The biggest business collapse in history happened in 2008 when Wall Street banker Lehman Bros., which had $691 billion in assets, filed for bankruptcy. Lehman’s fall sparked the 2008 global financial crisis and proved that no bank, and no company, is too big to fail.
In this vein, what happens if Tesla goes broke?
It’s lost $777 billion of value since December and a tide of analysts is claiming it’s been wildly overvalued from Day One. Among them is British political writer Will Lockett whose article, This is How Tesla Will Die, lays out the company’s step-by-step death:
“Firstly, Tesla sales dramatically drop globally, tanking the stock price. Then, one of three options occurs: Tesla fails to deliver the Cybercab, Tesla delivers a Cybercab that is wildly dangerous, or a superior competitor beats Tesla to the market, causing the speculative value of Tesla to disappear.”
“After that, Tesla’s value plummets to a realistic value, roughly 94% lower than it is today, putting Tesla into negative equity. Musk’s collateralized loans are called, as lenders worry that their billions of dollars are at stake. Musk can’t pay, and private investors won’t raise enough to bail him out. The banks force liquidation of all of Musk’s companies, including Tesla.”
If this happens, the future of Musk’s private companies will be driven largely by the domino effect: SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, and “X” and The Boring Company and Neuralink – will soon suffocate from lack of capital.
And if they all fall, what happens to Elon Musk? He’s been on the ropes before and his seeming ability to rise from the dead has made him invincible in the eyes of millions of Americans. But while rising from the dead happens rarely in real life, rising twice from the dead is almost unheard of. It’s not something I would bet my RRSP on.
Trump did two nice things for Musk last week: he hosted a Tesla infomercial on The White House lawn, promising to buy the latest model, and he ordered that anyone damaging a Tesla dealership would be guilty of domestic terrorism.
He was reacting to the Tesla Takedown protests that have sprung up across America and hit Toronto and Ottawa last weekend – and Vancouver this weekend because Tesla was removed from its auto show.
But loyalty doesn’t go far in the transactional mind of the American President. So will Musk’s fall as The World’s Richest Man remind Donald Trump, who has filed for bankruptcy six times, that parading a second unhinged bankrupt in the White House is not a good look to Make America Great Again?
Unhinged? Isn’t that a bit harsh? Hardly. It errs on the side of politeness.
After all, Musk did share this post on “X” last week: “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did.”
So if you’d like to play a role in the next greatest collapse in the history of business, tell your friends who own a Tesla that they’re off-brand both as friends and Canadians and should really get a new car, and tell your friends who are thinking of getting a Tesla that they’ve made many smart decisions since you’ve known them, but this will not be one of them.
Because cars don’t kill countries; people kill countries.
Meanwhile…
1. How to argue like a trial lawyer. Jefferson Fisher is a fifth-generation Texas litigator. He “began posting videos to social media in which he delivered succinct, down-to-earth communication advice as he sat in his parked pickup truck. To his astonishment, one video in his “How to Argue Like a Lawyer” series went viral on TikTok, racking up more than a million views one day after he posted it.” Here, he doles out homespun adviceon everything from “How to handle bad apologies” to “When you can’t think of anything to say.” His book came out this week.
2. Testiculating. The release of Prince Harry’s US immigration records, which chronicled his drug use before moving to America, turned out to be a damp squib…Also, I didn’t know that only white male soldiers were buried at Arlington…Plus, Elon not only has more money than anyone; he has more kids…Plus, we know men exhibit unconscious bias against women, but so do women…Plus, and sadly the more married you are, the fatter you’ll grow…Finally, who actually says: “What do we do now?!”
3. Justin’s exit interview. Prime Ministers always give a final interview in the days before they leave office to sum up their years in power. These invariably happen on CBC, CTV or Global. But Justin Trudeau chose Valerie Pringle to interview him on Canada Fileswhich airs in full on April 15 on 15 PBS stations in the US, including WNED Toronto/Buffalo. Here’s a sneak preview.
4. What are you doing Sunday afternoon? Last year, Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko, won the Gold Medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition. He’s playing in his first Toronto recital since that win on Sunday, March 23 at 2 p.m. at Hugh’s Room. Tickets here for an afternoon of Bach, Rachmaninoff and Chopin.
What are you doing on April 3? CBC’s Karin Wells launches her new book Women Who Woke Up the Law, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Ben McNally Books, 108 Queen St. East in Toronto. Contact marketing@secondstorypress.ca for details and your invitation.
5. Be well. Just walking more will get you less depressed. Plus, there are pacemakers to moderate your heart, your Parkinson’s and your depression. What about for addicts? Plus, lovesickness needs defenders. Plus, the good and bad of outsourcing your memory. Plus, is 90 the new 60? Finally, how to have the end of life talk.
6. Strong and free. Ronald Reagan got free trade right. Beavers did too. Bring back beavers! Are race relations worsening in Canada? No. They’re improving. Conversely, here’s how they round them up in America now. And finally, at least Colorado likes us, and not all companies are pulling back on DEI.
On the happy/sad front, here’s the 2025 World Happiness Report. At least comparatively, Canada’s still a pretty happy place. Maybe it’s because we’re not on America’s new travel ban list, which forbids or restricts travel to the US from dozens of countries.
7. Light reading on weighty things. First, the Periodic Index of State Stability. Next, who are those people with parents with money? And does the managerial class have a future? It seems not.
8. Weaning ourselves off America. Like most addictions, America started off as a habit because it’s so close, and then we couldn’t get off it. But now we must. We’re looking twice into those F-35 contracts; buying a $6 billion radar shield from Australia and finding new ways to export our resources to the world. Here’s one of them. NeeStaNan is a First Nations-led infrastructure project to open a deep-water port, railway and airport at Port Nelson (NeeStaNan) on the west coast of Hudson Bay.
9. Last week’s writing contest. It went well, but not perfectly. We forgot to publish two entries in the full list of 57. Sorry about that. Here they are now. And here is the truly full list of all 57 in case you missed it last week.
10. The past is a foreign country. Canada was the first country to have a government-sponsored motion picture bureau, and by 1918 it had two. Six months ago, David Sobel created a website, The Moving Past, where you can access any of the 1,000 films from these early days.