⚡️🚗 ARCHIVE - At age 28, Elon Musk treated himself to a McLaren right after selling his first company for $307 million.
In 1999, Elon Musk sold his company Zip2 to Compaq for approximately $307 million and personally pocketed nearly $22 million thanks to his stake in the company.
He then decided to fulfill a dream: to buy this McLaren, the fastest production car on the planet, with a top speed of 386 km/h, of which only 62 exist worldwide.
A few years later, he actually wrecked that same McLaren in an accident during a demonstration for a friend, though none of the occupants were seriously injured.
Replies (19)
At 28 I had still hair.
He looks older then, than he does now!
Truly amazing what #elonmusk has achieved. Incredible string of wildly successful companies.
Just to be clear - are we fanboying on the #mclaren, which is a truly amazing car, or are we jealous of musk's success?
Wildly succesfull due to state intervention, yes. Not because the companies in itself would actually produce anything a consumer would like to pay for at the actual price it needs to be priced at for the company to be profitable. Parasitic, rent seeking behaviour...
The state supported zip2 and paypal? If the state supported Tesla, that was a looong 4 years for biden to be in office and do nothing about it...
Tesla did not make a profit for its first 10 years or so. Tesla was completely living of of carboncredits given to them for free and being sold to other companies. Also, electrical driving was/is heavily incentivised and subsidized for the consumer. Tesla in a free market was DOA.
By the way, similar thing is happening to SpaceX right now.
People are loving their Teslas worldwide.
If you give me unlimited tax payer money I can make a nice car as well. Also, people without a Tesla paying for people with a Tesla, just like people without a mortgage are subsidizing the people with a mortgage.
People keep buying Teslas long after the subsidies subside. (I don't want one, I just recognize the genius it took to create them).
Who is subsidizing mortgages? Why haven't I been told?
As far as I understand Tesla still receives carbon credits and in many jurisdictions electric cars are stillsubsidizedd and/or receive beneficial tax treatment.
A mortgage dilutes the 'money' supply. Whoever is holding fiat is losing purchasing power at the expense of the new home 'owners'. Cantillon effect at its finest...
But Teslas sell whether they're subsidized or not. Anyway, no point in ping-ponging back and forth on the same point. Nice talking to you! :-)
As a clsoing remark: Teslas would definitely not have sold for their 'true price' at the same scale. If Tesla was supposed to be a profitable business on its own, cars had to double or triple in price.
Another final remark: all the famous AI tools are heavily subsidized as well. If people have to pay the actual price for their LLM inference I hardly doubt it will be as popular as right now. Instead ofsubscriptions OpenAI, Anthropic, etc have to move to token based pricing or will go bust...
They've started charging more realistically already, and the number of idiotic #ai-generated memes on social media has plummeted :-)
That's very different from Tesla being subsidized. I don't like subsidies, basically I'm paying for someone else's solar panels. And anyone who has road tripped an electric vehicle in #europe knows that #ev technology is currently not ready. Italy / France / Germany offer varying degrees of #wtf at every attempt to charge the damned thing.
There's no question about whether subsidies helped #tesla along - they did, and they shouldn't have. But #elonmusk (along with an army of gifted engineers) was the one who put electric car feasibility in the #overton window.
