Is Tesla Musk’s “Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down”?

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Final Up to date on: fifteenth February 2025, 09:33 am

For these of us who had been children and watched motion motion pictures within the Nineties, issues can get fairly bizarre. When the films first got here out, they had been cool, sensible, and a bit comical at occasions. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, and various different well-known actors are well-known for his or her work on the films we grew up with.

Whereas there have been a couple of motion movies that held up very well and maintain their cool issue to at the present time, time wasn’t as variety to a lot of them. In lots of instances, motion movies within the ’90s had been equal components corny and funky. The motion was there simply to arrange the jokes in lots of instances, and the skinny storylines led to extra cringe than they as soon as did.

Sadly, the 1994 film Pace tends to suit into the latter class. The nice man is a bit too “the one,” everyone knows that the bus would’ve exploded inside 5 minutes in Los Angeles, and the bus leap — yeah, that wouldn’t have labored out. Tricking the dangerous man with a VHS tape recording was a cool trick, although!

As typical, The Simpsons was on the case:

I lately noticed a publish on Bluesky that referenced this movie when speaking about Elon Musk. (Spoiler alert: Elon wouldn’t be performed by Keanu Reeves on this comparability.)

His illiquidity is the hazard. He has to maintain doing shit like this. The Not Really Actual Cash Bus should be stored above $200 billion or it is going to explode. All of this shit is principally debt and blackmail and it is forcing folks like Musk into more and more precarious and harmful positions.

— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T21:19:58.755Z

Like our previous motion movies, the hero can’t keep cool eternally. Elon Musk was as soon as seemed as much as by many right here at CleanTechnicaand lots of extra folks around the globe, as a result of we believed he was courageously and maybe even selflessly taking up the largest threats to the way forward for humanity’s existence. Piling up massive sums of web price was only a aspect impact of doing actually good and actually good issues, proper?

However, in hindsight, we had been cringe to suppose this. It seems that Elon wasn’t the man leaping on “the bus that couldn’t slow down” to avoid wasting the day. He was truly the man who put the bomb on the bus. He didn’t create Paypal — he was purchased out and pushed out, strolling away with a pile of money and the X.com area title. He then purchased Tesla from its founders after hiring nice folks to begin SpaceX. And the Hyperloop? All we acquired had been tunnels underneath the Vegas strip with Teslas being pushed inside by people.

The reality is that billionaires (even the largest ones) aren’t like Scrooge McDuck in DuckTales. They don’t maintain a basement filled with a lot gold that they will swim in it. The billions of {dollars} are likely to principally if not nearly all be tied up in firms and investments. So, taxing billionaires by web price or unrealized capital good points isn’t sensible in any respect.

In reality, folks with this type of wealth usually sit in a precarious place. They’ll’t promote shares in firms at quantity or they’ll tank the inventory. They’ll leverage these belongings by borrowing towards them, however the banks and different traders (a few of whom are identified to cut up individuals who make them mad) gained’t be happy if the worth of the collateral is misplaced, or the worth of what was purchased with the borrowed cash is misplaced.

With Tesla gross sales dropping all over the place regardless of general EV gross sales persevering with to rise, Elon Musk might find yourself in a reasonably horrible place. Traders can solely put up with a lot worth destruction earlier than the board has no alternative however to behave within the fiduciary curiosity of shareholders. Banks counting on Tesla shares for collateral would possibly resolve they should take motion to guard themselves. Rich traders from nations that torture and kill would possibly resort to insidious issues as Xitter and Tesla each tank.

I don’t know sufficient about Musk’s funds to know at what velocity the bus explodes, however I do see it slowing down. Hopefully all of us don’t need to go off any jumps with him whereas he retains it above 50.

Featured picture: a screenshot from the 1994 film Pace (truthful use).