July 16, 2021 - 10:48am
It’s July 13th, 2021, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk wanders nonchalantly from Delaware’s Court of Chancery to his personal Model X. He’s just taken to the stand to defend the EV company’s $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity back in 2016, after some of Tesla’s shareholders filed a lawsuit against him.
They claimed the merger possessed major conflicts of interest with the Musk family and that it had failed to deliver the profits Musk had promised.
Well, that’s because, contrary to the accepted narrative, the SolarCity merger was more of a bailout than an acquisition. It was a last-ditch attempt by Musk himself to save his companies from total bankruptcy. By creating a phoney solar shingle and presenting it to Tesla shareholders on the day before the proposed merger was set to go through, he persuaded them to approve it.
Failing to do so, as the lawsuit alluded to, spelled the downfall of Musk’s empire and a severe haircut to the wealth of several family members, including his brother Kimbal.
Yet the mass media, minus a few publications, declined to report that Musk had used a sham product demo to bail out multiple failing ventures. This, of course, enabled his ascent to stardom, effectively becoming the greatest vaporware salesman in modern history.
Consequently, anyone who understood what really happened that day has been subjected to a cringe-fest ever since. We’ve witnessed Musk make ever crazier promises he’s never delivered on. His proposed 150 mph Hyperloop and disease-curing “brain-machine interface” resulted in nothing more than an LSD disco tunnel and futuristic snake oil. It’s this overpromise, underdeliver scheme that has allowed Musk to become an unstoppable force, one backed by multiple global powers from the U.S. elite to the CCP.
So the likelihood of a deep multi-establishment figure, like Musk, facing punishment for past misdeeds remains next to nothing. This SolarCity acquisition lawsuit will prove to be just another reverse show-trial, a kangaroo court, and nothing more. Elon knows he’s immune to genuine scrutiny and discipline, and no justice will be served.
Now that Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes is out of the picture, Musk has become crony capitalism’s chief beneficiary. He’s the vaporware emperor who has no clothes, but the bogus “visionary tech genius” narrative surrounding him will, and must, prevail. The U.S. establishment needs to prop up the Muskian empire. It distracts poor and impoverished citizens from rising inequality in America by reassuring them that innovation and prosperity are reaching new heights. Which, according to fellow vaporware enthusiast, Richard Branson, and his “space flight”, is apparently only 264,000 feet.
Greg Barker is an independent journalist and quant, who also writes under the name Concoda. You can find him on Substack and Twitter at @concodanomics.
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SubscribeThis article would be a lot stronger if it explained how the author knows the solar shingles are phoney. The link that I expected to back up that claim just goes to Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem to say anything too alarming about the idea. The other link (“few publications”) goes to a paywalled Financial Times article.
We’re left with little evidence on which to judge the assertions of scammy behaviour. It may well exist, but, it’s not easy to find from just reading this article or its citations.
Agreed. I believe Musk is, to a large extent, a snake oil salesman, but the allegations in this article are so serious they really require thorough substantiation.
This should probably have been a much longer article that places the SolarCity lawsuit in context and describes in detail the allegedly failing Musk empire and how the SolarCity acquisition saved it.
Yes, I worry this is so. ARK investing CEO, Cathie Wood is the big pusher of Tesla, much like Michael Saylor is with Bit Coin and they both ring hollow to me. Tesla and Bit Coin, there is no knowing if they are merely faith based, and underneath is no real substance. Cathy does amazing projections for Tesla future sales showing a vast profitability – but I cannot really believe it – but then her company ARK is entirely dependent on Tesla.
Either Tesla or Bit Coin are big enough if they fail it will shake the markets to the ground, but both are exceedingly dubious. Tesla does not make anything off vehicles, but does by selling the CO2 credits it is given for the EV industry – it is a very weird game. (one big EV (electric vehicle) thing is how cheap the power is because electricity is not taxed like gas – but how can that work), so many issues…. CATL in China is, I think, biggest battery maker for EVs, but the really big one is when Ford, VW, Mercedes, and every other successful auto manufacturing company, with huge track records, and chains of distribution, name goodwill, and so on – ALL have EVs ready to pour out massively very soon, as soon as the market want them, and breaking that dominance by Tesla seems almost impossible to me, as batteries are becoming standardized, and so become a global commodity, and Tesla will have so much competition. I just cannot see Tesla as the new Apple, although it is priced so, and many say it is
“Greg Barker is an independent journalist and quant”
A new word – I always love stumbling on new words, my mind tried to figure it out (it is apparently a shortening of quantifying) but kept returning to Qanat as being a hidden path to a spring’s source, or some such esoterica, but it is merely some guy who crunches numbers.
It’s short for quantitative analyst.
They’re the guys with doctorates in physics/math (rocket scientists) that realise they can earn a fortune in finance vs. (relative) pittance in academia.
The future is a paradigm unlike the past – like CO2 trading, some say it will be one of the biggest ‘commodities’ soon, with trillions of these Credits sold and bought around the world yearly, and I have a very hard time understanding how such a market exists, but it does, and is huge. (A big part of it is the vast amount of professional fees in the process, HUGE management and consulting fees)
Timber companies set aside land and plant trees generating vast Carbon Credits, which they sell to Industry who produce carbon, even rich people like Arnold Schwarzenegger buy personal CO2 credits to offset his extravagant lifestyle. Farmers are set to begin to sell Carbon Credits as part of their revenue stream.
From the World Economic Forum, the one where Claus tells us ‘You will own nothing and be happy’ (the Great Reset is all about Carbon) “Pretty much everything we buy has a carbon footprint. Consider a car. It took about a tonne of steel to build it. Producing a tonne of steel emits two tonnes of carbon dioxide. At current prices, this will cost a steel producer in the EU roughly $16. Other companies that can avoid CO2 emissions at little cost (below $16) will sell their rights to those companies that have higher emission reduction costs.”
“Permit prices need to be substantial to make it financially attractive for the steel producer to invest in cleaner technologies. Carbon markets have seen relatively low prices for a number of years. Earlier in 2017, prices for a tonne of carbon dioxide ranged from below $1 in Mexico and Poland to $126 in Sweden. Yet, in most places prices remain less than $10 a tonne.” (WEF)
Davos 2017 said credits must get to $20 a ton rising to $50-$100 in 15 years. THIS IS HUGE! Trillions on business for this weird cost, and you know it is the consumer who pays (and the mega wealthy who harvest the $…)
Tesla uses its Carbon Credits for making EVs to make a real part of its money… Nothing in the world of economics is what it seems, ‘just ignore the man behind the curtain’ is the way of money.
There are even ETFs and ETNs trading on all the stock exchanges, and getting into the right stock which handles carbon credits now will bring in future riches.
Musk and Carbon Credits…. I guess this is his reason he exists as he does, it is never what it seems, like making cars and selling them for a profit – that is old school industry. (Him and blockchain, I expect CO2 credits to go to blockchain)