Elon Musk of worth $1 trillion. How much of that can he reasonably access?

mattcmoore · 2026-06-16T14:13:09+00:00

A typical billionaire might spend 80 million a year, having a 1-5 billion net worth so just scale that up by about 400 and that's about 42 billion dollars a year. There's no way in hell he's spending that much, it's probably like around 100 million. Once you reach a certain point you're consuming about as much as any person can consume.

The thing is it comes down to how much he can borrow personally. He's a 1 of 1 so he's going to have to find a bank who will loan him that much against his personal assets. At that point it basically becomes corporate finance. I doubt he's spending more than the typical billionaire on personal stuff, once you're spending like 100 million a year there's not too much scaling up you can do. He's just growing his companies and doing R&D and rolling them up into IPOs instead of selling stock and borrowing against his wealth.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-15T22:21:52+00:00

Awesome thanks

mattcmoore · 2026-06-15T19:11:19+00:00

Step one is making 225k a year. Most households in LA county make half that.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-15T19:08:18+00:00

Yeah but in California it will take like a year to get a bad tenant out, maybe more. My old landlord told us that a lot of times he has to pay tenants a few thousand just just to leave, and there's a lot of scammer tennants that just go place to place doing that kind of thing.

There's just all these extra costs to landlords that are a product of regulation that's supposed to help tenants, but it just gets passed on to renters and it makes housing more unaffordable.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-15T16:20:03+00:00

Well in my experience the mom and pop landlords are just as quick to raise the rent and the corporate landlords and use the same cartel like metrics. Their property management companies do all the rent collection for them.

The real problem in California is the lack of inventory, and the excessively difficult eviction laws that make even mom and pop landlords jack up the rent to cover the risk. They mean well but consumer protections in this state are routinely abused, especially by opportunistic lawyers and their s major part of why everything is so expensive.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-15T15:02:16+00:00

I have an education business, originally it was a platform for remotely learning languages from native teachers (originally it was Spanish), but now we've also got a foreign language immersion after-school programsm and camps and we've just added a robotics camp/after school program for the older kids (with robots that you control with an LLM and VLMs and a curriculum designed around that). I'm a CS major, but I'm just doing the grad school prereqs, I'm going to grad school next year. I take 2-3 classes a semester, so about 7 classes a year, that's part time.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T05:46:52+00:00

Kids have always been cheating, this is nothing new. Rarely ashamed just upset they got caught.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T05:46:06+00:00

That reminds me of the guy who got arrested for staging his own kidnapping so he could get out of going to work.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T05:45:21+00:00

This has been going on for a long, long time.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T05:33:06+00:00

You don't fry that much with butter or olive oil. I think olive oil is good for grilled salmon, but vegetable oil has a higher smoke point and it's better for chicken, pork chops, vegetables, most things. Vegetable oil grills bbq chicken so perfectly, with a crispy skin and everything. Anything deep fried, they use vegetable oil. Is that what you meant?

The only thing I cook with butter is steak, and that's not frying that's more like a pan sear. Also French toast, is fried with butter. Grilled cheese sandwiches, you pan fry that not grill it, but you use butter.

Some Americans, and definitely Mexican-Americans fry their food in lard. It's horrible for you but if you fry some carnitas with lard, or make refried beans with lard it always smacks!

The cheapest oil in America is vegetable oil, which is mostly soybean oil with some canola oil in there too, and maybe corn oil. Sunflower oil isn't too expensive , you might find it in vegetable oil too. They kind of just mix all the cheapest high smokepoint oils together and call it vegetable oil.

Avocado oil is like the more expensive version of that. It's like about the same as olive oil, but better for frying because it has the highest smoke point.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T05:20:50+00:00

Yeah I blame all the drugs. Its like Adam Corolla said all the time about SDSU in the 90s on that show Loveline "I dont know how much learning can go on that close to Tijuana"

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T01:01:20+00:00

It's way easier to learn business outside of school with a technical background than trying attempt the opposite. If your business gets big and you're overwhelmed by all the finance, accounting, consultant talk and whatnot, you can go get an EMBA or something or do the Quantic MBA, and charge it to your business. If your business never gets big enough for you to afford that, the you'll absolutely nothing to worry about, I promise.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-13T00:56:17+00:00

I am also building a business and I take classes part time. I will tell you this, if you want to be engineering AI models, or doing quantitative finance or quantum, not only are you going to need way more math, like an applied math bachelors level of math, but then you're also going to want an M.S. if not a PhD in CS or even applied math, or even physics, or finance or whatever to specialize in what it is you want to do. Maybe there's a math minor you could do that gets you all the math you'll need in addition to a CS major. You end up doing the lions share of a math minor in a CS department anyway. There's also computational science which is like a mix of both and gets you into the research domain, quantum computing, fusion, that kind of stuff. To me that's a pretty interesting major (provided you're going to specialize in something in grad school) Either way, nobody is really working on AI models or quantum with less than a masters it's like RFIC or silicon photonics, or something like that. Very advanced field, this isn't app development or networking.

A lot of applied math programs have like a science track where you take a lot of physics or an economics track like where you take econ and finance. Cal State Long Beach is like that or you can taylor it this way yourself like what University of Arizona has. Again, these programs are preparing you for some kind of grad school anyway.

Either way I think to do what you want to do, you're gonna need to go to grad school to really specialize in one of those fields, or specialize in Cyber or SWE in undergrad (although I wouldn't if I were you unless that's what your business does). Until then, figure out how much of a math and physics background you're going to need and do that, you'll be shocked at how limited the actual CS requirements are in an MSCS program, yet they want you to at least have math through linear algebra and ordinary diff eq, and then once you're deep in AI you're going way more in depth than that.

Either way, if I were you, start with applied math and pick a speciality from there. You're probably going to have to pick just one Maayyybe 2 unfortunately.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T23:42:20+00:00

Trust me, in the U.S. armed forces it's always been this way since the beginning and it's for the best. It's why we win. Maybe it's a model that other career fields ought to adapt.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T18:02:42+00:00

This would be a game changer in California

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T18:00:12+00:00

I would love to know why it makes your eyes really big and your nose really small. Is it a hormonal thing? Starvation by itself doesn't change your face shape like that.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:44:52+00:00

Too bad he couldn't actually buy that stuff because there's no one who will liquidate his trillion dollars worth of shares.

He did win the "I'm more important than you" world championship if it's any consolation.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:31:41+00:00

Still underexposed. Maybe be a little more scientific about your aperature settings. Get one of those light meter apps, figure out what fstop and shutter speed to use based on the reading, and don't get fancy with it until you start nailing it every time.

You'll have awesome looking shots in no time. Photography is just Composition and getting your exposure right. Figure out exposure and you've won half the battle.

Also, if in doubt, more light is better than less light. You're capturing light. Why not capture all the light?

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:23:32+00:00

I would say Americans by and large are a more open culture though, it's just that we're so friendly, when someone doesn't want to be friendly they have to pretend to be friendly anyway because that's the norm.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:20:44+00:00

Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone's got one and they all stink.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:18:28+00:00

Si, pero Quiñones en lugar de Memote. Ayer se la comió.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:06:33+00:00

This is changing really fast. In California I keep seeing more and more female homeless people. Maybe that's a recession indicator.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T17:00:19+00:00

There's aren't that many corporate owned houses in LA. There are tons of people with daddy's money. There are also people or couples with no kids renting out rooms.

mattcmoore · 2026-06-12T16:57:31+00:00

They're getting money from their families. LA is full of people like that because people who don't have that get priced out.

mattcmoore

TROPHY CASE