The consensus is that tariffs will lead to higher inflation. If so, REITs might not be a good place for your money. For example, ICF went from $70 to $50 between 11/21 and 11/23.
DB2
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I am confused about this and Elon’s funding Trump to keep him in millionaire status…what does Elon get from a person/team that vows to roll back alternative energy and ICE car mandates? That seems to shoot him right in the foot.
Or, is he giving up on Tesla and going all SpaceX with its gov’t contracts and top-secret clearances…?
LOL - everyone already talked about this, late to the party, ha.
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Fully autonomous warfare. Smart weapons, smart drones, self flying fighter aircraft, self flying cargo aircraft. Seriously, ethics aside, the possibilities are staggering.
He might simply think that those mandates and subsidies help his competitors more than they help Tesla. As you point out, he also has considerable interests in SpaceX that benefit from government contracts.
He has historically had a dim view of federal regulators, and may be pre-emptively concerned about how those regulators will handle both autonomous vehicles specifically and AI generally. So he wants to have influence with the guy in charge of those regulators.
And for all we know, the election might result in the federal government supporting a huge new mission to Mars - something that would appeal both to the new President and to Musk.
Send them both on the first one-way trip–hopefully next week…
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It’s easy to be confused if you don’t follow the story dispassionately. Elon is a complex personality and he is swimming in waters full of sharks. It is quite remarkable that he has survived. I would describe Elon as an idealist mixed with a very shrewd and calculating businessman. He sets goals and pursues them relentlessly. When I first heard about him, touting Tesla’s battery swapping, I disliked him immensely, he came across as a snake oil peddler. I was invested in a Chinese EV startup (that did battery swapping) and very much interested in business models for EV adoption. Kandi had what seemed a good approach. As I studied Tesla I also liked their approach, quite different from Kandi’s.
It was only years later, in 2020, that I started buying TSLA after their Battery Day that announced the 4680. Most of the criticism of Elon comes from people who never worked with him. Having been a management consultant for ten years, the stories former Tesla employees told painted a very different picture. Tesla and SpaceX are two of the most attractive companies for engineers to work at. Tesla’s Model Y has become the world’s most selling car surpassing the Toyota Corolla. Quite an accomplishment.
About the subsidies. Elon has been saying for a long time that Tesla does not need the subsidies. Without a doubt Tesla is the EV low cost producer except, maybe, for BYD. Elon listened to Sandy Munro and adopted his suggestions, giga castings and 48 volt systems. Sandy had been advocating these technologies for years but ICE incumbents simply ignored him.
Elon is ruthless, he fired most of the Twitter staff and nw runs the business with maybe a quarter of the former staff. Elon despises DEI
It’s a long and complex story
The Captain
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
The Kandi Story
Tesla’s Tipping Point
Kandi, The Prince and The Art of War
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Quite a lot of thoughts here, ranging all over the map and then some.
Which only reinforces my thought that there is a bunch of uncertainty, and markets don’t normally thrive in uncertainty.
Personally, I’m leaning towards increasing my cash position for a while. No, I’m not selling everything, but I plan to sell a chunk of some mutual funds to build my cash position in case of a buying opportunity (currently,I do not see any).
Sure, I may give away some upside, but it will also cushion a downside move in the markets. My primary goal is wealth preservation, all $3,000 dollars worth. 
I was going to give the cash to Mr. Buffett to manage, but he’s selling stocks (does he think they’re overvalued or because he is anticipating an increase in the capital gains tax rates? Or both?). I’ve also read he even stopped BRK share buybacks. Maybe he thinks it’s currently overvalued, too.
I don’t normally try to read tea leaves, but here we are, all of us trying to read tea leaves.
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XAI just announced they are going to go from an AI cluster of 100,000 gpu’s to 200,000 gpu’s. I believe that is a first.
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Who is the biggest individual Tesla shareholder? Remind me again…
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I’m with you on that. I started moving into cash months ago when preparing for the possibility that became a reality (personality) on Tuesday.
One poster above talked about putting his/her money in dividend “aristocrats” which are undervalued. I would do some of that, too, if I could locate any aristocrats that actually were undervalued.
Pete
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He owns such a large percentage of the company he has no realistic way to reap those rewards without cratering the stock value. What good does this do him? It’s literally wealth locked away that serves no useful purpose other than bragging rights. It’s money with zero velocity or potential for velocity.
Well he put up half of his shares for a loan to buy Twitter. So I think you could say he was able to unlock it but whether that was smart or not is still to be determined.
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I have to disagree with this. It does him lots of good. It allows him to do all sorts of cool things that may or may not pan out sometimes in the future. And then I say pan out, I don’t mean to necessarily increase his wealth. I don’t think he cares that much about it as a “scorecard” of sorts, I think he cares much more about what the money can do. He does all sorts of stuff with his wealth, and the access it gives him to other’s wealth. Things like a whole new way of doing rocketry. Things like crazy humanoid robots. Things like brain implants. Things like fields with hundreds of MW of energy storage inside big containers of batteries. And even weirder things like boring holes underground in some places.
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Staggering enough to make it acceptable for Tesla to go to zero, if XAI gets the contract, not Microsoft?
Steve
One of the biggest gobs of money I left on the table was when I went cash heavy, in 2016, due to the mercurial nature of TFG, to say nothing of his past business dealings. Looked like a good bet, for a few hours. Futures crashed. Foreign markets panicked. Then the realization spread, slowly, that TFG is all about fattening his portfolio, and the markets had a pretty good time, until the plague hit.
Steve
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Don’t fool yourself. He could lose 99% of his net worth and still be VERY WELL OFF at over $1B. But, if he got a defense contract for AI, now you are talking POWER.
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Unfortunately, seems XAI is closely held.
Steve
There is a pattern to this …
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You weren’t alone, Steve. From a Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, early on Wednesday November 8, 2016:
The economic fallout of a TFG presidency will probably be severe and widespread enough to plunge the world into recession, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned in a New York Times opinion piece published early Wednesday.
Calling TFG the “mother of all adverse effects,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist predicted that the GOP nominee’s administration could quickly undo the progress that the markets around the world have made in the eight years since the financial crisis.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/krugman-trump-global-recession-2016-231055
DB2
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As we later learned, TFG entirely measured economic health by the stock market. Anyone ask him about the economy, he would point to the market. With that focus on juicing the market, we may be able to speculate that health insurance companies and drug companies need not worry about “big gummit” limits on their profits, as an example.
Steve
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