To an extent, they weren't betting on the business, they were betting on the masses eating up the stock.
And they were at least initially right, and cashing out 2-4 days after the IPO certainly worked for and of them. Stock going down required some significant portion of them to take their winnings.
They were betting on the stupidity of the retail investor, not the fundamentals of the business.
Also, Elon rolled most of that 'future AI empire' stuff into SPCX instead. Meaning that even if investors wanted to believe it that, they know that Elon can play shell games and put the prize wherever he wants and the investors are not able to control that.
Yeah, while there are some folks that are die-hard must have gas cars, lots of other folks experience instant torque, smoothest and quietest drive imaginable, and replenishing range without having to go out of your way to a station. Wondering when the next maintenance needs to come and there's no oil, no wearing belts, no super hot engine bay, just some things like wiper blades and a bit more rough on tires owing to generally higher weight.
There are downsides and awkward fits for some people. My apartment dwelling colleague would be screwed since his place has no available residential charging. Road trips can be more inconvient (though viable and perhaps worth it if you are taking a road trip every few months but spare yourself a weekly trip to the gas station). But certainly there's a market for which EVs provide more value than combustion vehicles.
I want you to be right, but I'm more skeptical. I see all over the place companies explicitly targeting a profitable subset: the biggest suckers of the available suckers. Higher margin, fewer whiny customers. Bonus points if it creates a cult-like fanbase (a lot of big brands manage to cultivate this).
Saw a story where a company explicitly had a strategy of "increase prices by 10x, and it may scare off 90% of customers, but the 10% left will be a wonderful gold mine". Particularly shortages in the tech industry swayed a lot of folks that advocated for high-volume, low-margin to low-volume, high-margin.
So if 20% are ride-or-die for Tesla and Musk, then it might be a decent enough move to double down on those 20%.
Not defending, just an explanation, and one that if anything would enrage Elon more.
He's still an absurdly over-wealthed taint stain, but the specific numbers over that threshold were just not quite as substantial as other (also somewhat imaginary) numbers.
Point in fact, he was a trillionaire, and now he is not, but he didn't lose anything real. He still has every bit the amount of real wealth and control over all that stuff you listed that he had before, just the number shifted by billions of dollars while preserving every last thing of import that was wrong with his wealth. He is no longer a trillionaire but that means absolutely nothing about the problems his wealth pose in real terms.
At some point, the numbers cease being a thing for meeting their needs, their comforts, and at some point even their every whim and preference they could possibly imagine. It just becomes a score and they peg their egos to the score. This is a level no one should ever be at.
Didn't help that he pissed away the carefully cultivated "Tony Stark" image. Now people don't shrug off his failures like they were inclined to do.
Note that while that sounds ridiculous, we demarcate value using a currency system that makes standing still look like mild growth. When you ultimately are controlling currency, you can create the appearance of growth under any real world condition you like.
So a company that looks flat in a system designed to make flat look like grown is actually experiencing some decline.
Of course whether that is a decline in product, results, or just random investor sentiment is all up in the air.
He didn't particularly benefit, his trajectory could have been just as productive under the Soviet government. It's not like he was a total outsider. If anything it might have stalled his political career advancement a few years.
Putin is old and generally well hidden. He likely doesn't see that he has that much to lose, when it comes down to it.
Yeah, that doesn't account for his loss in the opening days, when the NATO nations were clearly preparing to write off the conquest of Ukraine as a terrible thing but do nothing substantive about it.
Putin wanted to be cemented in history as bringing back a powerful Russia, and now he has an embarrassment. Dude is 73 and knows he has fewer years ahead than behind and it is now or never for his legacy.
He might not be afraid for his safety or his people, but for his legacy.
Far as I have heard, Ukraine was the industrial and agricultural backbone of USSR.
Beyond that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics, notably on Ukraine. They see Ukraine as a key political necessity for resurrecting the power structure that they see as having been lost in the early 90s. Read about UK and US and you'll see a lot of familiar material there in terms of what Russia has actively worked toward.
Indeed, someone with a deep fanaticism for Musk posted exactly that scenario as inevitable. This was to stand by his man when Musk asserted that SpaceX should be worth more than everything else on earth combined (he was pissed that spcx had fallen).
The dude claimed that by 2038 the 20 biggest companies would all be entirely space based exclusively, and that globally SpaceX would be the sole provider of space technology and the other 19 companies would be tenants of SpaceX. It all made sense to him because space is bigger than earth, right?
I can't find it, but among the usual suspects (space mining, space datacenters, terra forming), I was especially amused that his hypothetical "space banking company", because for some reason the financials of space companies needed to be managed by a company that could get stuff launched into space?