That's interesting wording...on several levels.
A longtime venture capitalist sees the religious dedication to Elon Musk, hype, and YOLO investing as almost a dot com-style pyramid scheme in the making.
“To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others,” Wolfe told Motherboard. “These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools. And it's almost like a pyramid scheme: Get the next people in, and those people have every incentive to tell their friends, Yeah, I just made, you know, 20-50 percent in a day, and you got to get in on this. But they're not gonna be ringing the bell at the top and saying, It's time to sell. Because when we’re there, it's a rush to the exit. And that's when you see mass downturn.”
The year was 2000, and the dramatic growth of the internet over the previous decade had created a bubble that was beginning to burst. Over the next few years, the NASDAQ would drop by more than 75% as a slew of heavily-hyped tech startups plunged into failure, humbling the recently overconfident industry.
Probably my favorite example—notably, they are both in pursuit of space—is Bezos and Musk.
In Bezos’ case, you have somebody who did one equity issuance, raising less than $60 million when they went public, and then went from a $300 million market cap or whatever it was to $300 billion. And now, a trillion.
