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Why does Elon Musk keep pushing garbage investments? What is the deal

17 points by paulpauper ↗ HN
WHy does Elon Musk keep pushing garbage investments? What is the deal

What is his motive. It is not like he needs the money

Gamestop, AMC, and Dogecoin

what is his motive. The first two have crashed since the hype in January, presumably costing people who heeded the hype a lot of money. Dogecoin will easily fall below a penny if BTC falls. Doge is vastly more volatile than Bitcoin. it seems extremely irresponsible of him to do this.

10 comments

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JMTQp8lwXL
Is he not allowed to tweet investment opinions like the rest of us? (Beyond whatever SEC regulations apply to him as an officer of Tesla).
zelon88
He obviously does. However the question stands. What is the motive?

Personally I think he sees social media as an extension of his own investment strategy. Invest, recommend to followers, divest. Rinse, repeat.

toomuchtodo
Entertainment. He’s holding court with his fans.
Finnucane
Maybe the question is: why does anyone listen to his opinions? Maybe it seems irresponsible because he may be an irresponsible person?
riffraff
he doesn't, he just has some weird sense of humor and enjoys attention.

The problem is people will buy something when he mentions it (see also when people got an unrelated company named "Signal" to soar after he tweeted about the messaging app), not in him tweeting random memes.

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Cyder
Musk is the new Jobs
pocw
Part of it probably has to do with his hatred of short sellers. People who short sell have a vested interest in seeing the stock they've shorted drop. They tend to make their opinions known and attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. "I bet a billion dollars this stock will go down." "Well shit. if he bet a billion dollars the stock will go down I better sell it before it does." Gee the stock went down!

People have been vocal about shorting Tesla. Musk probably sees their bets against his company as a personal insult.

GME is massively short sold. By some accounts many multiples of existing shares have been sold. I'm not sure that's legal but it seems like it's being done.

If a bunch of people buy and hold a massively short sold stock the short sellers (who've sold a stock they don't own) have to buy it back to cover their promises. This causes a short squeeze which spikes the price and costs the sort sellers massive amount of money.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/melvin-capital-redd...

Or maybe he just likes the stocks. There's an argument to be made that Gamestop is undervalued. That AMC will emerge from the COVID crisis stronger than ever and that Dogecoin while it seems like a joke is actually a cryptographically and structurally sound cryptocurrency.

Although probably not the latter since he claims he doesn't own stock in any publicly traded company except Tesla.

I think he's just in it for the memes.

craftoman
That's bold market manipulation. So frustrating...he's like the Kardashian of geeks, gamers and trolls.