SpaceX Is Buying Up an Unfathomable Number of Cybertrucks
Considering the pickup EV has been an enormous commercial flop, only selling barely a fraction of Musk’s promised 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year, there’s a good chance Tesla is using the mercurial CEO’s other venture to boost the numbers ahead of the end of an otherwise disastrous year.
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfathomable-number-cybertrucksOpen linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com537
Comments126
Pretty sure this is illegal, you know, using one company to prop up another (the old “Enron” method)
Wish the US still I don’t know, had laws and whatnot
Laws are so 2010. Get with the time, it's all corruption and gambling now.
2010? By that point, the global financial crisis had already proven that there are no consequences for financial manipulation if you're rich enough.
"Illegal" is only for the poors and can apply to something as simple as crossing the street
Oh we still have laws. Elon is just part of the "in" group who the laws protect but do not bind.
Its shakey, but might be in the clear because SpaceX is still private and can do whatever it likes. If they went public too, then there would be a problem I think
I think they’re going to IPO soon, so gotta get this shady shit done first.
Using government funds to buy stupid trucks
It might or it might not. Money laundering is difficult to do legally. Possible but difficult.
Private, but don’t they serve a number of government contracts?
This is basically the government bailing out Tesla directly for a shitty truck.
If the US tries to enforce laws against Elon, he'll go on Twitter and starting calling for the break up of the United States like he did for the EU when they decided to enforce their laws
So the fuck what? Who cares what he says on his platform for bots, Russians, and fellow morons?
Besides the heavily armed Yall Qaeda crowd? All of their potential victims....
They can’t buy enough of these to weigh the collapsing market for them. They’ll be less than $50k.
They will a hundred percent buy them at full price, in a big money transfer from space x to Tesla so muck can get his trillion dollar payday that was voted in
Let's remember that SpaceX gets tons of government funding. No doubt they will try to pass it off as legitimate spending.
Yup,
NVidia-OpenAI-Nvidia-OpenAI
All valid criticism aside, 1000 is a pretty fathomable number.
To me one sold Cyber truck is unfathomable.
They only made around 50k of them. So that is still a considerable amount.
Sure, but still a number which it is possible to fathom.
Not in this economy. /S
I am fathomless
Would you fathom me? I'd fathom me so hard.
Not really. A fathom is a unit of water depth, equal to 6 feet. So unless hes throwing all 1000 into the ocean in neat stacks, they can't be mentioned in fathoms.
If they land on the nose it's probably over 2 fathoms!
I think it becomes unfathomable when someone's buying that number of cybertrucks. As in I can't fathom why someone would do that, unless to juice Tesla's numbers.
Fuck SpaceX too.
THANK you. I can't even get excited about their successes knowing Musk is involved.
I used to religiously watch launches and cheer on their success. Now the company doesn’t even exist to me.
It helps that nothing big has happened in the last few years.
I've read several articles that say they have teams assigned specifically to handle elon in all his companies - to keep him busy and away from the actual critical work.
Ah, the AI business model...
@technocrit Using taxpayer money that they're granted due to the outsourcing of government functions like NASA and communications to bail out their incompetent boss's other failing business which was initially built on tax credits supposedly created to address climate change. None of Musk's companies are profitable, they're just good at stealing from the mooks who run governments.
Musk: most efficient in the world at extracting the public's money via government.
Besos: most efficient in the world at extracting the public's money directly.
Elon is running the biggest Ponzi in history, financing on financing and counting both as the total. Eventually he won't be able to keep shuffling assets around and counting both, they will all collapse with nothing left and everyone will be shocked pikachu despite it being obvious.
after Nvidia and Open AI.
Business idea. I make an ai using ai, then hord investments and use that money to invest into another ai that I have made using an ai tool. Rinse repeat
it's a bigger ponzi than nvidia?
Playing games with the shareholders. Giving tesla a boost by paying for it with spacex.
Sounds like some form of fraud.
Because it is :)
EV subsidies are going away soon, so Elons putting some money fromone pocket to the other now, but also claims the subsidies so he's putting more money to that other pocket than he took out from the first pocket.
Space x money is coming from government contracts too, that's an insane feedback loop of potential fraud.
SpaceX bids on services that the government puts up for offer and wins with usually the lowest bid.
What they do with that money as long as they provide the service is up to them. If they need some vehicles to haul gear, or want to provide vehicles to each employee that's up to them.
There's no fraud from them buying them.
Edit: also Starlink is their biggest revenue source nowadays and is profitable, they aren't solely funded off government contracts and investors anymore.
They finally have decent revenue, a large percentage of that is consumer, but nearly half is still government contracts. It's notoriously hard to tell what amount the company is profitable because of how they move around the amount of money they burn on R&D.
So some where around 50% of starlink, almost all of the rest of the business are relying on grants and bids.
The cybertruck is both not selling to consumers and is extremely unreliable from a maintenance standpoint. So now Elon is moving money from one business, which is still majority funded by government money, to buy shitty cars no one wants from himself. That's not even adding in that he's been actually buying then himself image of Tesla as fleet vehicles. Like legit BUYING his own cars as fleet vehicles cause no one else will.
It's bad.
I mean sure, it doesn't look great, but it's not fraud.
SpaceX is a private company buying vehicles that regardless of how you feel about them, are capable of towing things or being gifts to employees for the work they've done.
SpaceX needs vehicles to tow things, and using an EV to help lower emissions would be a valid goal. They're also an all day portable 240v power source which I'm sure there are plenty of uses for in construction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-2rjmL8MgY
I'm not even sure if it would reach the level of fraud given they're a private company if they just let them sit on a lot for years then sold them at a loss as a used vehicle, but I imagine that would warrant their private investors suing for some breach of duty though
Edit: Also you really need to separate sold services from government giving them money. Grants can be a different thing, but when the government pays them $100 million to launch a rocket, they get a $100 million and launch a rocket. It's not some sort of life line or subsidy. This is in general as well for sold services/contracts, not targeted at SpaceX. SpaceX survived early on because of these, but they were still selling a service the government wanted. Also, the government is saving 10's of billions of dollars using SpaceX vs alternatives.
It looks bad cause it is, what Musk is doing with his companies has all the look of moving money around to hide losses, it's generally seen as a bad thing to amortize losses from one of your businesses to another (cybertruck), if shareholders cared there would be more lawsuits.
You also see this with how the businesses are being consolidated around xai. It's a house of cards thats being held up by a government largess.
I made an edit, you might have missed about the government side, but i'll just post it again here.
Nothing is being "held up by government largess" with SpaceX.
To be congratulated on the public stage by the clown running the circus, no doubt.
He literally already did something like this with tesla and solar city. There was a court case and everything but musk won so it's no suprise he's doing it again.
60m settlement. Technically a loss, but a slap on the wrist and a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned so I won't argue that it wasn't a win.
I can't believe this fucking court system.
https://www.pv-tech.org/delaware-judge-approves-us60m-settlement-for-tesla-shareholders-aggrieved-b/
Once you have enough money winning a court case is indistinguishable from losing one.
If the penalty for a crime is a fine it is only illegal for poor people.
once you have enough money, laws don't apply to you anymore. You just get inconvenienced by pocket change level "fines"
Ahhh I thought he straight up got charges dismissed my bad. But yeah $60 million for elon is a slap on the wrist, or "cost of doing business"
No need to apologize. You were quite correct. Lol
You can find that in his couch cushions, but look before JD Vance was there.
Oroborous Economics
Fraud?
Are they gonna use them as ballast or dummy payload or what?
Just so long as they strip out the lithium batteries first - otherwise that'd be one helluva fireball coming back down in some random spot
I get what you're going for, but the amount of energy stored in any mass going at orbital speed far outweighs the energy stored in its chemical makeup. A 1kg mass traveling 7.8km/s (LEO speed) has 30MJ of kinetic energy. By comparison, 1kg of TNT has 4.184MJ of chemical energy. So even if the Cybertruck was made out of TNT, the TNT would only account for about 13% of the total energy. Removing the batteries would significantly reduce the mass which would have a large impact on the "fireball," but I don't think that's what you're going for.
You are part of why lemmy is great.
It's been awhile since I took accounting, but this looks like they are setting up a transfer pricing fraud.
Nothing is based on supply and demand anymore. The "market" no longer makes corrections. It's all manipulatable fuckery and the elite still wants you to believe that the stock market is stable. The big bubble burst will be money, and how it's abused/misused, not AI.
They’ve made it so you will be left behind economically if you don’t slave for SP500 shares
eh, the SP500 is just the slot machine meant to real people in
real $ is on learning what individual tickers are really worth and trading on that
bubbles like this are basically just milking pensioners and whatnot who buy into the system mindlessly, when enough buy in and there's a catalyst to get peoples eyes on the screens (imo, trump finally croaking) so they can sell into it profitability the algo's switch to dumping, which'll then cause mainstreet to panic sell seeing half their retirement vanish overnight
It’s more than a slot machine, it’s the primary beneficiary of all the bad fiscal policy and wealth concentration. That and real estate. All the cool kids are hoarding it! Giving them selves cool loans based off the cool valuations they cooked up. Bond market is imploding and taking cash with it. Great time to buy SPY
but...considering the state of US labor/left, realistically crashes like they're setting up now are the plebs best bet on actually capturing some of that wealth for themselves, it's that or you jump like a monkey (sports) or record your misery (various arts) and hope your pain/suffering is entertaining to them.
The scary thing is, I don't think the people in power really have an endgame. They are just drunk on power and stealing until they can't anymore.
You can only manipulate for so long before the cards collapse
I do wonder if people can make direct food subscriptions with farmers and just bankrupt the entire corporate infrastructure one commodity at a time
K-shaped economy and all
He only gets his reinstated absurdly large Tesla bonus if Tesla does really well.
What can be better for profits than selling a bunch of cybertrucks? (Even if it is to himself.)
Money laundering?Stock boosting, same difference.A cybertruck bubble you say??
A bubble? In 2025?! Inconceivable!
Unfathomable and 1000-2000 are quite different… especially when talking about 250,000
In my opinion 1 cybertruck is an unfathomable amount I guess it depends.
Probably because these have been known to blast off before reaching ignition. I give them a T-minus on this deal.
Calling it now, spacex will merge with Tesla to try hit the valuation for Musks pay package
Makes sense or he will tease Tesla holders getting first dibs on a IPO
If anyone was still sceptical about there being an enormous bubble about to pop…
Wash trading at its finest.
That's a creative use for the state handout that he receives for spacex, propping up the shareholders.
Please God shoot them into space directly toward the sun. Please.
It's actually cheaper from the surface of the Earth to leave the solar system entirely than it is to cancel out enough of Earth's orbital velocity to crash into the sun. Logically it should be cheaper to throw them into some star other than Sol. Isn't that weird?
Imagine some advanced alien race orbiting VY Canis Major get a random DRADIS contact and fly out to make first contact with another species and a fuckpile of cybertrucks go hurtling past them and slam into their sun.
We shouldn't be littering the galaxy. We need to dispose of our own trash.
Science sure is weird, but wonderful. We should calculate the trajectory and send it into the Andromeda galaxy gor shits and giggles.
Also, aren't we slowly converging into the Andromeda?
Yes but the Milky Way and Andromeda will simply pass through each other
At first. We'll become gravitationally bound and become a larger cluster galaxy, and maybe calm down into a spiral again in a few billion years.
SpaceX rockets don't have enough ∆V for that.
Exploding rockets filled with cybertrucks sounds good too.
Over Mar a Lago
And explodes into a confetti of uncensored epstien files.
how many cybertrucks are gonna be trashed in landfills, junkyards and such?
More than the quantity trashed everywhere else, most likely.
Just turn them into dumpsters. They look like it anyways. Saves them from ending up in landfill.
Ahh, flagrant accounting shenanigans.
This is how Elon will make his pay package. Buy them from himself!
He's already done this before too. See the Boring company purchasing a bunch of cars too
But how does he sell the robots? They won’t even work lol
From one pocket to another...
Straight up fraud
Anybody that even indirectly gives any resource to these companies is being had
Texas already has Cadillac Ranch. How about somebody do Cybertruck Ranch?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Ranch
I failed to understand why Tesla shareholders thought that it would be a success. Everything about it is stupid. Far apart from any political situation that musk cause caused.
It made out of suspect material that is obviously going to corroded and accelerated rate thus causing them to have to do financially onerous repairs, it's a regulatory nightmare anywhere outside of the United States, it's demonstrably not a very good truck and thus has a very limited market, and it's unnecessarily heavy without offering any real benefits for that weight so it has terrible range. Oh and it has a tendency to get stuck in mud any deeper than one micron. What a wonderful product, why isn't everyone getting it?
So even the cleaners at SpaceX are getting company cars?
No. That costs money. They sit in a parking lot and rot.
Which is strange, because Tesla is supposed to have a build to order business model only. Yet, the local mall near me has >300 Teslas rotting in the parking lot.
Time for another Margot Robie explanation.
They keep shuffling around their inventory, earlier this year they were forced to move vehicles that were just sitting in a parking lot for months: https://www.jalopnik.com/1894493/hundreds-of-unsold-teslas-evicted-from-detroit-parking-lot/
I wonder if musk will run out of places to store his trash. The "rational market" still thinks tesla stock is worth near all-time highs, more than all major car companies combined.
Operation Self Gluck
Someone has to buy them to keep the stock propped up.
with the rules US market makers work under, not really. they get wide leeway in price manipulation when things are "volatile" to "facilitate liquidity".
add on the fact the US still hasnt made short selling illegal like most of the rest of the world did after 2000-2008, and the selling pressure to trigger these volatility thresholds can still be faked easily too
So they’re used cars already?
“Pre-owned”
Oh wait, that probably doesn’t even apply.