There has never been a better time for billionaire schadenfreude
By Max Chafkin
In late May, Elon Musk took a break from trying to get out of his purchase of Twitter to offer his view of the nation's economic health. He predicted that the US was careening toward a recession. No worries for him, though. "This is actually a good thing," he tweeted. "It has been raining money on fools for too long. Some bankruptcies need to happen."
Musk is, somewhat infamously, frequently off-target when it comes to predictions, as anyone waiting for his years-late electric pickup truck or a ride in one of his nonexistent 600-miles-per-hour trains knows well. He's also missed on topics such as epidemiology (in March 2020, Musk declared that Covid cases were heading "close to zero"), personal finance (he embraced cryptocurrencies in 2021, just before they crashed) and politics (he predicted a "massive red wave" for the midterm elections ahead of an historic overperformance by Democrats).
___STEADY_PAYWALL___