Elon Musk says he needs $1 trillion to control Tesla's robot army. Yes, really.
I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here, and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no f**king clue. I mean those guys are corporate terrorists. Lemme explain the core problem here, so many of the passive funds vote along the lines of what ISS and Glass Lewis recommend. Now, they have made many terrible recommendations in the past that if those recommendations had been followed would have been extremely destructive to the future of the company. Now, If you’ve got passive funds that essentially defer responsibility for the vote to Glass Lewis and ISS, then you can have extremely disastrous consequences for a publicly traded company if too much of the publicly traded company is controlled by index funds. It’s de facto controlled by Glass Lewis and ISS. This is a fundamental problem for corporate governance, because they’re not voting along the lines that are actually good for shareholders. That’s the big issue, I mean, that’s what it comes down to. ISS Glass Lewis corporate terrorism. -Elon Musk, Tesla Q3 shareholder conference call, October 22, 2025
https://electrek.co/2025/10/22/elon-says-quiet-part-out-loud-he-needs-1-trillion-so-he-can-control-a-robot-army/Open linkView original on piefed.social
I need full power because otherwise people will stop me!!
Yeah what a lame guy.
To be fair, all that money is effectively fake until the shares are sold.
Banks lend him real money based on the fake money
I count that in the sold category. Because they just get more loans to pay off the previous ones, or default and the bank just takes the shares and does it again because what the loaned is less than the share value. All the while avoiding income and capital gains taxes.
It's why boycotts and cancelling subscriptions actually do work when done in large enough numbers. Their money can disappear very quickly if shareholders get spooked.
It's also why Tesla isn't being affected as much now despite Elon pulling the mask off and going full Nazi, resulting in massive sales drops. Years and years of short sellers and complicit media trying to tank the brand, largely funded and promoted by things like entrenched oil interests and competing car brands have trained many shareholders to ignore a lot.
So how is that fake? I can't do any of those things you mention in the first paragraph.
Getting loans based on assets is not at all the same as selling those assets.
You're not rich enough where banks know you always have stock available to give them. Where there's virtually no limit to your stock pool that the bank can just liquidate after the fact. You need to be in the top .1% for that. The fact you're on lemmy means that's not a possibility in the slightest.
It is for the rich. That's why so many don't care about their traditional salary. That's why so many went out of their way to advertise they were taking a $1 salary during the recession, or even today. Because their salary is subject to income tax, but loans are not. You can get the same end result of cash in hand by receiving your pay in stock, then taking loans against that stock.
It's not the same though because they still hold the assets. If you sell, you do not hold assets anymore. Seems kind of self explanatory.
this is the most naive thing I've read on lemmy… blessed be your innocent mind my child
Me too Elon, I'm not feeling comfortable with you building a robot army
"Robot army" from the guy who gave us the Cybertruck? I'm not worried.
I don't know, the point of the so-called self driving Tesla is to not kill you or other people, and it fails on that.
So they might be able to fail creating a deadly bot army, so you'll have armless bot on war fields and killer cars on your road
I just want this guy to die. Oh, I will be so happy when it happens.
And all the other ones as well.
Someone who looks pretty good for a dead bitch.
insert 'I understood that reference' here Surely he won't let her get anything?
When Elon dies, dozens of children will lose their father, but not a parent.
hes a negligent, absent father, he only cares about breeding to sire male children, because of his eugenics fetish. he doesnt care for them otherwise, remember the kid he was using as a human shield for a few months? where is he now.
He needs to Mathew Perry.
hey errr maybe the richest man in the world with nazi views should not have a robot army to begin with?
Any day now Tesla is gonna be renamed Hyperion
But I was told that rich people like musk and Trump weren't swayed by money because they had enough... 😂
Sociopathic Oligarchs have a serious form of OCD/ Hoarding Disorder, that makes them crave even more money, no matter how much they have.
If they were hoarding cats, or rusty cars, or old refrigerators, or piles of scrap metal, etc., the authorities would intervene, and get them help for their mental illness.
But if they are hoarding money on a historically mind-blowing scale, they call them a successful businessman, and give them government grants and tax breaks.
This is a common misconception.
“The authorities” (USA viewpoint) are really extremely unlikely to intervene in any way at all with hoarding, and even more extremely unlikely to provide any kind of useful mental health intervention.
If the hoarding is causing a public safety hazard then the authorities may eventually start fining the hoarder until they do whatever is minimally required to clear the hazard.
Much much more likely, if the hoarder is renting, the landlord may evict them which is one of the many paths to homelessness.
But by far the most common outcome is that the authorities do nothing whatsoever to stop or help with harmful hoarding behavior.
In this way, crazy aunt Florence and Elon Musk are similar.
Perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that these people have a very serious mental illness so massive that it literally affects the rest of the world. They must be dealt with properly, not encouraged to lean into their destructive mental illness by funding their follies with taxpayer money.
The kleptocracy in action.
Man who can't buld fully self driving cars wants to build a f@*king robot army? I'll pass. How about give him NO money so he can't afford to build them in the first place.
This guy is so desperate to be called the first trillionaire, it's just really pathetic.
putin already beat him there, by stealing russia economy.
I hope he doesn't start any trade federations and blockade Naboo.
Jar Jar is our only hope.
I fucking hate this guy got off the hook. He fell out of the media so fast it makes me sick to think how complete the ruling class's power is.
I have a trillion dollars down in my basement you can have Elon.
He's on his way, but his car can't find its way
Fuck, better hide my ketamine then.
I keep mine at the angle grinder factory. How about you come and get it, Elon?
LOL
Elmo Musk literally is not an engineer or even understands basic engineering. All the real world engineering done at his company is done by actual engineers
What is his part in all those processes at jos companies, you ask?
Lying.
Literally lying. Its the only talent that Mr. Elmo has. Its the one thing he constantly does, at levels comparable to Trump.
Most claims he makes about any of his companies products are just plain lies. Tesla full self driving? Not even close, and by now i wonder if they're actually capable of getting a Tesla off a parking lot without crashing it, let alone do a full cross country.
Same for SpaceX, where we definitely will go to Mars!never mind that reaching low earth orbit is about 1% of that task and he still can't do that without blowing up his starshits. Hey, at least they blew up a banana over the Indian ocean.
Wanna know what Elmo's contributions are?
Cyber truck.
Launching the car that was supposed to be for the founder of Tesla into low earth orbit just to he an asshole
The "idea" to use intercontinental ballistic rockets to transport people to the other side of the world "in 30 minutes". This one I really really really do want him to try because tickets are CEO only expensive and nothing would make me laugh more than a bunch of stealing assholes all paying a million or so to just blow up on the launchpad.
Talking about launchpads, remember that Florida launch with a starship with a boat load of engines that also
failedwas a complete success because "it left the launchpad" and anything beyond that was extras? Yeah, that launchpad was absolutely obliterated, cars parked various kilometers away got pelted by concrete debris, an ecological area got polluted, and the launchpad was left in rubble because Elmo decided that flame diverters, you know, those things used since like the sixties of the previous century really weren't necessary.That is of course keeping in mind that he US tax payer paid 3 billion to take the US to the moon and well, that too is about at 1-2% mission completed, there is nothing remotely ready.
Do I even have to mention Hyperloop? "Its just another air hockey table, its not that hard!"
Meanwhile he keeps asking Tesla for a trillion dollars as well, even though he just got a gold package from Tesla that was light the highest payout in human history, even though Tesla makes a fraction of the cars that large brands make, ans even though he sent the extremely overvalued company (overvalued thanks to his constant lying about aaaalll the great things that are right there ready, just around the corner if you only pay me more money!!) right of a cliff with his Nazi antics combined with the laughable Nazirustbucket he designed..
This is the guy asking for just a trillion dollar bro, I will make this work, bro! TRUST ME!
You forgot to mention, that was was fired from PayPal(?) for being incompetent.
And the engineers he hires are either not that great, or (more likely) are having to play fast and loose due to unrealistic expectations. Like the original hyperloop demo that was setup years ago for a competition, instantly rusted and was secured poorly. It's since been destroyed.
Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.
He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.
Then he founded 'x.com', a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as 'the paypal guy', despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.
He's supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.
Yeah he did, I thought I mentioned it but there is so much to say about this horrible man..
The Hyperloop thing was never ever going to work as even high schoolers could have seen the long list of practical issues with it, prohibiting it from ever getting even in the direction of being real. It's a fundamentally flawed project
Making a (partial) vacuum machine 3-4 meters in diameter and 600km long? Won't happen, we can't even do a fraction of a % for that
Having a 600km tube in the sun will move your endpoints around by hundreds of meters throughout the day due to the metal warming up and expanding
That same tube will also be warmed up more on the top than the bottom, causing that tube to try and warp itself into a circle
So you do have your 600km partial vacuum tube? Awesome, now how do you get that
podtrain in there, or how do you get the people into that train (or out of it) without breaking your vacuum?Even with a partial vacuum, when moving that train over 600km will cause a pressure buildup in front of it what will become a problem
This entire design is a terrorists wet dream. I need one rifle of sufficient force to puncture that metal tube and the next train that comes in will end up hitting a hammer.
And there is lots more but I will try hard not to make this post too crazy long
Meanwhile we could have had normal trains but without having a source for it, I do recall reading multiple times that musk didn't wanted trains because they'd compete with his shitty Tesla cars, and that being the reason why he whipped this up. So now over the past two decades, China has been building railways like there is no tomorrow and now has. Huge network of high speed rail while the US (and Canada, Mexico) have basically and practically nothing. But they have cars, yaaaaaayyyy...
a well known fact is upper managment shields the employees and the company from Elons meddling in thier internal workings affairs. at least for spacex.
As far as they can, that is
That rocket launch that obliterated a launchpad was Elmo's meddling, for example
Elon Musk in charge of a robot army?
I've seen this movie sooo many times, and it never ends well.
I had to check to see if I was eating an Onion. Turns out, Ol' ketamine fried Musky truly did say all of this.
Sounds like they are getting on with their plan of eradicating all but the 1%
I hope he surrounds himself with these robots. Human bodyguards don't want to die.
He has enough money to pay an actual army
Apparently we don’t even need to pay the actual army. We can just revoke their paychecks and force them to keep working anyways. Nothing can go wrong with that, right?
Not that he can start pulling out of overinflated Tesla stock before crashing it. He's worth billions, but nowhere near 500 of 'em.
He has enough idiots following him that will do it for free.
Or even pay to do so.
Why this people never get cancer or horrible accidents?
Best healthcare with constant screenings. Catching most or all things early keeps them alive where it would cost us a mortgage or more.
I need 1000 Bitcoin to control the totally real AGI you should be scared of. Like really real and scary. Just around the corner guys. And it says I need those 1000 Bitcoin to control it.
They succeeded in making "billion" the new million. Now, they're trying to make "trillion" the new billion."
This martian wants to put chips in people's brain, and he wants a trillion dollars to make some future terminators. He better stfu and go to Mars.
Without a suit.
Why would you ever have any control whatsoever in the first place? Do other arms manufacturers have a control for their missiles?
So he's basically Justin Hammer at this point.
I don’t like this comparison. Hammer was actually competent.
Did you watch the film? None of his shit worked, and then it was hacked.
Not one more penny to this monster.
Yeah, well according to the Tesla board, he'll get paid $1 trillion if he makes Tesla the best selling car on the planet earth.
Just do it with your own money, Elon. All you have to do is one thing to get it. C'mon, "I love Telser," right? Run with that and see what you get.
Fortunately he isn't going to build a robot army. His cars can barely follow the road so I can't imagine his robots would present much in the way of of a threat, except quite possibly in the extent that they would stand on your foot although even then they'd probably fall over.
There has never been another individual who's ability and ego are so at odds
The man is insane.
Why do they even need musk? It's not like he is lead engineer or chief of design.
Marketing and fund raising. Doesn't matter how much you, well we, hate him he's still genuinely excellent at it. Sure it's absolutely destructive to... literally everything except his bank account, but it works. Very annoying.
But is he actually particularly stand out at that or is he just leveraging his pre-existing family wealth and connections to do so? In another universe a lot of these people are deadend used car salesman types that no one takes seriously.
Oh he is absolutely pulling himself up from his bootstraps, his are just made out of emeralds.
He needs? Go pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Somehow I don’t think he means $1T of his own money.
This is so stupid. If he has an issue with shareholder control, he has the money to buy the fucking shares. Sure, he has to pay the inflated bullshit price, but he can do that. Buy it and make it private, Musk. Then you can do whatever the hell you want with it, but it'll be your money on the line. If you actually believe in the product than it should be fine, right?
Actually he doesn't. Most of his 'wealth' is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he'd only have a third of the company.
Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined...
Did you do the math including the shares he already owns? Anyway, he can take out loans with the shares as collateral to buy more shares. I'm pretty sure he could get back 50% control if he leverages his assets. If he actually believes what's he's saying, this is a reasonable move.
Yes. Musk's net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.
Was there ever a hope that the customers buying the robots would control them?
MechaHitler controlled robot in my home or business is not a good marketing plan. Chinese companies are well ahead in robotics, and they have manufacturing customers, battery and motor research/leadership, lower bill of materials, plenty of AI skill. No reason to believe Tesla will be first or better.
When has Musk ever been first or better? he even botched his penis.
roadster and model 3/y were ahead of everything else when released.
Musk has nothing to do with either. The roadster was in production before he even bought into Tesla.
All the early Tesla engineers had left to start other companies. Everything since has been shit. The semi , the Cybertruck, the new roadster...
Fucking Ted Faro wannabe.
This is a real picture of Elon musk's dick.
Far too large.
And none of those shareholders vote along lines that are good for society. You're going to probably kill us all someday with some bullshit business decision or another, directly or otherwise.
Just wait until you have to pay a subscription to be on the "friend" list
A good chunk of shareholders deferring to public agencies that recommend based on societal good is imo the only way capitalism could “work”. Of course Elon is against it.
I learned some advisors at firms who usually follow Glass Lewis recommendations are taking unusual steps to request investor input specifically on Tesla. Apparently enough passive investors are dissatisfied enough to want a direct say on Tesla.
It was interesting to learn about shareholder voting.
Voting proposals from shareholders & their letters reveal great dissatisfaction with Tesla.
Major shareholders (investment groups, pension managers, state treasurers & comptrollers) wrote a scathing letter urging other shareholders to vote against directors up for re-election & to vote against proposals the company favors.
Their clarifications are interesting: they highlight issues with the conduct of the board & CEO
This SEC 14A filing lists all the proposals up for shareholder vote. A good number of shareholder proposals the board opposes concern board accountability to shareholders
The others concern better public reporting & oversight on senior executive pay & transparent audits on child labor dependence throughout the supply chain.
To promote an independent board of directors accountable to shareholders & to restore shareholder rights, I suspect Glass Lewis and ISS will vote against all board members & company-favored proposals and vote for all shareholder-favored proposals. Seems about right to follow their recommendations & oppose Musk on this.
I want to go back to the 80s...
Now is fine. We just need to forcefully put these wealthy fucks in their place.
To stop Reagan from becoming President, right?
Right?
Maybe you just shouldn't be building a robot army...
*pushes the front one and they all fall down*
The show Alien Earth presents a future that seems very much where we are headed. Countries replaced by corporations. One trillion dollars is a good start.
"WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING AT HERE IS ADVANCED WARFARE"
Take a lot more drugs Elon. Be sure it's enough to permenently quiet that scrambled brain of yours.
In a time when the entire world seems to be suffering from unstable leadership, rising costs of everything because of the decisions of people like him, oppressive and invasive actions directed at some of the most vulnerable people.
All that and much more, but this person with a net worth of $479,200,000,000 (according to Forbes as of today) is crying for $1,000,000,000,000 more for a large group of toy robots.
Some people have nothing and go on to accomplish great things. He has everything and needs more handouts to do anything.
Fucking egomaniac.
Because without that contract, TSLA is worthless.
He really needs $1 million, but he'll take the rest, just in case.
Lmao this clown should be peeled
Brooks (Roomba, Baxter, MIT, etc) says it's sill not enough https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/
If you skim through his piece, at least watch the 2x 30s videos, really drive the point IMHO.
I'll do it for half that.
I'll do it for half of your offer. $250 Billion is plenty for me to pull off a robot army.
Is he revering to the self driving Teslas when he says 'robot army'?
Just one more leverage bro
Another chuck e cheese token recipient in the making
they look like shit kinda. do they do anything useful?
They kill citizens who defy their fascist corporate overlords. So nothing to worry about.
Well Musk’s quote there isn’t wrong.
Musk isn’t an engineer, but neither are those consultants. They should all be deferring to deeper within the company for technical decisions instead of conflating some sci fi literacy with practical decision making, and leave musk to making much coarser ones at most.
So, is this a request for help, a threat, or just a grift?
Perhaps he really is concerned about rogue AI Slaughterbots, and wants to avoid that horrible Terminator-style future? Nah.
Perhaps it's a veiled threat - "I got these rogue Slaughterbots who are straining to get out there and fuck up the world, unless you give me a trillion bucks."
Or maybe, there are no robots, or even viable plans to build them, and he just wants a trillion bucks.
It's probably #3, and he'll use the money to build the Slaughterbots, and then do #2.