Thread by @doctorow

Tesla's doing well.

Financially, that is.

Elon Musk is now the richest person in world history, thanks to an incredible bull run on Tesla shares.

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But Tesla's not doing well in terms of its products. It's having to recall Model S and X cars for serious defects that it long downplayed.

arstechnica.com/cars/2021/01/t…

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We are living in an age in which value and profit are utterly untethered - the "financialized" age where making good things that people need and making a lot of money are not necessarily related to one another. It's Wall Street vs Main Street.

pluralistic.net/2020/08/24/rai…

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To get a sense of how absurd Tesla's valuation is, consider: for Tesla to earn enough to justify its $750b market cap, it would have to increase its annual earnings by a factor of 1600.

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Here's how @Jalopnik's excellent headline puts it: "Tesla Would Take Nearly 1,600 Years To Make The Amount Of Money The Stock Market Values It At"

jalopnik.com/tesla-would-ta…

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Where did all that money come from? Jalopnik attributes it to unsophisticated investors using the Robinhood app and other self-serve trading platforms, pumping billions into the stock market where sophisticated actors are more than happy to take it.

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As the saying goes, "If you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, chances are, you are the sucker."

We've always had suckers in the market - but for the world's richest man to sit atop a mountain of their money feels like something new under the sun.

eof/