4805

Not in the Facebook sense, no. Remember, he’s not a founder (in the usual sense). He just made investments later, then got a bunch of stock as CEO, mostly through vesting options.

4806

I don’t know, but there are plenty of Elon fanboys still. And a lot of people give Elon credit for Tesla and see him as the driving force behind its success. Isn’t one of the current criticisms of him that he isn’t spending enough time managing Tesla?

If the board has a replacement CEO ready and it’s someone the stock market will react well to, then sure, replace Elon. That might be good.

4807
4808

It’s his board, isn’t it? Largely chosen by him, and including his brother?

4809

Only a great man could single handedly tank the stock of such a large company.

4810

Well, hopefully there are men with more vision than you.

The obvious reason why mankind would eventually need to leave Earth, beyond the notion that doing so would help to mitigate the risk of having the entire species wiped out by an unexpected impact event, is that eventually the Earth will not have the resources we need.

The human species is growing too quickly for us to sustain indefinitely on earth. Unless you want to impose strict breeding limits on humans, then you are gonna have a problem sooner or later.

4811

Tesla isn’t down because of Musk and Twitter. I am sure that has some effect, but it is down because of weak demand causing a shuttering a factory in China for a few weeks, weak car demand in general because of interest rates, and the growing possibility of a recession. Then throw in it has been over-valued and heavily shorted. The Twitter/Musk haters want to act like it’s all because of Musk, but it’s not.

4812

If that were the case, then we should expect to see the same downward trend in other car manufacturers, right?

4813

They are, the car stocks are all having a bad year.

If you look up Tesla stock, there are about 100 articles about why. Musk/Twitter isn’t the major reason.

Edit: This is why it’s getting hammered today:

Edit 2: Here’s a CNN article from last week going over the reasons:

4814

Eh, none of them have suffered anywhere close to the collapse that Tesla has.

Toyota is down 26% YTD.
Honda is down 20%.
VW 48%. Ford 48%. GM 45%.

Tesla is down 76% YTD.

There are certainly lots of economic issues that everyone is dealing with, including the automotive industry, but Tesla is way underperforming everyone.

4815

As I have said, Tesla was way over valued. Insanely overvalued. It had a lot more room to fall.

4816

Well, they were also hella overpriced. They were worth more than every other car manufacturer combined.

4817

Sure, go ahead and hold your breath.

How long are you expecting the human species to last? In any event, this is at most an argument for developing the capability to detect and counter impact-threatening objects, not for moving everyone (!) to the worst environment you can imagine for human beings.

4818

It’s still overvalued. So gonna fall some more I guess?

4819

And a lot of that valuation had to do with confidence in Musk’s leadership. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that there has been erosion in that confidence given his recent behavior and the fact that he’s pretty much abandoned Tesla to be full time Twit. Investors have raised the issue.

I don’t think Tesla dropped 76% because of Musk’s behavior but I do think it is contributing to the decline.

4820

Nothing helps CYA more than plausible deniability. Institutional investors can quote factory numbers officially while side-eyeing his tweets privately.

4821

The goal would be … Forever?

But sure, if you find extinction as an acceptable outcome, then I guess everything is kind of silly and nothing really matters.

I think you are making two errors here.

  1. there are lots of potential cataclysmic events that would be virtually impossible to prevent. For instance, with some kind of planetary impact event, once you get beyond a certain size object, it’s probably real unlikely you would be able to stop it, as its detection would have to take place so far before impact that it works require searching impossibly vast regions of space at all times. No matter what, you likely can’t implement a perfect defense system.

  2. the idea here isn’t to abandon Earth. It’s that humans would just exist on more than one planet, which then dramatically reduces their vulnerability to a single event.

But even beyond all that, simply moving beyond the Earth for access to more natural resources seems to be a necessity in the near future, just based on the slope of humanity’s population curve.

4822

Alternatively, provide education, birth control, and economic opportunity to women, and you can bring that pop growth right down.

4823

Oh really? No, I do not believe you will. I do not believe you have any chance of that, at all.

In order to flatten humanity’s population curve, you will need to impose breeding limits by force. You aren’t going to talk humanity into it.

4824

I have some bad news for you about the eventual fate of the universe, my friend.

Sure, but the more unsolvable you make a hypothetical event, the less likely it is to happen.

Yes, this is what I was getting at earlier. Elon’s plan for going to Mars is about saving Elon and a few people like Elon. Everybody else is still fucked. It’s just another version of something like residential zoning, where the people in the right place keep everyone else out. Why should anyone else give a damn about that plan?

What? The birth rate in many developed countries is already below replacement rate.