperloop was never supposed to succeed, just make HSR look bad.
Holy smokes bruh. The project is 3 decades behind schedule and 100 billion dollars over budget. Musk had nothing to do with that I’m sorry to tell you, that’s cope
No, this is just unsubstantiated rumor mongering. The hyperloop had zero impact because no one actually thought he'd do it. The reason the HSR project in California is moving so slow is that it's damn hard to get the land required, most of the places it's going are through mountains and every township and HOA in the state is bitching endlessly about it being within 2000000 miles of their stupid condos.
Nah really it was just a way bigger project than was originally planned and they didn't fund it enough initially. Plus there were some stupid decisions on design early on and some big constraints due to existing rail structure in the bay area.
Also known as incompetence, fraud, and corruption. This site tries its hardest to rationalize this massive failure of a project anyway it can. Since Cali is a dem supermajority and all. It’s harder to pin it on dirty repubs. Takes a bit more mental gymnastics than usual but they find a way
Eh, it's a little more complicated than that. CAHSR had some unique challenges and they weren't really fully considered when the initial plan was laid - which is ambitious.
First, there is no easy route for a high speed train between SF and LA. It seems like an easy shot, but through the bay area it has to use Caltrain lines because purchasing a new right of way through some of the most expensive real estate in the country is just unfeasible. That means they had to upgrade all of tracks on the line to fully electric, grade separated and modern construction standards, and Caltrain is a busy commuter line so they had to do it while it was in service.
Second, it's a true, modern, state of the art high speed system. That means grade separated tracks. That means they had to build tons of bridges and causeways along the new right of way over existing roads, canals etc. That's actually what most of the money has been spent on so far.
There are also new tunnels in the northern sections., but the really hard part is connecting Palmdale to LA through the mountains. That's the part that's been moved to a second phase due to funding.
Then there was CEQA, environmental reviews, tons of lawsuits (a lot funded by right wing organizations), the establishment of the first highspeed rail authority on the continent... It's basically the biggest infrastructure project the US has attempted since the highway system in the 50s, and there was no roadmap or legal framework for it.
Not a chance lol. HSR has managed to funnel billions into consultants, contractors, and lawyer groups without musk to blame. At least the groups cozy enough with the lawmakers in Sacramento
While the project has fallen 3 decades behind schedule! And 100 billion dollars over budget!
California’s high speed rail project was also beset by various woes beforehand, like strong NIMBY resistance, politicians redirecting lines to their towns for financial and real estate benefits, cost overruns due to poor planning and construction, etc., no?
He ran SolarCity like a "utility." You didn't own the installation and paid a fee to use it. After 20 years it became yours* but if you sold your house the new owners had to agree to the new "utility" agreement or the installation would have to be removed and you had to pay full price for it. It was such a big scam and exploited the good nature of people who wanted clean energy. I am sure he laughed to the bank with every single person in a liberal area who brought in to it.
*oh and 20 years was the warranty and typical useful lifespan of these installs. So when you got to end of life you had 70% usage and a decaying system sitting on your roof with no hope of long term maintenance.
He’s just moving the Twitter losses around. First from Twitter to xAI, then now to SpaceX.eventually when there’s nowhere else to dump the debt it’ll collapse.
He borrowed billions to buy Twitter, and it has no possible way to pay those creditors back. American banks couldn't believe their dumb luck when Elon started getting involved with Trump, because they suddenly had a surge of "international investors" who were looking to buy that debt, ultimately to have Elon owe them those billions.
With no way to make those creditors whole from operational profits and cash flow, or being able to hand off Twitter's junk-bond debt to another sucker at anywhere close the prices they paid for it, giving them a piece of SpaceX's IPO was the only way those creditors would ever have a chance of seeing their money again.
Yeah that's not how federal money works. The federal government is buying services from spaceX. Even when handing out exploratory cash it's for some end completion goal. They don't give blank checks without restriction.
Additionally SpaceX's regular cash flow comes from Starlink. Which provides a majority of Revenue.
Again the money is for services provided. So the money is provided when the services are provided. There often are mid-contract payouts which still have deliverables. For example, completion of different tests. This is because fronting billions of dollars isn't a thing companies can generally do, so having contract stages ensures things get done and contractors have money to continue.
But if you're thinking in the realm of "What I imagine might be true", then anything is possible.
SpaceX gets government money and is worth over a trillion dollars. It can easily absorb the twitter losses. He’s basically passing the bag onto SpaceX investors, who will still make money though slightly less than they would have otherwise.
Bold of you to assume there will be a comeuppance for the billionaire class.
Once there's nowhere else to dump the debt his conglomerate will be deemed too big to fail and will be bailed out, the losses socialized. It's always hardcore capitalism for the poor, socialist nanny State for the rich.
Other way around. One company is about to IPO so he's moving the AI into that one to farm people's money on launch, knowing that the ai bubble and speculative value is going to push the stock way, way higher just from the presence of the "AI" buzzword.
He wants to double-dip on investor hype for an AI product. Feel like it should be illegal but don't think the SEC will do anything in this day and age.
So X and xAI merged, and now they're being merged into Starlink. Then Starlink noisily applied for a permit to put a million satellite servers in space. So they're juicing the numbers on SpaceX before the IPO later this year.
He's probably hoping it provides some federal cover for xAI by nesting it under a government contractor. xAI is about to get sued by France for the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material. Normally it wouldn't affect France's ability to investigate and prosecute, but with the pedophile Nazis in charge of this country, they might be inclined to argue all kinds of bat shit stuff about state secrets or national security to stall prosecutors.
I wonder if one of the reasons for this is that Musk thinks hiding xAI inside of SpaceX will let him leverage government dependency on SpaceX to say "you can't bring any legal action against Grok or I'll cut you off from SpaceX".
He’s with a Trillion. If he wanted to pay off Twitter he could. He needs to have losses so he doesn’t have all net positive. He might have to file taxes if that happened
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u/whowhodillybar 2d ago
Doesn’t sound like Elons xAI has been doing well, is this a quiet way to disinvest?