That only matters if lenders a) don’t believe he can pay the loans back, and b) would not themselves be hurt by calling in loans. With how incestuous the Epstein class is, my cynical bet is that he gets away with far too much for far too long
He does have loans, but a lot of people think he still has them from purchasing Twitter, but he actually went away from that during the Twitter purchase. Im sure its a lot without twitter even, but its not the crazy large number it was briefly.
$15.5B dollars, invented out of ether, and bestowed on the lucky gamblers. The stock market is so efficient that it can create wealth without bothering with economic activity. No jobs created; no products produced; and nothing to trickle down.
Unlike the market cap numbers that get thrown around when people say X dollars “destroyed” from the stock market or Y dollars “gained”, this isn’t nearly as imaginary (or invented out of ether).
Depending on whether we’re talking about real shorting, or put options, it’s one of two things:
They borrowed expensive SpaceX shares, sold them, bought back for cheaper, the people who bought shares at the higher price paid for it.
They bought put options and exercised them. The bank or financial organization selling the put options paid for it.
Now I went to actually read the article and this particular number was #1, but I’m sure a lot of people profited through #2 as well (the wallstreetbets types).
I did #2 except I didn’t exercise, I just sold it to someone else when the pice was up a bit on my small bet. I like to think that circuitously, Elon bought me a few lunches because screw that guy
Short sellers are an important part of the equity ecosystem as it provides downward pressure in price discovery. Lucky gamblers have made, and are making, far more than that with long positions in equity and options.
It’s difficult to say that we don’t need markets at all (e.g. would you plant cotton with no idea what it will sell for at harvest?). It then becomes a slippery slope of abuse and wealth concentration.
If anything this all feels like a failure of regulation and the SEC not going far enough
Investment provides resource allocation, which is not something that just happens on its own. That is, it says “this company or project is a worthwhile project to allocate capital to, and this is not”. The money here was also not invented out of ether, but rather lost by investors who shifted capital to SpaceX earlier, and gained by those who tried to shift capital away from SpaceX earlier; other investors came to agree with those shifting capital away. Those who do so earlier are rewarded; this encourages earlier efficient movement of capital.
Resource allocation is a necessary part of economic activity; any economic system will require such a thing to be done. You could have your government do it instead of investors, as in a command economy. Countries generally don’t do that, because it has run into more serious problems of misallocation.
only if you have disposable money. rich people have lots of it, they can short with lower risks to their life. the average person does not have nearly that much, if any
This doesn’t hit these sociopaths, the whole stock market system is rigged so they make paper profits no matter what happens, at the expense of others who aren’t in the Epstein class. A pump and dump like this is just a little faster.
In the same vein, this is partly why I’ve never understood the mindset of individual investors. Like, it’s extremely arrogant to seriously believe that you have an edge over highly resourced institutions and billionaire investors who can afford the best analysts and mathematical models on top of their market influence. I can assure you that whatever strategy you have, theirs is better, and they don’t have to play by the same rules. What can you hope to bring to the table when you’re swimming with these sharks?
Movies like the Big Short, Margin Call, shows like Billions, or whatever the inheritance show was, make people think they can be the ones smarter.
However, most individual investors aren’t usually of the arrogance that they’ll do better than the billionaires and hedge funds just of the arrogance they can still get more scraps than others and won’t get eaten themselves.
There’s also the individual investors who care about the morality of their investments more than the profits. Not putting money into Nazi owned companies for example. Fuck anyone with a single cent in spacex or Tesla or anything with musk’s disgusting fingerprints on it.
Some folks like to gamble! More and more people are desperation gambling these days out of doomer mindsets that see 0dtes and kalshi bets as their way out of crushing poverty.
And here and there, it’s possible to look at pricing and conclude it’s pants-on-head bananas. Trading and therefore price action is dominated by algorithms which amplifies hype cycles. Who couldn’t see SpaceX as being overvalued? Other than the assholes at NASDAQ
And here and there, it’s possible to look at pricing and conclude it’s pants-on-head bananas. Trading and therefore price action is dominated by algorithms which amplifies hype cycles. Who couldn’t see SpaceX as being overvalued?
But that’s the problem. Many of us definitely knew SpaceX was overvalued. It should have been a no-brainer to short this stock at IPO… however, look at Tesla stock. That shit should have cratered years ago but still hasn’t. I wanted to short this stock, but I didn’t trust the Musk morons to not continue humping his sack. Even when you can see that something is pants-on-head bananas, there are enough idiots out there (and enough insider traders) making shit irrational.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Any edge that I have as an individual isn’t relevant against these people. They have far superior information. I don’t have a chance.
Plus, it’s not anecdotal AND goes beyond your statement.
Through the years and statistical analysis, it has been proven that picking stock, even by professionals is still mostly luck. I think analysts have ran out of ridiculous examples of animals picking stock randomly and still coming on top in a long enough time period.
So if even the “professionals” are not really doing much, why would any individual nurture the thought that THEY could do better?
To explain why you did so well, so the chumps who didn’t bother have to go and sit in court sometimes, which probably gets them loser points at the next child raping party.
Nothing is really guaranteed in investing (unless you’re in public office and can insider trade or you’re a billionaire), though the post IPO dip has happened often enough that, yes, it probably isn’t the worst idea to have a plan.
They didn’t short rockets: They shorted Elon Musk’s promise machine. For years he’s sold investors a never ending stream of revolutionary breakthroughs that were always just around the corner. Eventually reality catches up. Even the world’s best engineers can’t justify a valuation built on perpetual hype instead of consistently delivered results.