It's true that a volatile environment in general is good for certain types of investment banking business, including facilitating this trade. I nevertheless think it's unlikely - honestly, a galaxy brain take - that Cantor Fitzgerald or other investment banks with influence in the Trump administration would push for policies like unconstitutional tariffs just to drive trading revenue. Maybe the strongest reason is that other, frankly more lucrative investment banking activities, like fundraising and M&A, benefit from a growing economy and a stable economic and regulatory environment.
It stretches your imagination to conceive of a financier chasing short term gains over the long term stability of the investment bank they are part of? I seem to recall an event back in the late '00s that you may want to look into.
Thank you for pointing this out. I didn't catch that the parent comment was ai either and upvoted it. Changed it to a downvote seeing your comment and realizing it the comment did indeed have many AI flags.
Great comment on hardware and maintenance costs, and in comparison Elon wrote "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space."
It's a pity this reads like the entire acquisition of xAi is based on "Elon's napkin math" (maybe he checked it with Grok)
The deal they made values xAI at $230 Billion. It’s a made up number, with no trustworthy financial justification to back it up. It is set to provide a certain return to xAI’s investors (the valuation decides the amount you get per share), who in turn are bailing out the earlier acquisition of X (Twitter). All of this is basically a shell game where Elon is using one company to bail out another. It’s a way of reducing the risk of new ventures by spreading them out between his companies. It’s also really bad for SpaceX employees and investors, who are basically subsidizing other companies.
The thing is, everyone knows Elon is not a real CEO of any of these companies. There isn’t enough time to even be the CEO of one company and a parent. This guy has 10 companies and 10 children. He’s just holding the position and preventing others from being in that position, so he can enact changes like this. And his boards are all stacked with family members, close friends, and sycophants who won’t oppose his agenda.
Most of the investors don’t even have a choice. Nor do all the other shareholders like employees. And the boards of Musk companies are stacked with his yes men.
He's bailing out one of his failing ventures with one of his so far successful ones. The BS napkin math isn't the reason he's doing it. It's the excuse for doing it.
This is also a political issue. The administration could have ftc investigate this under anti-trust, and the government could also pass tighter laws preventing this. But this current administration is likely too friendly to big corporate interests.
I wonder how much their lawyers are using AI to inform their legal tactics:
"Please generate an exhaustive subpoena that will help us defend against this claim"
