WORLD WORLDWID UNITED KINGDOM EUROPE - news journal UPDATE - (en) UK, ACG: The Tesla Bubble and Casino Capitalism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Tesla shares are running at hugely bloated values. Tesla is the

Electrical Vehicle (EV) company owned by Elon Musk, who also has SpaceX
and X (Twitter) in his portfolio. Musk is one of the richest people in
world history, whose net worth is valued at US$436 billion as of January
2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $426 billion
according to Forbes, which he has gained through his shares in the above
companies. He outguns the next richest capitalist, Jeff Bezos who owns
Amazon, by hundreds of billions of dollars. After Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg
of Meta and Larry Ellison of Oracle are worth hundreds of billions of
dollars. They, and five other American magnates and the Frenchman
Bernard Arnault, are the richest people in the world.

They have, between them, trousered hundreds of billion dollars in six
weeks, following Trump's re-election. There never have been individuals
so wealthy.

Their huge rise in wealth is fuelled by speculation, okay, let's speak
plainly, by gambling on the stock market.  This is as they slaver over
the prospects of a Trump United States, with huge cuts to social
programmes, massive tax cuts for the rich, and deregulation. This is
exactly the scenario they have dreamed of.

Of all the companies owned by these oligarchs, Tesla has gained the
most, with SpaceX in second place. In just two days Musk pocketed
$24billion!

But at the same time, the charlatanism of Musk can be seen in the
reality of the situation at Tesla. If we were spinning around the world
in a satellite, we would be able to see the parks where Tesla EV
vehicles stand, quite clearly. There are 50,000 of these unsold
vehicles. All of Tesla's holding facilities are filled to overflowing.

Tesla built 433,371 vehicles in the first quarter of 2024 but only sold
386,810. In fact, the market for electrical vehicles is slowing
considerably.

Musk is a master of hype and of boastful schemes that have never come to
fruition, like his predictions of putting mice on Mars, robot taxis,
getting a Tesla vehicle to drive itself from one coast of America to the
other,  etc, etc.

Despite being an enthusiastic advocate of a totally free market, with no
State intervention, Tesla was funded by the State funding, under Obama
and then Biden, through tax breaks, grants, low interest loans and
regulatory credits to the tune of several billion dollars. During the
Covid pandemic in 2020, Tesla received substantial funding from the
federal government. This was whilst Musk frothed at the mouth on social
media about the funding of ordinary people by the same federal
government during the same pandemic.

Some of the more sober financial pundits realise that this overheated
Tesla situation cannot last and are wary of investing. One remarked,
"Many will wake up to the realisation that Tesla's rise in the past
semester lacks any fundamental basis and it's all snake oil salesmanship
about nothing new and nothing justifying the current valuation."
https://medium.com/@creatix/when-will-the-tesla-bubble-burst-1835383dd7f5

Of course, the Tesla bubble is not the only bubble being touted on
financial markets. There is the cryptocurrency bubble (Musk himself bigs
up cryptocurrency and indeed Tesla has acquired billions of Bitcoins).
There is the Meta bubble (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.) There is
the bubble of NVIDIA (Artificial Intelligence Computing).

As we said earlier on, the Covid crisis  resulted in governments and
central banks pumping trillions into the stock markets in 2020. Over the
last period, the rich have moved from investing in production and
infrastructure,  to gambling on the stock markets. This finance capital
creates bubbles where the price of a commodity can soar far above its
real value. These bubbles then have a tendency to burst. Unfortunately,
it is the working class that suffers most from these bubble bursts and
big economic crashes take place, bringing on further austerity measures.
Indeed, before these crashes, bubbles can cause suffering. Take the
housing bubble, where ordinary working people are priced out.

The speculation frenzy has reached a fevered pitch.  The Dow Jones
Industrial Average has increased by more than 700% ( from 6,381 to over
45,00). The Nasdaq has risen by more than 1,100 per cent! (From 1,300 to
more than 20,000). Alongside this, speculative assets have soared in
price. This includes cryptocurrency, where a Bitcoin was valued at
$100,000 for the first time.

At the end of 2024, Ruchir Shama of Rockefeller Capital Management
warned in  an article entitled Mother of All Bubbles in the Financial
Times (https://www.ft.com/content/49cca8d7-7b6e-47e3-a50c-9557d7c85fc0))

that  "This is not a bubble in US markets, it's mania in global
markets." He went on to say "Talk of bubbles in tech or AI, or in
investment strategies focused on growth and momentum, obscures the
mother of all bubbles in US markets. Thoroughly dominating the mind
space of global investors, America is over-owned, overvalued and
overhyped to a degree never seen before. As with all bubbles, it is hard
to know when this one will deflate, or what will trigger its decline."
In a further article, How 'the mother of all bubbles' will pop, he
stated, "In the late stages of a bubble, prices typically go parabolic,
and over the past six months US stock prices have outgained others by
the widest margin for any comparable period in at least a quarter
century. When flying in such thin air, it doesn't take much to stall the
engines. All the classic signs of extreme prices, valuations and
sentiment suggest the end is near."

When that happens, a great depression will loom. This will bring the
human race into great danger, as previous great depressions have led to
mass unemployment, the rise of fascism and war. But at the same time the
possibilities of revolutionary change will open up.

In a second article, we will examine the alignment and integration of
the super-rich, among whom are the techno-oligarchs like Musk and Bezos,
with the State, which may present a new stage in the development of
capitalism.

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/01/22/the-tesla-bubble-and-casino-capitalism/
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