Comment by CoolestBeans
2 days ago
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.
Musk's hype the stuff up, raise money, can be applied to any venture.
The 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.
Did you forget X money and Musk's literally first job being in a bank?
A 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.