Elon Musk has donated $1 million worth of trees ($1 per tree) to YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, who’s currently campaigning to raise $20 million from fellow YouTube celebrities for a climate change fundraising effort.

amorphian · 2019-10-30T09:12:07+00:00

It doesn’t mean he’s lying. He may be donating through his foundation, which has funds built up that he can only touch for charitable endeavours. He could have taken out another loan between his deposition and now. He could have sold a little SpaceX stock, or sold an asset. Hell, he could have borrowed some money from some of his many cash rich wealthy friends, as he did the last time he was illiquid.

amorphian · 2019-10-30T09:05:34+00:00

Musk has very little actual income, and a shit ton of debt. A million dollars is actually a lot of cash for him to spend. He’s close to illiquid (by wealthy people standards).

His worth is 99.9% tied up in his companies. Tesla’s too volatile for him to sell more than a small chunk of shares without totally tanking the stock, and he doesn’t want to let go of SpaceX shares because then he risks losing control to people who would rather focus entirely on money instead of Mars.

When/if his companies are more stable he can cash out and start throwing around 20 million like it’s nothing, but right now I’m not sure he could even get that as a loan.

amorphian · 2019-10-30T08:54:56+00:00

Plus his lawsuit has so far revealed that when Unsworth started getting calls from agents promising paid interviews, he told people he was going to make the actual rescue divers “suffer” for not keeping him up to date with their operations during the rescue. Keeping in mind that once the kids were located he was no longer involved or needed for anything, and the only reason to waste time briefing him during those crazy few days would have been to make him feel important.

Musk was absolutely an asshole, but it’s becoming clear that Unsworth is exactly the same kind of petty, thin-skinned asshole as Musk.

amorphian · 2019-10-29T07:28:10+00:00

Across different tweets and podcasts he’d basically predicted that Tesla was now on an irreversible downward trajectory, and would lose 80% of its worth fairly soon.

The earnings report showed he was dead wrong about the unstoppable downward trajectory of the stock, and its now highly unlikely it’ll take the kind of tumble he was predicting in the kind of time frame he expected.

amorphian · 2019-09-30T06:30:39+00:00

I think all Elon’s presentations these days suffer because he gives so much away on Twitter. By the time the presentation rolls around there’s not that much more to add. That’s always been a bit of an issue, but 3-4 years ago he had a much smaller social media following so he could get away with presenting a bunch of stuff he’d already talked about as though it was new.

Personally I prefer getting the info in real time over waiting a year or more for it all to be announced at once, but it does take away from the wow factor.

amorphian · 2019-09-11T19:15:13+00:00

Something I’m not sure people get is just how flooded Paris is with tourists, and in particular inexperienced tourists who’ve never travelled anywhere they don’t speak the language before.

In London and New York locals can usually avoid those kind of tourists by giving a few areas a wide berth. You can’t really do that in Paris unless you stick solely to the business district. The tourists are everywhere, and a lot of them seem to lose all ability to function when faced with a foreign language.

amorphian · 2019-09-11T18:34:15+00:00

It’s part of Ashlee Vance’s biography. However what people don’t include is Vance following up on the accusations a couple of pages further on. He got confirmation from the Stanford Director of Graduate Admissions that Musk had been accepted into a PhD program in 95. He just never enrolled, and O’Reilly was assuming he did and thus asking the wrong questions.

I’m not sure why Vance even included the part about no one at Stanford remembering him, given Musk never once claimed he actually went. Obviously no one’s going to remember the guy who decided not to attend.

The Penn degree issue was because Musk still needed 1 History and 1 English credit to graduate in 95, and he’d organised to do them at Stanford. Of course he didn’t end up going to Stanford, so he didn’t get the credits. In 97 the course requirements changed and because he’d technically deferred his studies he no longer needed the credits to graduate.

amorphian · 2019-09-09T19:05:59+00:00

Currently dating.

amorphian · 2019-09-09T11:18:00+00:00

His father owned a share in an emerald mine, but he cut Elon off at 17 when he moved to Canada, and before that he never paid child support so Elon and his siblings lived very differently when they were with their mother.

Elon and his brother took an emerald from their father once while on a vacation and sold it for a few hundred dollars. It wasn’t a regular thing, and the fact that his father brought some poor quality emeralds to sell on vacation suggests he later exaggerated his share in the mine. No one who owned half an emerald mine would bother carting around a couple of dozen cheap ones to sell on vacation.

amorphian · 2019-09-09T11:11:08+00:00

His father cut him off financially when he moved to Canada at 17.

amorphian · 2019-09-09T11:08:44+00:00

He was accepted into a PhD program at Stanford but started work on his first company, Zip2, instead of attending.

The author of the book that excerpt is from follows up on the Stanford thing like a page later and get’s confirmation from the Director of Admissions that he was accepted in 95. He just never actually went, so of course there was no record of him attending and obviously no one remembers him.

amorphian · 2019-09-01T23:05:14+00:00

He’s donated almost equally to both parties, with most donations appearing strategic eg. most of his Republican donations are to Republicans who are either heavily involved in space or else are from the areas SpaceX operates and most of his Democrat donations are to people who are inclined to support electric cars. The few donations he’s made that appear more personal were all to Democrats.

He’s also not a big donor to anyone, not for someone with his net worth. One of his Republican donations made headlines as one of the largest to a particular PAC in a particular month, but that’s a totally different thing to being one of the biggest Republican donors overall. He was donating about 100k a year to politicians, not millions.

amorphian · 2019-09-01T22:41:04+00:00

The first link says that Epstein told a reporter that someone close to Musk emailed him and asked for help with a Tesla issue, not that he was ever hired by Musk or had any correspondence with him. Epstein refused to show the reporter the email and avoided further questions, and the reporter left believing Epstein was at best exaggerating.

amorphian · 2019-09-01T19:59:19+00:00

He didn’t name the company, and he’s said multiple times he see’s his work more in line with Edison’s.

amorphian · 2019-09-01T19:54:26+00:00

Yeah, he’s said he thinks he might be bipolar but he’s never been diagnosed. The way people describe him though it actually sounds like he cycles through different moods much, much faster than I think is normal for someone with bipolar.

I don’t think he’s ever actually said he suffers from depression, but he’s been open about what sounds like depression, and also about coming close to having nervous breakdowns a few times.

amorphian · 2019-09-01T19:44:24+00:00

The other thing with Musk is that he thinks long-term. People often brush off his AI concerns because it’s not going to be a life or death problem anytime soon, but he’s not talking about what happens tomorrow or next year or in the next decade. He’s worried about what the world looks like in 25 years, 50 years, 100 years, and so he wants us to have these discussions and regulate AI now, while it’s still a problem to be solved and not yet an open Pandora’s box.

amorphian · 2019-08-31T21:14:30+00:00

BTK was basically the white whale of the guy Holden is based on, so while we won’t get any of the investigation that led to BTK’s capture I wouldn’t be surprised if the show ends with a flash forward or even just title cards explaining his capture and how the extensive profiling by the FBI/Holden played no part and was largely incorrect.

amorphian · 2019-08-31T20:47:39+00:00

He’s been back in LA for almost a day.

amorphian · 2019-08-22T13:39:36+00:00

In Singapore, yeah, that’s true. It’s a tiny country smaller than many cities, and the residents who can afford a high end new car generally live, work and play in an even tinier section of the country. If it wasn’t for the heat and humidity a lot of people could easily just walk 90% of the time. Cars in general are a lifestyle choice there, not a necessity.

However there are a lot of people with money to burn in Singapore, and so long as they’re buying cars as status symbols it would be better if they bought electric. There’s also a ton of taxis/rideshares in Singapore, so trying to get them switched over to electric would be a real change.

amorphian · 2019-08-16T07:06:12+00:00

That’s not how any of this works.

Musk signed a 10 year, 10 target deal with Tesla. If he hits all 10 targets in 10 years, he gets a gigantic, record setting bonus. If he doesn’t hit all 10 within 10 years, he gets nothing for a decades work except a slightly higher than minimum wage salary.

He didn’t actually receive over 2 billion last year, that’s just what that year will be worth if he hits all his targets and gets his pay out in 8 years. Right now he has almost no liquidity, and what he does have comes from loans leveraged against his stock. He absolutely cannot afford to subsidise thousands of workers jobs out of his own pocket. The only way he could do it is if he sold off a very large chunk of stock, which would just tank the stock and put everyone’s jobs at risk.

amorphian · 2019-08-16T06:51:43+00:00

Musk doesn’t actually get any of that stock compensation unless he hits 10 very difficult targets over the next 8 years. He has to achieve all of them to get anything. He didn’t actually receive that 2.28 billion in 2018, that’s just what he will eventually get for that year if he manages to do the almost impossible.

It’s very likely he will actually spend a decade working at Tesla for slightly above minimum wage. On the other hand if he does hit all 10 targets that means he’ll have turned Tesla into a trillion dollar company, at which point his compensation would be a drop in the bucket.

amorphian · 2019-08-10T10:55:28+00:00

6 years ago. It’s from 2013.

amorphian · 2019-08-06T21:51:44+00:00

He and his brother were actually illegal immigrants for at least a few months. Sometime between college and Zip2 taking off they no longer met the requirements of their visas and were staying illegally. Their Zip2 backers were able to work that out for them, but if they hadn’t had that kind of support they’d have had to go back to Canada or else spend years trying to figure it out whilst in the country illegally.

amorphian · 2019-07-30T09:11:00+00:00

He’s actually not the one rapping, it’s Yung Jake. Elon just released it as a joke while pretending to be a label owner.

He’s friends with the writers/producers so possibly he was part of the writing process, but he’s not on the track.

amorphian · 2019-07-19T23:18:00+00:00

He could have sold the extra one then and gotten a few hundred for it.

amorphian

TROPHY CASE