• Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Ok, I’m missing something. There’s some shady money laundering tactic going on here. Just not seeing where it is. Can someone explain to me what the point of this is?

    • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Tying the success of one platform to another to shovel potential investment money to a wildly unpopular product and platform. Ego-fueled indeed. This probably means he’s working to funnel taxpayer money to xAI right now.

    • Flic@mstdn.social
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      2 days ago

      @Nightwingdragon @vegeta I think he’s just trying to stay solvent because knows Tesla is going to *tank* and he needs to pay off the Twitter investors (using xAI investors’ cash) before he gets margin called

      • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        The comment I was going to make. This is preemptive. He used TSLA stock as collateral for the twitter loan and can now use xAI to pay it off before TSLA falls under the threshold set in the twitter deal

    • vegeta@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      The true genius of Elon Musk is his ‘subsidy harvesting strategy,’ political science professor says

      Musk might even be making a play to fold in artificial intelligence by creating a market for chatbots and other applications in the government, Barnes said, calling it the ultimate contract. There are some signs that this could already be happening, such as one of his staffers reportedly creating an AI chatbot to streamline processes at DOGE.

      https://fortune.com/2025/03/19/elon-musk-subsidy-harvesting-strategy-tesla-spacex-xai-doge/

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      He borrowed money to buy twitter.

      It had just gotten a very bad valuation, which might have led the people he borrowed from to change terms or take collateral.

      By doing this, he set the “value” at 33 billion because that’s what his other country just paid for it.

      It’s a house of cards where if any of his projects goes under, they all will.

      While this is a short term help, it’s going to make people less likely to invest in xai because it’s propping up twitter.

  • vegeta@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 days ago
    1. Buy a company
    2. Run it into the ground
    3. ???
    4. Sell it to yourself for more than you paid for it
    5. Profit