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RIP Twitter’s iconic bird logo
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Lenders are not as stupid as you think. 75% of Twitter's purchase price was paid by Musk himself or loans secured against his Tesla stock. None of that will be "written off".
The number I've seen it closer to 55% but, regardless, all the Tesla money was acquired exactly the same way and will be written off the same way too.
Tesla has positioned itself as a tech company instead of a car company, and if its investors decide one day that it's a car company it's value will drop 60 - 80% overnight. Of course the investors will never do that because 1) it will leave a lot of them in ruin and 2) the gigafactories for batteries are probably actually valued pretty accurately. But remember ever time Telsa talks about robots or super computers they're trying to make everyone forget that their valuation multiples should be closer to Ford than Apple.
Tesla owns a huge and successful charging network, and most EV makers in the US are switching to Tesla charging ports in order to take advantage of it. In the process, this will make the smaller charging networks (like EA) even more irrelevant.
If Ford happened to own all the gas stations in America, you'd have an idea of what Tesla is about to become. There's a good reason why Tesla stock is priced so high.
Ford used to own gas stations. They didn't totally leave the business until the 70's gas shortages, though they had been in decline since the 30s. History does tend to repeat itself, and there's nothing proprietary about electricity (there are adapters to go from one plug type to another). The US switch to using NACS has just started in the last couple months and will not be seen in most of the rest of the world, since Europe and much of Asia codified standards like CCS into law while Tesla was still trying to keep their tech private.
Smart money says Tesla will spin off the charging network (and solar stuff) into independent entities due to stagnate markets during the next recession and then devest entirely after their next major stock slump.
Ford never dominated the US market for gas stations like Tesla does for chargers. Even if Tesla never builds another charger outside the US, it can thrive by dominating the US market alone. And the experience of EA and others demonstrates that it's not so easy to set up a competing network.
Of course Tesla might spin off its charging business, but that won't worry investors. It just means that your Tesla share would turn into a share of TeslaCars plus a share if TeslaChargers.