r/wallstreetbets
What happens when Elon Musk is no longer leading his companies?
Questions the sustainability of Tesla and SpaceX valuations, highlighting the key man risk tied to Elon Musk's vision.
- Valuations are disproportionately tied to market faith in Musk rather than underlying business fundamentals.
- Significant key man risk exists as a successor may not command the same confidence from investors and customers.
A significant portion of the valuation of companies like Tesla and SpaceX appears to be tied to investor confidence in Musk's vision and ability to execute ambitious goals. What happens when he's no longer around?
Most companies of Tesla's and SpaceX's size have demonstrated that they can remain strong businesses and attractive investments even after a CEO transition. However, I've always felt that Musk's companies are different. Their valuations seem more closely tied to the market's belief in Musk himself than is typical for companies of comparable size.
If Musk were to step away or pass away, would a successor CEO command the same level of confidence from investors, customers, and employees? Would the market reassess these companies and place greater emphasis on their underlying fundamentals rather than Musk's vision and influence? How much of their current valuation is driven by the businesses themselves versus the market's faith in Musk?
Yes
People will continue to buy Teslas just like are now, only they’ll stop making themselves look dumber than a box of rocks by putting those stupid anti Elon stickers on them. Also people will probably stop insulting the guy that made a lot of people rich through his companies.
Elon AI will.
That's why he tweets obsessively and why he often puts 'tags' at the start or a tweet. 'Insightful'.
Grok is trained to review his tweets before answering so it can parrot his BS to the world on a higher scale than Elon himself can. He wants Grok to become him.
I firmly believe the ultimate purpose of the Neuralink project is to improve that process and integrate himself with it as much as possible. He's planning to live forever as a shit posting teenage drama queen through Grok.
I'm also suspiciously curious of where Grok got the term 'Mecha Hitler', it's pretty random and out there to have popped up organically from data it was trained on. Was it just an accident, or was that how Musk had tried to describe what it should become in its top level training? Or was that an effort Grok had made to visualise the instructions it was being given?!
Before he leaves or passes away, he will copy/paste his brain with Neuralink onto the next CEO.
Or Optimus will download his brain.
AI could also run any business in the future. Who says we need humans to run actual companies?
Real ones know Shotwell is the reason why SpaceX is successful. That's one of the main reasons merging all these companies together is dumb. Each respective company will have its agency and goals diluted because SpaceX now owns a social media network for some fucking reason.
You are right it has made some larger changes in the past few years. But for most of the 2000s it was stuck. They purchased a few companies like verisign and some other ecom billings but had no idea how to integrate into their system, which itself was cobbled together with bubble gum and popsicle sticks.
Im a sw developer and for a period of time I created e-commerce integrations with many of their services. Every service they offered had a wildly different API, backend, restrictions/requirements. Some were drastically outdated and easily fooled by editing form data.
They still have some of these antiquated services, but yes more recently they're newer services have been better.
Their supprt and fraud department was always clueless and useless for sellers. Always favored buyers (to be fair the global resit card system isn't much better)
They are just too big to fail because they've been around forever and most online stores still offer some form of paypal.
nothing.
the companies will get better and their stock prices will go down
Same philosophy kept me from investing in bitcoin in 2012 at 1,100 🤣
Did I?
You are correct. But when Jobs died the company grew. The opportunity and momentum was there. Or stated another way - they were "going concerns". Now the timing is everything. If they are profitable at the time and if they were past the "let it fail and we learn more phase" then the shock to the market is manageable by any CEO and you do not need the iconoclast with his massive following to attenuate such an event. Not challenging you - just spitballing. I mean no one sees Bezos as an iconoclast. His rocket just blew up in the most dramatic way. And yet - it goes on. The herd is conditioned to accept bad news it seems.
Parenthetically - note that WallStreet creates these Iconoclasts out of thin air. They cannot shill tech without them as most investors lack the specific education to follow the topics. In fact most Stock Market Analysts can follow along. So you make a "guru". Jobs was one of the first. When he was booted they tried to make Sculley one - with a massive ad campaign - didn't work. Jobs returned and they rebooted the media machine. When Jobs died there was a void - they focused on Musk and started his mythology. He did not Found Tesla - he literally just discovered it and joined. But they needed an icon to sell the new Green sector with all its investment potential and there he was. And Elon leaned in. He changed his monologues to fit their needs. Win-Win. Elon is more DOGE than he is Genius. He's no dummy but he really does not have all the answers. But then who does? Pivot to Intel and you realize one bad leader lacking the ability to embrace risk can destroy a tech company. The right leader - arguably at the right time - can create major shareholder value by actually fixing what's broken and growing the business. Just an opinion.
This “pivot.” Is it in the room with us now?
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I'm not shorting these stocks simply because the market can stay irrational longer than I can necessarily stay solvent. Nonetheless, these businesses would perform as-businesses much better with someone who isn't just a hypebeast running them.
Right now, these companies don't make money, they just make stock.
Never bet against cult stocks until the cult leader leaves the building. That was literally my whole point
After they crater and settle into their "actual" valuations.