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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   28952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".

Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”

When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.

It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.

In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]

The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.

And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".

If Twitter ends up going bankrupt or sees some other horrible fate, Elon is going to take the blame. In a vacuum, there's nothing unusual about that; the problem is that he also owns a number of other companies, one of which has a p/e ratio that's off the charts and is responsible for a great deal of his wealth. Most of his companies are sci-fi dream companies that can fail without being a reflection of Elon's business acumen. Not so much Twitter, which was existing and, if not consistently profitable, then at least relatively stable. Now Elon comes in and buys it and all of the sudden it's doing miserably. Is this a reflection of Elon's business acumen? No! It's a reflection of how the haters sought to destroy him because he dared to stand up for principle, dammit. No need to worry about the management of Tesla or any of his other companies; those aren't ideological, so keep the money flowing in. Tesla is the car company of the future and its stock price should be every bit of what it was back in April. This little dip is just a consequence of a general tech slowdown and backlash against political concerns involving one of his other companies. So don't worry, investor. Management is just fine. The fundamentals are the same. Buy buy buy.

Elon is trying to avoid having to pay full price. this is smart of him. Loading twitter with debt and then going bankrupt is a common private equity move. This is tiny relative to Tesla's value, so the extra shares should not have too much of an impact.

You keep saying this but there are virtually no examples of this occurring. It’s not a common tactic. The equity is in the vast majority of cases wiped out. He would need a very friendly judge and the owners of the debt would need to play ball.

The debt owners could also tell him to fuck off. And if he decides to try and permemently blow up the company while control is transferring to debt holders he would face legal liability.

A more likely scenerio is someone like Elliot Management snaps up key debt tranches and gains control. Tells Musks to fuck off. Purchased say the debt stack from 12-18 billion for 3 billion. Owns twitter at around 15 billion EV. Brings back Parag as CEO.

Him pulling that off would require a corrupt deal with a friendly government, is what you’re saying.

Which means it’s unlikely that he can do it while headquartered in California.

Except that bankruptcy is Federal so what state he's in doesn't really matter.

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