No one is worth $1trillion.

"Worth"? Agreed.

An estimate of the damage -- past, present, and future -- he will cause? Probably on the low side.

No, but the payment is in stock, and Tesla's shareholders have voted to give away even more of their company.

Surely it's down to them to be that stupid? In the same way that US voters made an active choice to vote for a rude, bullying, orange stained, rapist, sex pest, tax dodging felon to become their president.

You'd start to wonder if money is worth anything at all when people do that.

Oh no, it's worth lots to the people who voted to give their company away - their reasoning is that if Elmo is incentivised enough, then they'll make more money from the appreciation of their shares than they lose in the giveaway. It's good old fashioned greed, in the Gordon Gecko mould.

I wonder if they've worked out the impact of how much they lose if Elmo only hits the trivial targets like $2trn market cap? Over ten years that'll be achieved purely through inflation.

As I've noted elsewhere, stocks aren't real money. At best they're notional metrics of instantaneous investor delusion.

My partner and I happen to own some stocks which have substantially appreciated in "value" since they were purchased and, of course, our broker keeps telling us we can't sell them because taxes would eat up most of the profit. In other words, they're nice numbers on a page but not much else -- I couldn't even buy an overprice cup of burned bean water at Starbuck's with them as they stand at the moment.

Elon's situation is far more extreme.

Not only would the taxes kill him, the moment he unloads any substantial quantity of the magic beans, they will signal to the market a deflation in "value" and the price will tumble. Shareholder lawsuits will keep him tied up until he blasts off for Mars. 1

The only thing that's money is money. As Roosta says in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy , "If I can't scratch a window with it, I don't accept it."

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1 A day which I fervently hope will be soon but I suspect will be approximately never, since why would he give up not only the power he holds but the all important opportunity for fawning public attention by his hoardes of acolytes? A trillion dollars of stock will be worth zero dollars in a leaky dome on the surface of Mars.

But everyone involved in the current fairy-tales based "economy" must believe in it. If at any point in time someone acknowledges the fact that the king is naked, then the whole world collapses instantly. Our economy lives on only because everyone still firmly believes it can and will work fine even if it's based on NOTHING AT ALL.

This is why no stakeholder actually said "WTF???" and everyone went on with this idiocy... because otherwise they'd instantly lose 99% of the money they invested; so better keep faking it until it will eventually crash, but not now, not yet.

Just like the AI bubble.

"This is why no stakeholder actually said "WTF???" and everyone went on with this idiocy... because otherwise they'd instantly lose 99% of the money they invested"

If any stock owner wants out, they currently can do so, and lose virtually nothing, and probably bank a fat gain. The problem comes when somebody in the theatre shouts "Fire!" and everybody scrambles for the exit, and then valuing companies at their marginal price is shown up as a rather unhelpful concept.

The people who are worst positioned (apart from fanbois private investors) are those with money in index tracker funds, because those funds HAVE to hold specific companies and specific weightings based on the current index. When the reset happens, the trackers will be hit hard, both through declining value of the assets they keep and taking a massive hit through being forced to sell some stock whether they like it or not. And with the likes of Nvidia valued at an unfeasible $5trn, trackers will have huge exposure in one company, plus the whole FAANG + Microsoft, Broadcom, Tesla and Oracle disaster in waiting as well.

Anybody who has the choice and currently has money in tracker funds might want to take a deep breath, and ask themselves whether the prospect of losing 50% of their current tracker investment worth is sufficient to make them forgo any further last-gasp appreciation in prices.

Interesting take on the vote here:

[1] Tesla (TSLA) shareholders shoot selves in foot, approve Musk $1 trillion payday

I seem to remember from the last time that some shareholders votes were worth more than others, hence achieving a majority only really required a handful of key people.

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/11/06/tesla-tsla-shareholders-shoot-selves-in-foot-approve-musk-1-trillion-payday/

You are worth exactly what someone is willing to pay you.

I wish that were true, but the number of incompetents who are employed and then do not live up to the salary disproves it.

Like a steep hill to a Cybertruck?

Not a problem. The biggest customer appears to be SpaceX and [1]Boca Chica is flat. Parking should not be a problem as Starbase is set up to scrap stainless steel on an industrial scale. I am not sure how xAI will manage.

[1] https://supercarblondie.com/spacex-buying-unsold-cybertrucks-tesla/

Tesla have sold about 8.5 million vehicles. Of which 2 million have Version 12 of Tesla’s FSD. So there is a big hill to climb

I believe the metric is FSD subscriptions, and that's around 1m? But presumably every new car will have the untruthfully named FSD capability built in but not enabled, and the trick will be in shepherding buyers into also ponying up for the FSD to be switched on.

There's no other explanation for this. There is nothing about the company finances that make any of this even slightly realistic. People just keep throwing money at it because other people are throwing money at it there's no realistic return on investment here. Just like AI this is a bubble that has to burst and god help anyone who's heavily invested when it does.

Did you mean to type L and not N?

That will still leave him with $50 billion - more than enough for anyone.

Use the tax for: food aid, Medicaid, overseas aid.

That will never happen, but it is nice to dream.

@alain williams

"That will still leave him with $50 billion - more than enough for anyone."

Why the green eyed desire for theft? You probably earn more money than a vast portion of the world, would you like the idea of them stealing from you?

Worse than that you want it to be taxed, which means going to the government. The very people who cant even agree to keep the US government funded, cant budget and spend vastly more than they make. If that is your dream I call it nightmare.

Musk, accompanied by a dancing Optimus robot,

How could the audience tell the difference?

One is non-human and only works on pre-programmed inputs.

The other is a human simulacrum and cannot apprehend reality.

So, which was which?

You are talking about the world's most powerful people. They own and control the world's economies, and can find you and know you in intimate ways. The shareholders simply want more money. As long as money continues to be unreasonably thrown at them, the shareholders will not disrupt it.

Muskox will throw money at his komrades and kompromats alike in turn, they will continue to throw money at his shareholders.

It does irrationally piss me off when I see someone driving a telsa though.

"I think there could be tens of billions of Optimus robots out there."

So in excess of two for every single person on the planet! At the estimated eventual price of $20,000 each I reckon the total cost would be over 4 times the current global GDP.

Yet I'm sure some people actually believe what is said.

I always come back to considering that if you have made a billion (which to make it clear is a million, then another million, and so on A THOUSAND TIMES (a U.S. billion)), under what circumstances would you need to make another thousandfold million and then another and another etc etc ad nauseam (and it is nauseous)? You can't possibly spend it, unless you start a rocket ship company when it's not really yours, is it, especially if you finance it with share values.)

If these guys were serious philanthropists then I might not be so against them, but they just hoard more and more, in shares and investments, in some sort of pi55ing contest.

One of these guys' wealth pots could do a lot to fixing the absolute 5h1thole which most of the world has become. Instead they are just amplifying the en5h1ttification of the world.

This timeline is truly the most stupid.