Technology

It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.

Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company's actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a "must buy" for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don't think there's any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don't have a strong monetary incentive to try.

At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he's going to Tulip Mania his company again or he's going to fall far short of the mark.

I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.

NASA's been a contractor's boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.

I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we've largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.

For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That's going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.