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The Tesla-financial complex

When your financial instruments are better than your cars.

Cory Doctorow
4 min readNov 24, 2021
Bosch’s painting ‘The Conjurer,’ which depicts a grinning magician amazing a group of rubes with a shell-game trick. The face of the magician has been replaced with Elon Musk’s, and one of the shells on the table has been replaced with a Tesla automobile. Image: Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors_trimmed.jpg CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommo

Elon Musk is the richest man on Earth and Tesla is worth more than a trillion dollars. What the fuck is going on? In Robin Wigglesworth’s phrase: it’s the Tesla-financial complex at work:

https://www.ft.com/content/17f0cd1f-e751-4ddb-b13c-ea4e685b55c0

What’s a “Tesla-financial complex?” Well, Tesla is only tertiarily a car-maker (which may explain why the company is so indifferent to QA for its vehicles and the safety of its workers). Its primary product is financial instruments (its secondary product is an army of creepy cultists).

For example, Tesla mints an astounding number of carbon credits that are primarily consumed by car companies that make gas-guzzling SUVs. Without those SUVs, the company’s financials would be much, much worse:

https://www.yahoo.com/now/tesla-gains-results-show-dependence-053528438.html

But that’s just table-stakes. As Wigglesworth writes, the real secret to Tesla’s valuation is “the swelling size and hyperactivity of Tesla ‘options.’” These options create incredible volatility for Tesla and have reversed the traditional relationship between options and shares, with option prices driving up share-prices.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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