What this article is parodying, in case folk aren't familiar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

I think $10M is right. The options cost $0.04 each yesterday (per the tweet), so spending $22,000 would get you 550000 options. Those options are now worth $18.30 (per the tweet) for a total value of ~$10M.

An option contract with an ask of $0.04 costs $4. The trader bought 5500 options for $4 and they’re now worth $1830, so it’s still a $10M profit.

The listed option price is the price per share, and a standard option contract is 100 shares of exposure.

No, the trader bought 260 options. See second photo in the tweet, first row, column "volume". 260 options times $4 equals $1,040 invested, which turned into $475k.

None of the images in the tweet show either premium of $22k or 5,500 option contracts (eg options on 550,000 shares). What am I missing?

The screenshots seem to show a total traded volume for yesterday of 260 contracts (26,000 shares), way smaller than what was suggested.

Furthermore, nothing makes it clear that these were all the same person. And the open interest went down that day so at least some of this volume was buying to cover.

Broke Rule #2 of Matt Levine's "Laws of Insider Trading": "Don’t do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets."

Broke Rule #1 too, it seems :).

Came to post just that. Great read!

That's actually the inciting incident for the cli-fi book "The Ministry for the Future". Overall I really enjoyed the book, was a good mix of interesting economic/policy ideas interwoven through a compelling character based narrative.

As is often the case, Matt Levine (writer of Money Stuff) had some fun hypothesising about how this might be actually part of his "plan".

'Tesla Inc. is the main source of Musk’s wealth, and his main goal in life is selling lots of Teslas. He has sold all the Teslas that he can sell to coastal elite liberals, and now he faces the daunting challenge of selling electric cars to social conservatives. Acquiring Twitter and turning it into a right-wing media company with himself as the main character might be bad for, like, Twitter ad sales, but that is small potatoes if it is good for selling Teslas to Republicans. “Our cars are electric, yes, but they are free from the woke mind virus” is perhaps a good pitch.'

I don't think Matt (or myself) put much weight into this being his true reasoning, but it's a fun thought exercise :)

This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard from Levine in a long time.

Any 101 level marketing course will tell you that burning your brand with existing customer base is a horrible way to reach a new market segment.

A Brand is a promise. Damaging your brand with one group doesn’t make you more appealing to another. Just makes you look erratic and untrustworthy.

In context, he wasn’t being completely serious, IIRC. I think that was one of a list of fairly comic possible explanations for Musk’s recent behaviour.

Though, it’s probably as good an explanation of his nonsense as any, really.

> He has sold all the Teslas that he can sell to coastal elite liberals

If you think this is true, I have a bridge to sell you.

Tesla right now owns the lion's share of the EV market (a late-November report put it at 65% of the market), but that share has already started to slip (it's down from 71% the year prior). But they're still a small player in the overall auto market (~3.5%), especially compared to established operations like Ford (~13.5%), Toyota (~15%), and GM (~16.25%). And now that two of those three marques are making heavy EV bets, I'd expect the EV market to grow overall, something Tesla is increasingly poorly positioned to take advantage of.

Put another way: Westchester County has the highest rate of Tesla ownership (6,926 total, 69.4/10k residents). Using the tool in the original post, there were 685,843 total vehicle registrations in Westchester County in 2022, so Tesla accounts for just 1.01% of vehicle registrations. What CEO would accept such a low level as the maximum addressable market?

Matt Levine is great. I spent half a decade in HFT and he was one of the few writers who was actually good to read.

> He has sold all the Teslas that he can sell to coastal elite liberals

If Musk really believes this, then it’s safe to call him a pathetic businessman, since he doesn’t understand the concept of repeat customers.

Reminds me of Connor Roy's funeral speech from Succession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdOB9OIh70

Oh my god.

Haven’t watched the show, but that feels more like the wedding speech in Sherlock (“high functioning sociopath”).

Reminds me of a quote from Bojack Horseman I think about quite often (in the show it's in reference to running): "It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That's the hard part".

I have that quote printed out and hanging in my work room. With the running baboon next to it, smiling, looking at his watch and the sun shining behind him. I've never watched that show, but the quote hits home and was welcome during hard times.

I think it should be more like: "Every day you get faster/stronger/better. But every day will be just as hard as your first day, and you gotta do it every day."

From the Complaint (https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-5...): "Kamujula met with Sure on April 8, 2020 and later that night began purchasing out-of-the-money Twilio call options."

Clearly not Money Stuff readers!

Do you know how to clear the cache inside of a running Postgres instance? All of the articles online say to just restart the db, but that isn’t feasible in some cases I’ve come across, such as when trying to do testing against a remote db spun up to test against more prod like data. Like you said the query perf against a cold cache vs. something that has had a lot of rows loaded into the shared buffed can be quite different!

Yes but! (1 + 1) * (7 * 3) = 42 =O

1/137 is just 42 in a different base.

LOL! I first read that as: (1 + 1) * (3 * 7) = 42 =O, guffawing because it follows the sequence of digits of the rational number 1/137 expressing the real fine structure constant.