With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX(paulkrugman.substack.com) |
With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX(paulkrugman.substack.com) |
Also, the article explicitly answers your sarcasm.
I keep hearing this refrain that Starlink is going to connect everyone. LTE already covers 93% of the population globally [1]. There are obviously dead spots but I really don't see the economic case for Starlink coverage. I frequently travel with a mini and I appreciate the near certainty of connection but it seems like a luxury item. The vast majority of the time cell connection is fine. I suppose Starlink could eat all the telcos but it seems like they aren't too far behind and this connectivity will be commoditized.
[1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25...
It's a good thing you don't run SpaceX (and whatever Bezo's copycat is called).
Musk is the management huckster who slaps his name on it, sells it, and reaps the benefits as opposed to the person grinding creating the actual results and innovation. "It is what it is."
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/china-car-exports-jump-73...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/another-falcon-9-looka...
You mean like Krugman recognizes in this paragraph:
> Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.
Krugman's hypothesis is in the very next paragraph:
> But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
followed by:
> We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
> Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.
Kind of a lame comparison. Nobody is sold on the dream at a "guaranteed" profit by in his companies, you know, like an actual Ponzi Scheme. It's literally the free market at work--it's really simple, if you don't believe in whatever he says, don't speculate!
You can make the same argument for literally any overhyped, or maybe properly hyped depending on who you ask, company. Doesn't mean they're all Ponzies. Unless your argument is ultimately that the stock market is a ponzi, which in that case is a different argument altogether.
Wish people would stop crying about this guy already. These hit pieces are so goddamn boring at this point.
You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .
There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.
This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century.
I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.
Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?
I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.
This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870
In 2015, Elon Musk on Hyperloop: "it's no that hard", "it's like a tube with an air hockey table...", "I swear, it's not that hard" [1] Eventually, it was hard. You can literally go on and on with these examples.
You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.
The only morality of the left is that of Big Brother.
Musk must be verboten because of his heresies, not because he shares the libertine tendencies of the left.
Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk?
Musk does indeed have some detestable tendencies, as indeed most of us do, if we will be honest in our private moments. The difference is his are magnified by those vehemently opposed to his willingness to oppose the entrenched political elite and speak the truth as he sees it. If Musk was willing to bend the knee he would be as celebrated as Soros despite his trillion..
Musk doesn't need me or anyone to stick up for him, but we as a society need to be much more honest in these dialogues about what we are truly talking about rather than cloak in vile rhetoric and divisive attacks. As long as we debase the debate with emotional baggage of envy and vitriol rather than goal based reasoning, we deserve the pit of despair we're currently swirling into.
I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.
It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.
Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.
I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?
It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.
Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.
This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.
Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news.
Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?
(History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)
Most of the top engagement on Twitter comes from the right.
This is very different from X is "an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool".
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
1. If you actually read the Snopes article, you'll see that his 1998 "prediction" was actually a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla what was going on at the time.
2. Something else he wrote in 1998, in more serious matter, has been widely cited and was very important in the post-GFC world: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1998b_b...
3. If you do want to take his "prediction" seriously, he was of course wrong about the social impact of the Internet (which he has himself admitted, IIRC).
4. But if you look at the economic numbers of the productivity Internet, he was actually correct:
* https://archive.ph/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
There are a few chapters on the growth (and lack thereof) of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.
This, too, is actually addressed in the article - the whole point is that you're being forced to participate/speculate through this rapid inclusion in indices and mutual funds, because he's had the indices change the rules for him. So no, it's not that simple.
Tesla isn’t going away, but it isn’t ever going to be a giant in the industry anymore. Their maximum output is ~2M/units/year, which BYD already easily exceeds while continuing to scale. Is Tesla building any more vehicle assembly lines? They are not.
Citations:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a69905157/tesla-sales-down...
https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-ma...
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-gl...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-tesla-and-byd-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/10/china-byd-c...
How did they turn this around? By building a car factory in China using local knowledge, then building an duplicate of that factory in Germany, and then building a factory in Texas that incorporated knowledge learned.
model 3 was successful and profitable long before shanghai started churning out model Ys years later
The same guy burning portable gas generators at both Colossus data centers?
We can judge him by technical merits very easily. But if you hold him to the standards of Carmack or Feynman, Elon's accomplishments are entirely benign.
Elon has a closed box that he has successfully convinced a lot of people that there is a lot of money inside, and sold them small stakes in the contents, and promised year after year for 10+ years that this will be the year he opens it.
Many people have built products used by far more people, that have generated far more utility, and accumulated far less personal wealth. These things aren't connected.