TRASHFUTURE - Precision Strikes from the Shorty Air Force feat. Quantian1

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

This week, we've got Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) with special guest Q (@quantian1), an institutional investor and observer of the big cruel injury factory known as Tesla. We talk about how Tesla cooks its books via emissions credits, why Elon Musk is the way he is, and why the Robin Hood app is basically a dumb money index for investors with billions more resources than you have.   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project   If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

So we are here for the first time ever. This is, this conversation has never happened before talking to, talking to finance blogger, Quantian one, and we've got a few Q drops for you. Yeah, we have a legit secret informant. We have a secret affiliate. But before we, and we're going to talk, be talking all about Tesla and irrational exuberance and how our current macroeconomy has decided that that's really the only thing it has to offer anyone. Really, really. When you say macroeconomy really fast, it just sounds like McElroy economy. All beans juice. All beans juice, we fucking... All beans, we forgot to, we forgot to have interest rates be at a sane level,

and now the world is stupid. But no, so, but Q, I want to ask you one question. Why is the electric car the future? And why are the trolls and short sellers wrong about Henrik Fisker, Fisker Automotive, and more importantly, Fisker lifestyle? Well, I mean, as a devotee of the Fisker lifestyle, I'm wearing one of Henrik Fisker's shirts right now, suitable for either the boardroom or the discotheque. And it's not just a car. It's everything that goes with the car. It's a way of life. That's right. Henrik Fisker starts a space program that's just about sending

sensible teak furniture to Orbit Mars. So Henrik Fisker, if you don't know, is just like, fuck, how would you even describe him? Not like billionaire Elon Musk. Yeah, the trad Musk. Yeah, he's a he's a trad Danish Musk who came into the electric vehicle business. It's like the Society of St. Pius X, but for like making electric cars, he's like a Sedevi Kansas Tesla guy.

He basically, he started a version of Tesla quite a while ago. It's just he didn't have an emerald pine in his background. No, that's the secret. You've got to have an emerald mine. Oh, there's your problem. Yeah, that's right. So it's it's we are what we are interested now and in trash future is please send us a Fisker lifestyle shirt because we're going to ride this this bull to the moon. The shirts are so hideous.

Welcome back to this free episode of trash future. The podcast that only gets recorded one time and never has audio problems. We are here. We are here and we is myself. Alice Hussein and Nate Milo is off shopping with his mom and forgot we had recording today. What you have to like include that detail just that simp. Yeah, yeah, he's in the pocket of big mom. He's yeah, Milo Milo is off dressed as a little sailor licking a giant lollipop saying I would ever so love a figgy treat, mummy.

And we are very happy to be joined by Quentin one, a finance blogger and general critic of all things exuberant who has a little disclaimer before we crack on. So first of all, it's finance tick tock. Now that's where all of the hot teams and finance kids are sharing their Robin Hood tips. Yeah, but I mean, I just want to say it is a pleasure to be on this podcast, which will be the first time I have ever been on trash future as a guest and definitely not, you know, the second or third attempted recording this. And I just want to add a brief disclaimer, which is that nothing I say should be imputed as

financial advice and that my firm may in fact be short Tesla at any given time. I know this is a shocking revelation that a hedge fund would be short Tesla and go on a podcast to stay shit about it. But yeah, well, there's something something I've realized sort of speaking to you as I've realized that trash future really is the world's least successful short hedge fund. Well, we're also still lit for legal purposes. We are still an oil warehouse. That's right. We briefly get that's right. We did briefly become an oil warehouse back when it was free. We're still waiting for that money from Chevron for like storing all of this oil.

Yeah, we bought we announced we were purchasing infinite oil and I'm pretty sure that's how it works. We became the monopolist by gaming the rules. But so what we're going to do today is we are going to talk about mostly Tesla. We're going to talk about some of the environment that led to Tesla and a lot of it's going to be around answering one core question. Why is Elon Musk like this? It's also the other question is Tesla's been around for 17 years. It's been inhaled as this incredible disruptor akin to the iPhone or whatever. But and it's the world's now it's the world's most valuable car company and it retains 0.5 percent of the global car market.

And so we're going to try to square that circle over the course of the next hour or so. But in order to get there, we're going to start with a little bit of macro, a little bit of what's going on with trading and retail investing. And then we're going to get into the dark undercurrents of the Elon Musk side show. So before we so in order to do that, Q, you actually sent me a really good lunch for the FT article that basically could be replaced every single season of our podcast. You could just delete it and put this this up. Do not do that. Do not do that. And it's an interview with a sort of Titan of short selling Jim Channos.

Channos, it says in the FT, describes the current economic environment as a fertile ground for people to play fast and loose with the truth and for corporate wrongdoers to get away with it for a long time. He reels off why. A 10-year bull market driven by central bank intervention, a level of retail participation in markets reminiscent of the end of the dot-com boom, post-truth in politics where my facts are you're a fake news, and Silicon Valley's fake it to you make it culture, which is compounded by FOMO or the fear of missing out. All of this is exacerbated by lax oversight where financial regulators in law enforcement are the financial archeologists. They tell you after the company

already collapsed what the problem was. Dying in an SEC windbreaker, like dodging a giant rolling ball. But did you know that they got ICO windbreakers? Every regulatory agency is just really... It's a windbreaker scheme, yeah. It's all the pocket of big windbreakers. It's more of a version of men's warehouse than it is actually a really thorough way to prevent financial wrongdoing. There is a reason, though, why you can't replace us, your beloved podcast with Jim Chanos, right? He's just like, oh, that's how it is now for the last 10 years. The man has no history, right? When has it not been like this? In particular, if you want a time when there was a 10-year bull market with a vast level of retail participation in the

markets and no truth in politics and faking it till you make it culture, you could have talked about 1928. Yeah, it's silent, cavern, coolage, post-truth politics. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're all living in the Hooverville of post-truth. But, Q, I just wanted to know what do you make of that statement? How do we get here? And especially, how does this contribute to big imaginary companies like Wirecard or possibly others? Yeah, I think it's not. I mean, obviously, Jim is right about everything he says, but it's more that the financial regulators and the law enforcement has become almost completely toothless, a sort of consequence of the hollowing out of the regulatory. It's called police abolition. We love it.

Exactly. I believe in prison abolition for Ken Lay, the CEO. That's right. Him only. Martin Chicrelli is a political prisoner of conscience. But this environment has evolved whereby virtually any wrongdoing except for buying a Rutang album is punishable by the SEC, basically suing you and then settling out of court for like a $10 million fine. Elon Musk basically blatantly committed securities fraud and attempted to lie and manipulate his stock price. And the SEC's punishment was to say that you can't tweet. And he's completely ignored that to no substantial consequence.

Even today, basically saying, yeah, we did the coup in Bolivia and we'll do it again. The cool guy. Yeah. I mean, hey, the man needs lithium. And we're never going to be able to play Rick and Morty theme pong on our self-driving Teslas if we don't do a few coups. That's what this is for. I think the thing that's amazing about that is like they don't even have lithium from Bolivia. He was just like doing a coup sounds cool and epic. So I'm going to admit to doing it. The supply chain doesn't even touch the area. He's just like, oh, this will give me a lot of

likes on Twitter if I say that we like, you know, stage the CIA intervention in the South American country. Oh, so he's like, he's he's basically lying about committing crimes to get people to think he's impressive. Exactly. Yes, the same as the wire cut thing. Also, very funny to me to be stealing Valor from like John Krasinski from the office. That's right. I think I think it's it's awesome that Silver Corp has gotten now bought out by Tesla and is being turned epic. It's like it's like these are all like that's the Venn diagram between Silver Corp and Elon Musk is dipping my bullets in bacon, but for different reasons. Alice, I like that you call what you call that a Christian Islamophobic Christian

Ham magic. Yeah, Christian Ham magic, one of my favorite genres of like folk folk belief. Yeah. So it's this is a big part of this is this whole story of how Tesla got to be what it is, is what I call the Elon Musk side show. But I think let's before we get into that, right, I want to talk a little bit about Robin Hood and retail investing, because part of this story, not the whole story, but a part of this story. And this is something that channels talks about as well as this wide retail participation in markets that are so governed now by like high frequency trading algorithms and institutional investors who can like move the market with their own purchases that like a lot of these people are just sort of signing up through these apps to

kind of give money to short sellers and prop up the stocks of either bankrupt companies like Hertz because they like, I don't know, got like the intelligent investor summarized to them in three seconds and then didn't really learn anything more about Chapter 11 law or use it because, you know, they think that Elon Musk is epic and they love that he, you know, dunks on rose emoji Twitter. So doing some day trading. Yeah, doing some day trading based on who I like on Reddit. So let's talk a little bit about Robin Hood. So a little bit of background. It is a Silicon Valley unicorn. It's worth 8.3 billion dollars. And you can trade stocks and options and worryingly really exotic options

just on your phone and you just like pick up your phone and you're like, I have entered into a ton team. And what it and what it is is basically it's a it is just a no commission trading platform where every time Elon Musk says that, you know, he's he's gonna he's gonna build a diversion of Disneyland but without all the girl stuff on Mars, a bunch of Redditors can go and give a bunch of money to short sellers. Yeah. Well, what you have to imagine is the Wojak meme with the like the guy with the cal art smile going so true that but with like a stock line. So, Q, could you explain a little bit about what how like we know like it's an app you can trade stocks on for free and they claim to be democratizing finance for millions of new

traders by making it possible to buy and sell financial products without making a commission. Can you explain how this is bullshit and how everyone is getting a bad deal who uses it except like the four people who profit from it? Yeah, I mean, so you know how Twitter like redesigned their interface a couple of months ago. So it's all like blank white space and like smooth rounded blue buttons. Like imagine if you had that app, but like every time you press the button, it just like wrote $100 check to Citadel securities. So the Robinhood is commission free trading. But obviously, they're still making a lot of money and then they make their money in basically two ways. The first way is sort of the way that, you know, every unscrupulous

person makes money, which is just charging absorbent interest rates to people to borrow it. So they don't offer margin loans, but they will offer to increase your buying power for a quote unquote monthly. If you get discord nitro. Yeah, I think my bank charges me that I get I'm a cold member of my bank and I have a little card and it's just a 19.9% of whatever I buy. It's awesome. Yeah, exactly. It's Shariah compliant because they're not. But the other product that Robinhood is has I think been very clever in monetizing is that they've realized that their biggest asset is that they have a bunch of like epic bacon redditors as their primary like target market. And these are people who know literally nothing

about companies or investing or option trading or anything like that. So all of the trades that they're placing are basically like pure random noise. So you can sell this random noise to market makers and market makers can use this is like a benchmark. So they say, hey, you know, the idiots on Robinhood are putting in 55% buy orders from Tesla and 45% sell orders. And this like dark pool that's got a bunch of like Wall Street hedge funds in it is putting in like 60% sell orders. So they probably know something that Robinhood does not and I don't want to match their orders. I love so much that democratizing access to finance means instantly creating a kind of dumb money surveillance operation.

Yeah, I was I was I was going to save it like and this definitely wasn't said in the last recording, but this is basically like what happened like democratizing finance is basically what happens when you like give these types of tools to shit posters. So it's like, it's fascinating how much like the Tesla stock has, you know, that's so much of it's kind of like the line going up stuff comes from like shit posters who give bullshit information and day trade, especially like especially like guys who have found themselves especially recently like at home and they're just day trading because there's like nothing else to do to like take these bullshit. Well, it's like a Reddit subculture too, right? Is you like you post your epic trades and it's

like just this weird kind of like cosplay thing where you're just like spending all of I'm going to switch from like buying Ukrainian forest warden patches like spending all of my disposable income on a trader jacket. I interviewed a few of these day traders like last year when I was doing some stories about people getting into day trading and like one of the common things that I sort of found was that they just liked the idea of like having two monitors and like looking at a graph for a bit. That's cool. And it was like cool to like have your graph have your like funky finance graphs on one screen and you're like Twitter where you're like shit posting and you know, making fun of women online and stuff like that is like the dude equilibrium.

So I kind of respect that. Well, these guys were all Bitcoin guys until like six months ago, right? Yeah. Now they're into stonks. I love that. They've taken all of their all of the market acumen that they use to be Bitcoin millionaires. To make Bitcoin the most incidentally, another thing which Elon Musk like he'd used his powers of prediction about, I think. Yeah. There's like an old Elon Musk tweet that's like if Bitcoin isn't, oh no, fuck it was John McCarthy. He's going to eat his dick. So easy to confuse those two men. So a little bit on Robin Hood that I think is very funny. Number one, it was founded by some Occupy Wall Street people who were like, we're going to democratize finance. And they've done

so again, as you say, I was by creating a surveillance network of dumb money. And as you would say, Q, by making a benchmark of what stupid that market makers can use to gain edge. You could have done the same thing more cheaply by just having a dumb guy in a room with a Bloomberg terminal. I like to press the big green buttons. So that's probably like. So and as you say, how this actually works is the order flow where all of the stocks that are all of the trades that are made in a day, all get bundled up and executed all at once. And and just sold on to these market makers who they have existing relationships with that then sell them, give them money. And they're actually fine 1.25 million for for like not

giving people or not fulfilling their obligation to give people the best price. But here's something very funny about Robin Hood that I love, which is among people, I found this statistic, which is among people earning between $35,000 and $75,000 annually, stock trading activity increased by more than 90% versus the week before, after they received this Trump stimulus check. Again, doing the call out smile and funneling my stimulus money, which thanks to America is the only thing that I'm going to get directly into Elon Musk. Effectively, yeah. So it's a way of like one sesh one source place.

It's like there was almost a slightly like counter secular readers read every you know, I call it redistributive policy in the US. And then a company just got created to just swoop all that money right back up, which is hilarious when you consider how much of the federal stimulus funds are going to companies for bailouts. And it's like, not enough. We got more. We got more of the backdoor route. No, more of these need to go to companies more. And that's the Elon Musk again on Twitter is like, oh, stimulus is or dumb. And it's like, that stimulus money is all going into boosting the isn't boosting this Tesla stock price that much versus institutional investors probably not. But all that stimulus money is going into

boosting the stock price buying Tesla stock specifically is like for every other company, if you buy the stock like the company doesn't care, like then they're like only very loosely and directly like compensated based on the stock price. But Elon Musk has like a 50 billion dollar pay package that is directly linked to his stock going up. So it's literally you are writing a check to Elon Musk every time you buy his stock. Which is cool. He's going to be your best friend now. He's already awesome. Twitter. He's going to invite you to his parties with clients. Oh yeah. That's right. He's going to reply to your tweet about missing Harambe. Q before the during the previous recording, which definitely did not happen,

you were about to respond to a question that I was trying to pose about some of the structural advantages that let's say actual hedge funds and other institutional investors have versus a person with an app. And I was wondering if we could get your insights on that because I'm struck by how to phrase this. How much the allure of being the cool day trader who makes it big could be, but also how much just of a disadvantage people are at with regard to people who actually make money this way. Oh sure. I mean like we have basically like a research budget that allows us to buy like any sort of data sources we want that like normal investors would have no access to. Like you can as an investor you can buy things like satellite footage of car parking lots so you can see

in real time how many people are visiting a store. Just a pull up Elon Musk's genome here. You can buy like people's credit card histories so you see what the money they're spending it on. You can pay for like drones with infrared cameras to go like take pictures of like oil storage facilities so you know how much there is in them. Yeah, exactly. We can get a spy satellite to look at the trash future global headquarters and see exactly how many barrels boil you have. I was thinking about that. I remember hearing about a firm doing a thing where they couldn't necessarily talk to people below the C-suite in publicly traded companies, but they could talk to private companies. So they just hired hundreds of people to just call different

supply chain private companies in related industries and just talk to them all day about stuff they were seeing. And that's not even a tiny little percentage of their overall budget. This kind of industrial espionage stuff aside, it's also like have one big thing that we're not talking about. It's a lot harder to do insider trading when you're an epic Reddit guy who just has a phone. Nobody's giving you tips. There's no channel for like getting inside information the way that like Bill Ackman can just like call up the CEO of Valley and to be like, hey, are you guys going to make this quarter? Which more or less is kind of like what he did. He got like insider information about a merger. I think that was the Allergan merger and he

basically just traded on it and it was totally legal because the company signed off on it. They literally gave him like a pass that said, you may insider trade on this information we're about to give you. Just writing myself a permission slip. Yeah, it's cool that you can get like a hall pass for just like doing insider trading. But that's why like and then the converse of that, you know, is that someone on some guy will see something come up on Reddit. That's like Elon Musk's new Tesla to say the cake is a lie. And it's just like, yes, please, 10 shares. And then all of that money just it goes to subsidize the activities of like, again, extreme. One of the things that we've talked about before on TF

as well is that like money in some ways acts like a gravitational object. It bends things around it. And so like when the firms or the companies and stuff get big enough, then it kind of doesn't matter because, well, that trade that I make on, you know, seeing some article that just goes to end up subsidizing a research budget that ends up sort of giving that firm even more of an edge over me, the random retail investor. And even then my trade isn't even probably not even profitable for me because mostly it's going to subsidize the order flow business of like Citadel. The more often you trade, the more you care about that. And so like Robin Hood is again, it's like a skinner box that, you know, it turns you into

a monkey with cocaine injected into its brainstem because it's just like, it's the smooth modernist clean interface that's like, you don't buy a put option or a call option, you press a button that says like, stock go up or stock go down. And so it's designed to be as seamless of an experience as possible to encourage you to trade as much as possible, which of course means that like your order flow is now like a significant component of your return. As opposed to like, if you're just buying ETF and you hold it for a year, like your order flow payment doesn't matter at all. One of the few, yeah, one of the few pieces of like British nanny state legislation that I quite like is for day trading apps, which you can see,

you can chart the economy as they advertise more. You are legally required to put a big disclaimer on this. Like you could lose all of your money. I appreciate that. But like, obviously, if you're in the US, particularly like the Epic Reddit Bacon guy doesn't like, he's not going to pay attention to that. And he's going to be like, yes, one stonks please. Yeah, well, maybe those suckers will, but I'm investing in the Tony Stark company. Speaking of, he was an Iron Man too, man. Speaking of the Tony Stark company. So we are having sort of talked about Robin Hood a little bit. I think now it's time to move into Tesla and answering with these macro factors in mind, with understanding a little bit of what the retail investors are all about.

Let's try to understand Tesla, the company. And I sort of like I said earlier, what we're answering the question of is despite being around for so long and being hailed as an incredible disruptor, it's only got 0.5% of the global car market doesn't even have that much of the electric vehicle market. And how much of a disruptor can you be for like 10 consecutive years? Yeah, you can only be an upstart for so long. At some point, you're just like a 40 year old living in your parents' basement. And the facile TF answer to this, which is also the correct one, is that the line has stopped. It doesn't like relate to anything anymore. So you can just it is literally just vibes. Elon Musk can just be cool. And that can make him a disruptor and that

can make him this, you know, powerhouse monopoly. Yeah, well, specifically the world's most powerful car, the world's most valuable car manufacturer. And so there's the last time you actually saw a Tesla with your eyes. To be fair, I don't see them very often in the UK. I did see them a lot living in New York. But yeah, here, not so much. So yeah, you see them everywhere. If you're in California, it's just like literally every person like the second that like their first big tech paycheck salary hits, they immediately go out and they like buy a Tesla. And that's and you know what, that's where the money is. It's in the high end short, short, short fat end of the curve. It's definitely not in the long tail. So we're going to be answering this question a couple of ways.

I want to start with something I call the Elon Musk side show where Tesla as a company becomes a prop, a proxy for Elon Musk's whole thing, because SpaceX, Neuralink and the boring company are all private. So I think the best way to into this is to talk about his just sort of infantile blog where he has made two posts, the master plan they are called. So the first master plan I've got step one inherit Emerald mine. That's that's look at any good plan has to start with that. No, so the first master plan is create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive, which credit to him. He has done it is technically a car. Yes. So he has done this use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price. He as far as I know has not really

done this. I mean, Q you sort of are a closer Tesla watcher than I has he accomplished step two of his master plan that he said in 2006. Kind of he's made he's made the model of the model three, which was kind of a problem because sort of the first, you know, 100,000 model threes that he made were like held together with like spit and rubber bands and and were like barely functional as cars. But apparently if you buy one now, it's like about as good as like just a generic like, you know, Ford sedan. And he only makes what like 0.1% of the cars that Ford makes. Yeah, it's like Mark said, all that is solid melts into a kind of like medium price range sedan. The third step use that money to create an affordable high volume car hasn't done that.

No, no, has not done that. And the fourth step provide solar power. No kidding. This has literally been our website for 10 years already. Damn, what if we made the whole car out of solar panels? What if we made the roads out of solar panels? What if we made me Elon Musk out of solar panels? So one of the things that he did actually was he predicted that 2019 would be what he calls the year of the solar roof. Sure. I'm going to give everyone a moment so you can check. Go outside, check your roof, check if it's solar. I'll wait. Okay, we've paused. We're back. Q, is your roof solar? It is not. Alice, Nate? Yeah, Mr. Rich Guy thinks I can afford a roof over here. Who said your roof? Is it solar? I'm anti-sun by principle. So even if it was solar, I would

reverse it. So far, he's done the first thing. So he created a low-volume expensive car, kind of did an okay medium-volume car that's still very expensive, has not developed an affordable high-volume car, and just has bought a lot of lithium to make a lot of very large batteries that catch on fire all the time and has also failed to provide solar power. A company that was supposed to do this, which is the amazing thing, like he had solar city, and it just immediately went bankrupt because it's a terrible business. And so he sort of bought it out by Tesla and was like, oh, we're going to make solar roofs at Tesla, and it's like they've never produced anything remotely like that.

Yeah, but what they have is they've talked about it and really sweet renderings of a house with a solar roof. As far as I'm aware, that is the only real solar roof in existence. Can we say that Elon Musk may actually be a multi-year plot by big rendering? Yeah, he's just in the pocket of CAD. Yeah, exactly. It's funny, just as you were discussing this, I pulled up the Tesla UK website to see what it looked like. And there was, of course, a rendering of the Model 3 behind the wheel that they had reversed the steering wheel to look like a British car, but it's so very obviously supposed to be

in California. And it's so obviously on the wrong side of the road that I just had this shock of disorientation because this can't exist. This isn't real. UK people that drive Teslas are basically all just hopped up on so many of the prescription drugs they only give rich people that they forget what side of the road to drive on. So that was his first master plan, which basically is all about saying, oh no, Tesla, I just realized that to do this grand global libertarian energy revolution, to change the energy mix of the world is not a political question. It's just a question about, is the technology there and can we scale it? And so the idea is, oh, Tesla is going to just be

this thing that finances the wide adoption of solar power and green transportation everywhere. And again, this is a luxury car company, but here's master plan part D as he says. Fucking asshole. Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage. Wrongo. Do you want like a price is right losing horn for these? Yeah, if you have one to hand, otherwise I'll just continue doing wrongos. Yeah, you go ahead.

Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments. Well, he does have the cyber track. Yes. Yeah, hasn't hasn't done that. Develop a self-driving capability that is 10 times safer than manual by a massive fleet learning. Sorry. Q, can you confirm the sad horns? Yes, it's very sad. The thing about his self-driving capabilities is like every other self-driving car drives with radar, like it uses LiDAR to like actually physically detect if other cars are there.

But Elon Musk, who is also overseeing the self-driving program for some reason, just decided that you don't need to do that. So he just uses cameras, which means there's been a bunch of incidents where like there's a white panel van on a cloudy day next to the Tesla and the Tesla just like drives straight into it because the camera can't distinguish between the van and the sky. Yeah, but on the plus side, we did make PayPal much more irritating to log into. And also like there are with that unintentional high speed acceleration incidents, I think they're called. Yes, there is an acronym. I don't think that's it. I think normally you would use, perhaps use the word Kareem. Some kind of hydroplane. And the final one, my favorite one,

my favorite part of Tesla's fleet master plan is enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it. The car is going to get a Robin Hood account and it'll just day trade for you. Yeah, but it's going to be just a mass amount of just cars crashing into panel vans and then buying stock and Hertz rent a car, which was bankrupt two years ago. No, it's like you short the U-Haul stock as you are about to hit the U-Haul. Yeah, just it turns out the subject of history was the self-driving car. So that's what I think is really funny. So enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it, which basically means a vast distributed public transport network of self-driving taxis owned just by you, the customer. What does he call them

again? It was like teletaxis or something? Yeah, something like this. Robotaxes. Thank you. You would just be able to get like a ride in somebody else's car because they were not going to be using it, I guess. My car just randomly leaves the garage at 2am to pick up drunk people who immediately throw up all over it. It just parks in the garage ready for me to go to work in the morning at 6am. Covered in vomit. That sounds like a great experience to earn 20 bucks. I love to be in a taxi going home and then the entire car to like veer around in a handbrake turn and throw me out of the back because the guy who owns it needs to drive unexpectedly. No one's ever needed to drive unexpectedly. Everything... Wait, are you saying that your fleet of personal assistants

doesn't have your calendar planned out a year ahead of time? Weird how these guys keep making products that only work when you live their exact life. It's weird. I get called in to work on an emergency and like my car arrives full of taxi riders. I have inadvertently taken hostage. We live in a future where everyone can experience the last long shot of the Long Good Friday. So what I really think of this, right, what Musk is actually doing is he's saying, he recognizes that there is a problem around like transportation and infrastructure and stuff and he's saying, okay, how can I try to solve this problem libertarianly? And so like to the problem of mass of affordable ecological mass public transit solved by a libertarian just involves

all of these like ludicrous innovations and crazy assumptions and mass kidnapping and destruction of panel vans and being like, yes, so long as we can turn this luxury car company into like a loss leader for a transportation revolution, then we'll be able to solve the problem of green transport. Also, what's a train? The problem with trains is you can't inadvertently kidnap anyone with a train. The train is a perfect way to distribute a discrete amount of Libyan militiamen though. That is true. My car is arriving back filled with 15,000 Libyan militiamen. Awkward. They're all like 14,000 of them are just like riding on the roof like a technical.

So I'm now going to, this is something I took from CNBC and this is a report about how after a German court ruled last week that Tesla cannot meaningfully describe their cars as having any kind of quote unquote autopilot. And I take that fact now let it rest in the context of the following litany. Musk first started talking about autopilot in 2013, saying that generalized full autonomy, so like a fully self-driving car that you don't need to touch or look at, was in development by 2015. By 2016, Tesla told customers that all its cars in production would include full self-driving hardware. That hardware did not arrive until the spring of 2019. And although Tesla has been promising self-driving cars since 2016, it still hasn't demonstrated the cross-country hands-free

drive Musk said will be possible by the end of 2017. In April 2019, Musk said, we expect the feature complete in self-driving this year and we expect to be confident enough for our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably in the second quarter of next year, a.k.a. at the time of this recording. Musk said in a call with investors then in May 2019 that Tesla expected to have 1 million vehicles on the road by the end of 2020 that are able to function as robotaxis. So, Q, do you feel stupid now that I've told you that that's what's happening? Yes, I should have realized that I actually took a robotaxi to this recording. There was a massive oversight on my part.

Oh, no, I took a fake robotaxi. Oh, no. So, Q, what is your... I like the idea that it's like the mechanical Turk, where it's just they have a self-driving car, but there's like a midget in a box in like under the hood. Yeah, it's just going to be like those delivery robots. You're just going to have a guy in Columbia driving your car remotely. Oh, God, I've laced it. I've laced it. Yeah, it's going to happen. But what is your take on this timeline of, oh, this technology, the keystone technology that's going to revolutionize it and that's going to justify our valuation that makes us a tech company rather than a car company that gives us this monopoly. It's always a day away.

I mean, it's always been a day away. And there's no reason to think that when eventually that day comes, Tesla would be the one to have it. Waymo, which is the Google project that does this exact same thing, basically they tested their cars in, I want to say Phoenix, Arizona, which is literally the perfect place to test a self-driving car. It's dry. It's hot. There's only single vehicle, single occupant vehicles on the road. It's a perfect grid. There are no three-way stops or anything. And they found that at the one three-way stop in the entire city, just every single one of Google's cars would get backed up in a huge line that would be hundreds of cars long in this random suburb because it couldn't understand how to navigate a one-way, three-way stop with no

sign, something that a 16-year-old driver could do. So even this technology that's miles more advanced than Tesla's is still years out from development. Yeah. And it is really quite an image, just getting up to go to work one day, opening your bedroom door and finding just 30 unoccupied Toyota Priuses with cameras on them, just idling in your hallway. Sorry, we're working out the bugs. We're working out the bugs. So ARK Invest has predicted that a RoboTaxi business could lift Tesla's shares to as much as $6,000, which again, that's basically... What is the time of recording? $1,400. Yeah. However... They wrote that when the price was like $150 though. So it's already most of the way to their

estimate. Wall Street responds to stuff like this, where it's like, oh, we thought this stock was worth $500, but it's suddenly increased by a factor of 10 on us. We'll just raise the price target, so now we think it's worth $3,000 instead. What's that FOMO thing that we were talking about at the very beginning? It's this idea that if your whole economy is based around chasing monopolies, then there's no... If you put enough bets on trying to find the next monopoly, you only have to... It only has to work once. You only have to identify the right monopoly once. That's why Masayoshi San gets to just say, yes, I think this dog walking business with an email address is worth $14 billion because he called Alibaba right, and now he gets to just basically

fuck up the economy and externalize his weirdness on everything else. It's no surprise that once Tesla says, we're going to do robotexies, it doesn't matter that they're the least advanced in a field of other players who are nowhere near that. They're still going to have their stock skyrocketed to the moon, and then Elon Musk himself will take home a huge fat check because of what he did to the stock price. When the stock price is based on vibes, there doesn't matter what the underlying company is doing. Goddamn. It makes us feel so good, right? I love doing this show. If we take seriously the idea that it is all based on telling a good story about becoming a monopoly, then Elon Musk is perhaps the least fit person to actually lead this transportation

revolution. He keeps posting. He will never log off. He just unfollowed his wife. Well, I think fundamentally right. He's PT Barnum. He's not the right brothers. He's a showman, but who's saying, you've been mentioned earlier, you want to talk about the nerves online. People's relationship with Elon Musk, it goes beyond parasocial. It's like devoted. He's like their pharaoh. It's a very weird part of internet subculture. I feel like it does feed on what we were talking about in the previous section, which is really just about vibes and how you can really build a cult purely around those vibes. I made some kind of joke which featured... I responded to a Bernie tweet. When Elon talked about how the US doesn't need to do another

major stimulus package because it should do UBI instead, which we've spoken about is sort of like a brain dead idea that doesn't address any kind of structural problems. So I responded to Bernie just saying, get his ass and stuff like that. Like a very kind of innocuous and basic tweet. And for the next few hours, I have all these kind of people who are like, read the Fred blue checkmark. Listen to what he's saying. Do you know how to read blue checkmark? There's lots of it was like, you have a blue checkmark and everything, which is something that I should really unpack on another podcast or some sort. But when you go into the profile of these people, they all have the same type of bio,

which is like lover of SpaceX or aspiring Tesla buyer. Right. It's like these really cringy things that are kind of like, are you trying to get Elon to like notice you? And what I found was like the similarity, the thing that like really binds these people together are they're very kind of like, they're dumb versions of Stan Twitter. So the people who are like really into Taylor Swift or BTS or like other types of K-pop bands, right? But the thing is, but the thing is they're like, those stands are at least like, they sort of have some degree of self-awareness, right? Or they have like, they're kind of at least somewhat critical, at least like peripherally speaking, even though

like lots of them will kind of like, make your life a misery if you say that like, John Cook isn't beautiful or whatever. But with the Elon guys, like they are just, they're just completely unhinged. So when you say to them, but like, okay, well, you know, if you're, if you're, if you love Tesla so much, like, can you kind of explain like why it doesn't make any money? Or like, can you explain like, you know, why like their earnings are so missing? Like, they have like a history of like financial irregularity, which kind of lends itself to maybe some kind of corruption. And what they'll say to you is like, well, Elon's smarter than all of us, including me. So I can't answer those questions. But all I know is that the line keeps going up

and you should buy Tesla stock hashtag, you know, Tesla. So it's kind of like, it's like arguing with someone who like, they start off as a stat as a stand, but they ultimately become like an automated bar. Yeah. And it's also interesting, like the extent to which they, like they get very into the vibes of Elon's other companies, like into SpaceX, into the boring company. Yes. Yeah. As a way of propping up like a car company, I guess. But the thing is like, they even, even they sort of openly admit like these companies might be junk and they might not be worth anything, but it's like Elon the visionary, like Elon, like, is someone who's smarter than all of us. So you just have to trust in Elon, which like

explains a lot of what we've been talking about in terms of like, why like Tesla seems like, you know, goes through these periods of like overvaluation and seems to kind of like project this kind of aesthetic of being a like successful, modern, sustainable engineering company. It's purely based on the fact that like Elon Musk, and you know, it maybe goes right to back to the beginning of what we were talking about, which is like, why Elon won't stop posting. Like maybe it's because like the posting element of Elon Musk is like necessary for that whole company to survive. Oh my god. Yeah. Whomst among us has not unfollowed our wife?

Yeah. Like if you look at the CEO of like GM or whoever, like, she's just like a generic rich lady. You know, there's there's nothing to relate to. But if you look at like Elon Musk, you're like, Oh, this is a guy who's on Twitter at 3am, like screaming at somebody and calling them a blue checkmark idiot. Like I can relate to that. I should buy this guy's stock because he's just like me. It's parasocial relationship that's like deliberately cultivated by Musk. Sometimes you can really tell that he like puts on the troll face, right? And he's like, Oh, I'm going to do some posting about pronouns is dumb. Epic bacon Harambee. And it's like, Okay, fine. Just give me the give me the GM lady who just like does not post and goes to the

fucking Wayfair cabinet opening parties. I really, I really do appreciate the concept that basically you take the worst elements of online culture. And if you could just get them to IPO, then like they would perform as well as Tesla does. I mean, imagine if actually, you know what, I don't want to go down that road. So I don't want to make fun of podcast listeners because that's how I pay my rent. But at the same time, like you could do the idea that their edge in the market is basically like they just got a ton of subreddits that are really into them is weird, but also apparently true. Well, like this is the thing, right? The thing is that like the difference, right, is that we are using this to pay some of our rent and also not like

making this the cornerstone of the economy and also destroying the fucking night sky as a hobby. Well, yeah, I mean, I would like the idea that we could actually get people to take us seriously, you know, from an investment perspective, if we just made similarly outlandish claims, but then instead of being about space travel or solar roofs or self-piloting electric cars, it's just like, we will end sex by 2025. That's right. So what I find very interesting, though, is that all of these people's identity is basically wrapped up in, lest we forget how the economics of this actually happens, subsidizing Q. Making your business work.

The Tesla stock is like, obviously, in recent months, it has not been so great for short sellers. There was a stretch of like eight or nine years from like 2012 to 2019, where the stock basically went nowhere. And it was just all of these people were buying money and short sellers were just selling short the company and taking the cash and investing it somewhere else. And it was a great trade. Yeah. So it's like all of these angry blogs like Clean Technica, basically just keeping you in like, yeah, like Premier Crew. It's cool. But I think to think about why he's relatable, my position on this is that Elon Musk is like, he's the last promise that the model we've been living under for the last several decades,

where some very small number of people are elevated to the towering heights of prosperity at the expense of more or less everyone else. This innovation-led, business-friendly, blah, tech economy, whatever, is a worthwhile trade that results in anything more than incremental, positive changes in quality of life. Because what he's promising is he's saying, we're going to live on Mars, and I'm going to put billions behind that. And we're going to have infinite Jetson-style abundance of solar power and self-driving cars and all these wonderful stuff. Because there's very little in the economy that's actually promising that anymore. The last time that that was promised en masse was the 60s. The last time anything ever happened

like that was like the iPhone. I think really a lot of it is, if Musk goes, if he stops being a going concern, like his company stopped being going concern, if it's shown to be not all that it's cracked up to be, if it's shown to mostly be stories and vibes, then what do we endure all this inequality for? Being epic, getting the source back at McDonald's, briefly. So on the Tesla Trolls, which I really enjoy, I went to just a few of the blogs, and a lot of these people, they are mostly about posting. So here's a quote from a Clean Technica, a very pro Musk blog. A few months ago, I was working on a post about the SEC and Elon Musk, and I asked people on Twitter for input, and Elon actually joined the conversation.

I wasn't prepared for what came next. For several days, I had an endless supply of Tesla Q guys attacking every word, sometimes in nasty and personal ways. Not much later, it suddenly stopped. I'd been added to the list of pro Tesla accounts for automatic blocking, but I was still curious, why would people act like that? So I decided to go undercover and join the ranks of the Trolls. Yeah, so explain to me real quick what Tesla Q is, right? Because it seems like it's this Tesla hate them, which obviously we're all part of. Yeah, I mean, I think Tesla Q is basically all of the people whose brains were broken because they shorted Tesla for the first bounce when it went from like $20 a share to $200.

And they concluded that this is a company that doesn't make money, therefore it must go bankrupt tomorrow. And they never factored in that all of these Epic Bacon Redditors would just... Yeah, no. You can't just keep your value going up in your accounts receivable without making any car arenos. So what I've referred to them as, as a kind of Seth Claremont Fedain dedicated to doing whatever it takes to making this stock behave like its fundamentals dictate it should be, they are just willing to do anything. We're going to bend this girder back into place because that's what the laws of physics say it should be doing. And so that's all we're going to do. Also, the reason why it's Q, if the listeners

don't know, is that it's what you put on a stock ticker for a company symbol. Once that company goes bankrupt, so it's aspirational to be like bankrupt Tesla. Yeah. Personally, I'm starting a new loosely affiliated online group of stock market pickers, but I'm doing one that's more likely to be successful sooner. It's called HertzQ. I basically just exist to point out to all those guys on Robinhood who think they're doing a really good value trade by buying calls on Hertz. And I'm just cheering on them, subsidizing the creditors who are just being like, well, thank you for the free money. The funniest element of the Tesla Q thing though, it's like this is huge. It's an online subculture. Yeah, of the finance people who just got mad

about the trolls. They're all just mad at the trolls. Tesla Q is mad at the trolls. Pro Tesla is mad at the trolls. It's all trolls all the way down, but they're willing to take it off the screen. The funniest element of this to me is that when they took it offline and into the real life, they developed something called the shorty Air Force, which is a group of guys who are short Tesla who fly drones over and through the Tesla factories because they're convinced that no one's actually there working. Roles. There's amazing stuff that they take pictures of the scrap, like these trailers full of scrap, and they're like formatting these conspiracy theories that basically like, oh, Tesla claims that they're making like 5,000 cars a week, but a third of those

cars are scrap and they're piling up in these unmarked trailers in abandoned construction site in Fremont and stuff like that. And it's this total when prophecy fails shit too, because they're all convinced it, like you say, they're convinced it's going to happen tomorrow. And it's true, like we don't need Tesla Q shorty Air Force, so like go and take pictures to know that like the Model 3 like historically wasn't a very good car. We don't need that to know. No, you can just look in Elon Musk's replies for a guy who's like, Mr. Musk, sir, I really admire all of your work, but I saved up all of my savings at the racism factory. And I bought this Model 3. And as soon as I got at home, both the bumpers fell off,

and the steering wheel fell off, and the roof fell off. And then just immediately after that, just being brigaded by like Reddit guy is being like, well, clearly it's supposed to do that. And also you didn't like correctly secure the bumpers on yourself. Yeah, that's right. But like it's but they're there, the conspiratorial thinking isn't really necessary. Because you know, what we're what we're about to talk about right next is it's like, yeah, it's all of the reasons that this is a bad company. It's all out there. It's a lot of it's just not hidden. You can just look and be like, oh, this company makes 0.5 million cars a year. And Toyota makes like 15 million cars a year. And it's worth more than Toyota. Like that's

probably bad. Yeah, but how many games of Tetris can you play on a Toyota? So this is our last section on creative accounting and executive compensation. So last year, the company posted a loss of 862 million against a turnover of 24.6 billion. Again, half a million vehicles. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine in terms of it's just inefficiency of using capital to make vehicles. But it has now become profitable for the first time ever. And show of hands virtually, who thinks that's because of selling cars? Not I, not I sir, not I. Q, can you tell us why? What has actually caused Tesla to become profitable? So Tesla has basically discovered this loophole in sort of California energy regulations, which

says that like, if you're selling cars in California, those cars have to have like an average carbon emissions below a certain threshold. So like if you're Hummer, the only way you can sell your giant gas-guzzling cars in California is to buy the credits of manufacturers that produce cars with low emissions and say, OK, now my average fleet emissions is X and that's below the threshold. So Tesla makes like literally like over a billion dollars a year just selling these carbon credits to other car manufacturers. They're literally, they're profitable because they're being paid to be profitable by their competitors. You know what this really reminds me of? I don't know if part of the sort of whole green

sales saga where Sanjeev gooped as energy company that actually just ended up being a way to privatize a bunch of subsidies from the government, right? Where it was just, oh yeah, I've realized if we just buy a bunch of diesel generators, make a bunch of predictions about how much energy we'll be able to generate, then we'll get a promise of subsidies from the government and then we can securitize that promise and make the money without ever having to generate the power. And this really reminds me of that where he's just been like, wait a minute, for every car I make, all I have to do is have a car company that doesn't make diesel cars or petrol cars. And I don't really even need to make cars. I can just sort of exist as a sort of

conceptual middleman in this like regulatory loophole. And so the thing making it profitable, it's not the, the promise was, right? If you think back, the promise was Tesla's going to be profitable because it's going to go from a low volume expensive car to a high volume cheap car, and they're going to be fully self-driving. And people are going to pay sort of upwards of sort of 8,000 this year, then 10,000 next year, then 40,000 the next year for it to have the self-driving software downloaded onto it and that ability unlocked. But actually, if you look at the way that they're making their money, it's mostly just this. It's just this. Every single quarter, Tesla has made money. Their sales from energy credits have been larger than their net profits.

It seems almost as if Tesla exists because of this, again, hollowing out of the state and this way of funneling money from it into, well, Elon Musk, I guess. Right. The state couldn't just say, you have to sell cars that have emissions below this threshold. That would be socialism. Instead, they have to set up this convoluted shell game where it's like, well, you get certain credits and if you buy credits against your existing fleet, we'll give you a tax rebate and that will allow you to sell cars at a certain discount. And it's this whole enormous convoluted system that has no sense or value except in as much that it allows, again, Elon Musk to basically cook his books and pretend his company is profitable,

so it gets included in the S&P 500. Yeah. And much like Greensill. It's this kind of like allergy to government doing anything itself and so just creating this kind of Gorman-Gast kind of bureaucracy. I just remember hearing people complaining about, I believe this is cap and trade. Is that correct? Cap and trade would be extending this idea to the entire economy instead of just being like car manufacturers. The UK has a system a lot like this too, which is like Aston Martin by volume sells like this tiny electric car as their number one product, like a smart car or whatever, because that's what allows them to sell like their huge Z12 gas guzzlers that get like, I don't even know what the units are, like five miles to the gallon in

metric. And I think what you look at, right, is this then Tesla can now I think from this angle be seen as kind of an indictment of this whole approach to managing an economy where the government is the manager of the economy, the government, whatever, is scared to do anything other than what they think of as encourage more production. The idea of, well, we can't discourage anything. We just have to create incentives here and here because it was the case of Greensill, it's the case here, someone just figures out how to privatize the incentive, and then we're back where we started. But one dumbass gets to like post professionally now, like that's the change. But if we wanted to a little bit more, we talked about the S&P 500.

One of the keys, one of the key elements for this whole story, like the one of the key reveals at the end is that one of the big quests for Tesla long term has been inclusion in the S&P 500 index. And the requirements are that you have to be profitable for four quarters and then profit like in total and then profitable for your most recent quarter. And Tesla is very close to being included in the S&P 500, largely from a lot of this regulatory stuff. And what does that mean for Elon Musk? Well, so this is sort of like the key to understanding like the recent run up, which is that if Tesla made a profit in their most recent quarter, which they just announced results and they made, I believe, all of $15 million dollars.

No, no, they made a little bit more. So they made $104 million in gap net income, which again, this is the company that sold like $20 billion worth of cars last year. So they should be making way more than that. And so that sort of cleared the final hurdle to get included in this index. And this is truly huge. There's $4 trillion in assets in S&P 500 index funds, and there's probably $20 trillion in assets that are benchmarked to the S&P 500. It's like literally the only game in town as far as these financial products go. And Tesla, like every other company that gets included in the S&P 500 gets included as like number 497. Like it's a small cap company that just becomes big enough to make it across the threshold. But Tesla would be like the number

10th largest company in America. Like it's bigger than Intel and like MasterCard and like all of these other real companies with huge profits. So suddenly $4 trillion worth of assets needs to buy 1% of Tesla. And they're just going to trip over themselves to put in like literally to $20, $30, $40 billion worth of demand for Tesla at whatever the current price is. And that's going to drive the price sky high. So a huge part of this run up has just been obviously the retail traders, but it's also been essentially these index inclusion trades, which is if you assume that the S&P 500 index fund is going to have to buy Tesla at whatever the price is, why don't we buy it now and front run them? And that's probably been sort of the

primary catalyst for this huge run. Yeah. And so if you think all the way back to the beginning, where so much of this, so much of the devotion, so much of its buzz, so much of all of this is just basically based on Elon Musk telling a good story where the sort of libertarian end of neoliberalism just works to deliver a quality of life improvement. And also, by the way, delivers a monopoly that has now translated into him getting included in the S&P 500 by way of like, primarily this sort of cap and trade logic. And now we have basically paid, in many cases, with tax money or public money or subsidies or even just credits from other car companies, have sort of just created him to be this billionaire because he tells a good story.

It's like JK Rowling for Redditor Guys, basically. Do you think that's a fair assessment? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the other thing that's remarkable is, and this is something that gets glossed over a lot, and I definitely want to like highlight this point, Elon Musk did not found Tesla. It was founded by two random other guys. And he was basically like an early stage investor who owned like 10 or 15% of the company. And he just sort of kicked them out and fired them and like asserted control over the company and then made them sign like these very restrictive non-disclosure agreements where they couldn't go around saying like, actually, I was literally the founder of Tesla and Elon Musk is just like a random guy who bought it from me. So it's not even

his company. It's something that he has manufactured the image of himself as a successful entrepreneur when in fact, he just bought it from somebody else and made it like super big with all of these financial gamesmanship and these tricks. Yeah. But hey, you know what? At least I read, I read my fama. There's no such thing as a bubble, right? Oh, definitely. Yeah. At least not at least. Leaping through my gigantic copy of Pikachu to see what he says about this. But anyway, I noticed we've been going a little bit long, especially given that we definitely didn't try recording this first beforehand. So I think I might take that opportunity to wrap it up and to say Q, thank you so much for giving some of your time to come and talk

to us today about this. It's been very interesting. Of course. I mean, if I could say something like please sort of corny and a bit more realistic at the end. Please do. I don't really think Tesla is a bad company because they're like playing with their financial statements and they're like, gaming their pay plan to make Elon Musk very rich. I think that's a symptom of this sort of corrupt and toxic and corrosive culture. There are other symptoms too. Tesla, for a very long time, it was the car company with the highest injury rates in its sector. And then once that was revealed, there's a lawsuit out that's alleging that basically after that, they stopped giving medical treatment to injured workers because that would require them to report the injury to

OSHA. So they would just give them a bandaid and tell them to walk it off if they got cut by a machine or whatever. They use these aggressive anti-union tactics to stop the UAW from representing their workers. They've repeatedly flouted like environmental and pollution permits from Fremont in their paint shop. Everything about this company is emblematic of toxicity. At least to me, that's why I think they should be shorted because they should be punished for doing these bad things. And the government is clearly not interested in doing that and the markets are clearly not interested in holding them accountable. So what mechanism is there? Other than the guy with the drone? Yeah, other than a guy who's piloting a drone over Tesla and

like taking measurements of their VOC emissions when that should be like a guy from the EPA who's just... That guy's the government now. The shorty Air Force are the federal government. Yeah, that's another thing. We always talk about what America is going to look like as it begins to sort of fracture as states are no longer able to meet crises and sort of deal with shocks symmetrically. The shorty Air Force is absolutely going to emerge as like an actual law enforcement body in like the Southern California like protectorate. Yeah, Jim Chainos is going to be like the Baron of New York. Baron Harkonnen Chainos. So I love that. Just floating around on suspense or globes, just shorting stuff. It's very cool. But yeah, I think that's...

I think what you say is it's important to include. Like the other thing is we've focused sort of, I think specifically on... I've tried to focus specifically on like trying to answer that question of why the stock price and the fundamentals of the company don't line up, but that's absolutely not the whole story. There is this union busting. There is this sort of aggressive, like anti-social corporate behavior surprise. There is so much more to Tesla than just the financials. And it's like every page you turn is just another sort of chapter in this story. Yeah, but on the plus side, Elon did just unfollow his wife. Hey, you know what? Maybe one day, maybe that's all it takes for men to go their own way.

MGTOW just needed to all own like insane, massively overvalued car companies. But with that in mind, I would like to once again thank you for coming on to you, because I think that was important to include and we should include it and share your insights with us today. And also thank you to everyone listening. Thank you to our new battalion of Tesla Q listeners. We won't let you down. Thank you for your service. Yes. Thank you to everyone in the short. Can someone make us a shorty Air Force patch, please?

Yes. God, yes. What about like a thin red line flag for short sellers? Yes. And other than that, you know, the comrade Marcus Braun is still arrested. So, please, there are bail funds for him and other incarcerated people. Are the prisoners of conscience? Yeah. No, there are actually bail fund links in the description. Not that aren't for Dr. Marcus Braun, the world's most German man. They're from Martin Shkreli.

Yes, they're also from Martin Shkreli. They're for Yad Varsalek helping him evade capture. But also, you know what it is. There's a Patreon, second two episodes a week, five bucks a week, five bucks a month, where we haven't upped the price. And also, there is a t-shirt link and you can email Milo because we're too lazy to set up a Shopify. Anything else? Any more for anymore? Listen to, well, there's your problem. Listen to Britonology. Listen to the Boney Island Whitefish. Yeah, 10K posts. All the other 10K posts. Yeah, we've got a good one out. The next one's a good one out.

All the other podcasts that we all started because we were bored in quarantine. Q, you can follow Q on Quantian One on Twitter. Do you have anything else that you want to promote? No, not for me. So, check all that out. Anyways, we will see you on the Patreon. Later, everybody.