Japanese keiretsu also usually have a bank at their center or have both horizontal and vertical integrations. Where they don't have integration, they at least have financial integration. Whatever Musk is doing is far less cohesive in every way.
replyMusk's hype the stuff up, raise money, can be applied to any venture.
replyThe only charitable part of this idea is that it will insulate the stock price from the actual balance sheet. It asks investors not if they want to invest in an EV automaker but in "Elon Musk Inc" essentially. He's been doing some variation of this his whole career, this would just give him the ability to dilute the numbers of each component industry further. The problem is the brand name of Elon Musk is worth a lot less than it was in the 10s.
replyDid you forget X money and Musk's literally first job being in a bank?
replyA payments platform is not a bank. Beyond the services being different and the customers being different (consumers vs businesses), both had to partner with... well a bank, to provide the actual financial services.
replyDo they have a gigantic tumor like twitter and Space AI slapped on the side? If all of the products were profitable it would work.
replyI don’t have time to look up whatever Masayoshi Son has wasted a few billion dollars on today, but yes kinda.
replyReliance in India basically ran a severe loss for Jio (their new mobile network where they essentially gave the country free mobile internet), but paid for by the profits of their fossil fuel business.
replyFor a while, didn't Amazon do the same? They basically ran a loss with Amazon retail but profits on AWS, until they spun off?
So yes, this is fairly common with conglomerates, (Amazon sold diapers at a loss to put diapers.com out of business). And in fact, this tactic is a target for anti-trust laws where they exist.
I think Twitter is the one that actually makes money.
replyUntil they sold all their compute to anthropic, Ai was the boat anchor.
Starlink makes the money.
replyNo way in hell is Twitter making a lick of profit.
deleted
replyI'm glad someone else gets it.
replyWhat about Tesla's management style would you call Japanese?
replyI’m highlighting that companies can and do have all kinds of departments doing seemingly unrelated things if they want to.
replyI'm pointing out that Japanese companies can do that because they're organized and managed like Japanese companies. Tesla is not, and in fact lacks pretty much all the organizing characteristics and long term planning that enables keiretsu to function.
replyDon’t think it requires layers and layers of management attending meetings for 12 hours a day to function as a prerequisite.
replyKamikaze
reply