One day after launching the roadster into space, Elon Musk’s company posted record quarterly losses. I mean, it’s not like this doesn’t happen to him all the time but these particular losses were record high even for him.
Russian propagandists are all over this. He’s a loser! He’s pathetic! Ha ha, the leading US businessman can’t even run a business without losing hundreds of millions!
All US companies are posting losses because of the new tax rules. I don’t understand why the media doesn’t say that in the reports.
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Tesla posted enormous losses in 2016, too. This is not new for this company. Uber has done nothing but lose money since inception. Amazon has had trouble running a profit for years. This isn’t a new situation. This is how successful businesses operate these days. This is the new normal. This has been in place for about 15 years.
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“this is the new normal”
years ago a Scandinavian told me that the way to live really well in Scandinavia is to have a lot of debt and that all the richest people were deeply in debt, he tried to explain how that worked but I didn’t get it all.
What’s going on now is probably different in the specifics but similar in the broad outlines.
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This book by Dan Lyons that I wrote about recently, that’s what he discovered when he went into the world of the startups and Silicone Valley. It’s how they all operate. All of them. It’s the new liquid economy. These are the rules of the game. We pretend not to notice at our own peril.
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I don’t know about Elon Musk’s business model at all, but from what little I know about your typical start-up company, the end goal aim is pretty much to sell the company off; the way you get there is by growing your user base, or market share, or whatever, as fast as possible, mostly through money that is not so much loaned to them as it is, well, bet on them. The typical expected outcome for a start-up is to fail – it’s the rare great upswings that people are hoping to bet on. And once it’s about as big as it can get, it gets plucked off by someone bigger, and they try and figure out how to actually make money off of it.
I find it as a fascinating attempt at solving the cultural problem of innovation – big companies are far more risk averse than two comp sci majors in a basement… And also probably a breeding ground for confidence tricks of major scale.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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