How is this deemed not a conflict of interest? SpaceX is almost totally funded by the government. You can't use government funds to buy your own products.
YouTube influencers who are showing off how successful they are and everyone should buy their courses to copy their success. Exhibit A for success: Cybertruck in background.
It's kind of weird. I haven't met a single person in real life that doesn't basically giggle out of embarrassment for the driver when a Cybertruck goes by. No one I know thinks they're cool in the slightest, and they're openly laughed at. It's bizarre that anyone thinks they're cool.
It is very popular in many industries; when it is accomplished by convincing re-sellers to take in more stock than they desire, it is called 'stuffing the channel'. Book publishers are famous for doing this to achieve 'best-seller' status.
Which seems like a long while, seeing as how their big "can't-call-it-a-dealsership" nearby has like 20-30 sitting on the lot for a while. I imagine they'd make their two week estimate early.
There's about 30 or so listed used online around me.
What would the alternative have been? Not reporting that they were purchased at all?
The premise here seems to be that spacex purchased the trucks for the sole purpose of inflating the tesla reporting, which of course makes no sense from a business perspective
Elon keeps doing things that make no sense from a business perspective and he’s defended by people who exclaim it couldn’t have happened like that because it makes no sense from a business perspective.
The general behavior of doing things that don't particularly make sense from a business perspective, to make numbers look better, is unfortunately common. People exploit it by doing things like trying to get a discount near end of quarter.
I'm fairly certain that a lot of Musk's recent moves of creating that umbrella AI company, doing things like this, etc. are all to pass around the dept he took on when he purchased Twitter. He's effectively money laundering his debt through a ton of shenanigans.
The unfortunate corollary to that reasoning: Elons shenanigans and election interference were well aimed efforts to create favourable regulations and a regulatory that would directly enrich him and enable more shenanigans.
Seen as a corrupt investment, with DOGE data access in the middle, buying an election through Twitter has been directly profitable for Elon with obvious and visible downstream upsides for his financiers partners and collaborators in such shenanigans.
You need to be careful here, you're falling into the inverse "Elon is a visionary genius" trap: "Elon is an evil genius". For example:
>buying an election through Twitter
It's weirdly forgotten now, but Musk didn't want to end up owning Twitter. After making the impulsive buy offer, he spent that summer and fall desperately trying to get out of the deal. He finally gave in when it became clear he was going to lose in court. It was a major failure for him, and it's odd seeing this aspect of the Twitter purchase memory-holed and reframed as some 19D chess move.
> What would the alternative have been? Not reporting that they were purchased at all?
They could have purchased any other vehicle, from any other manufacturer. Any other heavy duty truck would be a better choice than the Cybertruck, which is impractical and poorly designed.
> The premise here seems to be that spacex purchased the trucks for the sole purpose of inflating the tesla reporting, which of course makes no sense from a business perspective
It's almost like the owner of SpaceX, which is doing quite well right now, made a decision designed to benefit the owner of Tesla, which is struggling to sell a bunch of 2-ton chrome shitboxes. Wonder what those two individuals have in common. I'm sure that anyone, even you, will be able to figure it out with a little googling.
> The premise here seems to be that spacex purchased the trucks for the sole purpose of inflating the tesla reporting, which of course makes no sense from a business perspective
I think you missed the part where Tesla is overevaluated and any bad news could utterly crush it's share value.
