The Daily View 8/8/2018

There’s a bunch of stuff going on in the news this week:

1. Elon Musk announced yesterday that Tesla could be taken private at $420/share. Tesla stock surged to $380, a gain of nearly $100 from just a week ago. Last week I put out a post about Tesla. Yet again, another example of how I’m almost always right about stuff.

All those people who said to short Tesla a couple weeks ago were sure wrong. Last week Steve Eisman, who rose to fame in 2008 by betting against the housing market, announced he was short Tesla. That position is probably at least 25% underwater now. Not only that, but Tesla losing money does not mean it is insolvent, because it can keep raising money and most of those losses are capital expenditures instead of operating losses.

A common misconception about Tesla is that it’s dependent on subsidies.

Because Tesla has sold over 200k cars, it is no longer eligible for subsidies. If Tesla were so dependent on subsidies, the stock price would be a lot lower than it is now.

The reason why subsidies are not that important is because demand for Tesla cars is inelastic. Unlike the low-end Nissan Leaf, a $7,500 subsidy is not a major deciding factor for whether or not someone buys a Tesla. People buy Tesla because of the brand and performance, not price.

Some on the left are saying that Elon Musk is ‘helping’ the Saudis, which is preposterous. The Saudis have a sovereign wealth fund, which can invest in public or private companies at its own discretion. Because Tesla is a public company, It’s not like Elon Musk can stop the Saudis from investing in Tesla. It would be against the interests of investors to block such transactions. The left defends Islam in every instance, except this, apparently. The left accuses Richard Dawkins of ‘Islamophobia’ for a harmless and funny tweet, yet the Saudis buying Tesla is a national security issue.

2. The high-IQ, HBD bull market is unstoppable as the S&P 500 closes at another record high. That’s why you don’t bet against high-IQ, HBD. Yet again, I was right. The S&P 500 is going to 4,000 minimum by the end of Trump’s first term and then 6,600 minimum by the end of his second. I arrive at these targets by assuming the S&P 500 rises 15% a year, which given how strong the economy is, is a conservative growth rate.

Regarding the HBD-investing thesis, a misconception is that all high-IQ companies are good investments. What I mean is high-IQ is a necessary but still insufficient condition. The following factors must also be in place:

Market dominance
Strong growth
Large size
Ubiquity
Indispensable
Cash-flow positive

After these factors are taken into consideration, the pool of possible companies to invest in shrinks from over a thousand to maybe a couple dozen, such as Tesla, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and some others.

3. YouTube, Facebook, and Apple banned Alex Jones from their platforms. Twitter, to its credit, did not join in the purge. However, Twitter is not off the hook, because they are extra-punitive against right-wing users; for example, banning Milo and Roger Stone for ‘harassment’ even though the left gets away with it constantly.

I think Jack Dorsey knows that if he purges too many right-wing users, his user base may turn against him, especially given how popular Trump and Candace Owens, for example, are on Twitter. Jack knows where to draw the line, and he knows that pissing off Trump’s large fandom is bad for business, which is already struggling. But also, Alex Jones (and the Info Wars Networks) is smart enough to not directly correspond with leftist Twitter users, because Milo and Roger Stone both got banned for directly tweeting at leftists, whereas Alex Jones mostly uses twitter to post links to his shows and news headlines, not for conversation.

But going back to Alex Jones being banned, the chilling thing is, is how all these platforms seemingly collaborated to ban him at once, almost as if they communicated or colluded in private to so; or, after one did so, the rest followed to save face (I’m not sure which one banned him first).

4. And then there is the whole Sarah Jeeeeooong story, which has been discussed to death so there is almost no point of bringing it up. As is obvious to almost everyone, if she substituted any mention of ‘white people’ in her tweets for any other race, she would have never been hired, but the left plays be its own rules and protects their own. I suspect, also, what is working to her advantage is the staggering volume of tweets she has produced over her history–over 100k tweets–which I think is the most tweets I have ever seen for any Twitter user. This makes a few really offensive tweets easier to dismiss, than had she only made those tweets. To quote Stalin, one death is a tragedy but many are a statistic. Offensiveness is not linearly proportional to quantity, but rather has a frown-shaped relation. So making zero offensive tweets is as offensive as all her tweets being offensive. Saying you hate Jews and Blacks is considered far more offensive than saying you hate everyone, even though the latter encompasses more people. Saying you hate everyone is as inoffensive as saying you hate no one. It seems like her Twitter history is so misanthropic and cynical, that it’s easier to forgive for just being an angry nihilist, than a racist. Another problem is, the New York Times has such a huge and influential brand that thy can probably withstand the backlash. They are considered the go-to source for news, still. Many of the same people who are outraged about the New York Times now, will, in time, continue reading and sharing it.