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More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.
In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.
Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.
So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.
What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?
This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.
Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.
$100 extra billion is basically a rounding error. elon could fund it
Elon does not have $100 billion in liquidity, nor does he have the capability of generating $100 billion in liquidity over a 1-year period. Even if a sucker bank could be found, a healthy financial regulatory apparatus would immediately step in to prevent massive systemic risk.
He took out a $45 billion credit line https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/musk-and-tesla-compensation-or-control
There is this popular notion I have seen it a lot on hacker news and Reddit, which purports that billionaires are not actually as wealthy as indicated by their net worth because their liquidity is tied up. This is generally false, especially when said equity is in stock, which is liquid and where all parties can easily agree upon a price. Tesla stock is extremely liquid, and there is a huge market for it. This is how collateral works, in which Elon pledges stock to an investment bank as collateral for a credit line. The bank can hedge this risk and profit from fees. Yeah, artwork or collectibles are different and there may not be enough liquidity to absorb a large sale, but stock and real estate are more liquid and transparent.
That is not what the paragraph you cited means. He has $45 billion worth of Tesla stock pledged as collateral. That doesn’t mean he can borrow $45 billion USD against that collateral.
He doesn't want to sell because he still wants to retain voting rights. If he wanted $100 billion liquid cash he could get it either with loans (using tsla as collateral), selling tesla shares, etc. Due to the inherent volatility of Tesla, likely such a loan would need to be double collateralized , so the OP is right that he could not access all of it, but I think if he wanted $100 billion he could get it. This is what many billionaires do. They pledge stock as collateral to borrow billions of dollars without having to actually sell the stock on the market, and without paying taxes. He came up with the funds to buy Twitter.
He did. This was
Only $44 billion instead of $100 billion,
Also collateralized by the value of Twitter itself as an asset, and
The banks which financed the deal lost money, making Musk a less-than-desirable customer in the future.
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