Grifters Gonna Grift

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the great thing about Musk's comp package being heavily incentive-gated is that it guarantees a decade of systemic financial fraud at the heart of the market. good job everyone

— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:23 PM

do I think that Musk has considered hyperinflating the dollar so that he gets paid? obviously. *obviously* he has thought about this.

— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:44 PM

I don't think they inflation indexed it either so, you know, there's another pathway open

— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 6:39 PM

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Ok, but Tesla is currently at 7.2 million sales in 9 years, sales have slowed down and to make the first step towards his trillion dollar salary he needs to sell 20 million cars. I don’t think any of this is going to happen.

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— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:44 PM

He is also not going to deliver one million robots because at present he has not delivered one (1) robot because his robots are not real.

— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:46 PM

Still, I’m glad this brain genius is going to land the first permanent settlement on Mars*
*he isn’t

— Twlldun (@twlldun.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 5:50 PM

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This is true (and the WSJ breakdown is great) but I can’t stress enough how low a bar some of the milestones are compared to what Musk touted over the years.
He used to say Tesla would make 20M cars *per year by 2030*. Now he only needs to sell 20M by 2035 — and Tesla has already sold 8M!

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— Sean O’Kane (@seanokane.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 8:05 PM

Anyway I wrote about this 2 months ago
techcrunch.com/2025/09/06/m…

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— Sean O’Kane (@seanokane.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 8:10 PM

… Everything else Tesla’s board is asking of Musk is tied to money. Ultimately, Musk needs to help Tesla reach an $8.5 trillion valuation in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package and become a trillionaire himself.

Musk already had grand designs to accomplish something similar. He has often claimed that Tesla could one day become more valuable than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. At their current valuations, those two companies are collectively worth around $5.5 trillion. But earlier this year, the CEO claimed Tesla could be worth more than the next five most-valuable companies combined — which at the time meant he was aiming closer to the $15 trillion mark.

Along with the goal of blowing up Tesla’s valuation, Musk is being asked to increase the company’s earnings to, essentially, $400 billion per year — an enormous figure compared to last year’s earnings of around $17 billion.

Lastly, Tesla’s board has asked for two notable assurances from Musk in order to unlock the full value of the compensation package. One is that he must work with the company to develop a plan for how he will be succeeded as CEO of Tesla (and the plan essentially locks him to the company for at least 7.5 years).

The other, buried in a footnote, is that Tesla received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.” …

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Getting a billion dollars sounds really hard until you find out that all you have to do is impress a bunch of Tesla shareholders

— Ian Boudreau (@ianboudreau.com) November 7, 2025 at 12:44 PM

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Musk’s face at the end of this clip, as he says “… But he is… charismatic.”

best part of this is how elon musk's definition of "swindler" is also the most concise possible summary of how he became a billionaire

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) November 6, 2025 at 3:06 PM

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It would be a lot funnier, if not for the damage Musk has already done.

As Elon Musk wins trillion dollar payday. The greed is biblical.

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— Greg Olear (@gregolear.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 7:42 AM

Atul Gawande, for the New Yorker:

It was January, my final week in the outgoing Administration. In a few days, Donald Trump would be inaugurated as President. I had come to the United States Agency for International Development in early 2022, leaving my surgery practice and public-health research in Boston to lead the agency’s global-health efforts. Now I’d be returning to my previous life.

I spent my last days at U.S.A.I.D. in meetings with our civil- and foreign-service leaders, thanking them. Their work with partner countries had helped to contain twenty-one outbreaks of deadly disease, sustain Ukraine’s health system after Russia’s invasion, combat H.I.V., tuberculosis, and polio, and reduce maternal and child deaths worldwide. On a budget of just twenty-four dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

Many of the leaders voiced trepidation about what the incoming Administration might bring, but I struck a sanguine note. U.S.A.I.D., I pointed out, had more than sixty years of solid bipartisan backing. Trump had advanced significant parts of the agency’s work in his first term. He had personally pledged to end H.I.V. as a public-health threat by 2030. The incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had been a vocal supporter of the bureau. There would be isolated partisan skirmishes—over diversity initiatives, abortion-related policies, and the like—but more than ninety-five per cent of our bureau’s work had never been under contention.

Clearly, I lacked imagination. Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. Secretary Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the agency. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court did anything to stop it.

We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children…