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SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire (www.reuters.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

So the borrowed money that came from nowhere isn't real because they did enough sleight of hand that the literally real bank balance doesn't actually exist because it isn't real money.

Got it!!

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    Like most rich people his wealth is purely theoretical. If I needed to demonstrate my entire wealth I could just extract it all from my bank account, but a lot of his money is based on perceived worth of his businesses, which of course don't really have a value because they haven't been sold to anyone and in many cases haven't actually generated a profit.

    So basically the IPO is saying that if the company was sold, it would be worth x amount of money. But of course we don't know that, and unless he actually sells the business, he doesn't get x amount of money.

    This is what people mean when they say we are in another tech bubble, companies are getting massively overvalued for what it is even remotely conceivable somebody would be prepared / able to pay for them. So you get stupid headlines like this that say that Elon Musk is a trillionaire, even though he has substantially less than 1 trillion dollars in his various bank accounts. In terms of actual dollar amounts he probably has 10 or 20 million at most. Absolutely not chicken feed by any stretch of the imagination but also not more money than most countries GDP.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago*

    A lot of wealth is based on perceived/theoretical value. Most of it, in fact. Let's say you own a car or a house, their value is based on what someone else is willing to pay for them, but you can't know how much that would be before you do. Heck, even bank notes are technically just "worthless" IOU's backed by a government.
    That doesn't mean your net worth is zero just because you don't have cash on hand.

    Shares are (in reasonable sale quantities) more factual, because they are essentially based on buy offers: if you have one SpaceX share, you know it's currently worth exactly $160.13, because someone has offered to buy it for that amount.

    And this is entirely ignoring the fact that you, like Musk, can turn the "perceived" value into "real" value extremely easily - it's called a loan. Musk got a cool $13 billion one back when he bought Twitter.

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  • [–] -5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Really? Go buy a fucking president. I'm not kidding. Cause if you can't, your "theoretical" money is literally able to but things you'd be killed for suggesting.

    So fuck you. Fuck you for defending the fact that thousands of kids are going to start starving to death so this soulless cockwart can LITERALLY take that money away from the parents. Fuck you for defending using resources that should keep Americans alive to kill babies in countries I'll never see.

    Fuck you for wanting to be one of them.

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