Henrik and Geeta Gupta-Fisker made themselves billionaires when they listed their EV car company in an October 2020 IPO, and they did what many of us would do if we made billions of dollars: They bought a house. A nice house. A house that currently has a listing price that’s higher than the car company itself.
At the time Fisker IPO’d, the pitch was that it was a potential competitor to Tesla. That’s not quite what’s happened, though even Tesla itself is looking for some wins as it deals with a difficult transition to a robotaxi company amidst an economic slowdown. One way the company thinks it can make money? Bringing its FSD system to China.
Genesis, the Hyundai-owned luxury brand, is doing its darndest to differentiate itself from its more humble roots by becoming more independent. And, finally, let’s end this Monday early edition of The Morning Dump with a quick look at the economy, which is a little mixed.
The Fiskers Live/d In The BoJack Horseman House
If you haven’t seen BoJack Horseman, just know that the Will Arnet-led story of a Hollywood has-been trying to make a name for himself is bleak. It’s a dark sort of humor that can quickly turn from a light chuckle over a silly situation (one of the characters is dating a bunch of kids doing the trenchcoat adult gag) to something extremely grim. It’s also a comedy that’s often best when it isn’t funny at all, as in the almost completely dialogue-less “Fish out of Water” episode.
The most iconic location in the show is BoJack’s modernist Hollywood Hills mansion, which is a character in and of itself. Also, the house looks a lot like this modernist Hollywood Hills house, which is reportedly being listed for $35 million by the Fiskers.
As an observer of, and commenter on, the greater automotive world, I have a hard time resisting the framing: couple’s house is worth more than their car company (thus the headline). But rather than point out all the nice features of the house for the purposes of schadenfreude, I think the more helpful way to observe this is as a bit of an allegory for the EV hype train/ZIRP/SPAC world that allowed this purchase to happen.
Henrik Fisker, if you weren’t aware, is a famous car designer behind a lot of great Aston Martins, BMWs, and other attractive cars. He’s long been a proponent of environmentally friendly cars and started an electric-hybrid company called Fisker Automotive that made one car, the Karma, before declaring bankruptcy in 2013. After a long hiatus, Fisker returned with a new company, also called Fisker (Inc. this time, instead of Automotive), that would be an electric car rival to Tesla and utilize contract-manufacturing.
Fisker decided to go public before making any of its cars via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company or SPAC, aka a Blank Check Company, which is basically a shell company that allows a group to quickly raise money from investors without going through the normal due diligence of going public. Once the investors raise enough, the company is merged with another private company and that merged company is de facto a public company.
SPACs have been around for a while, but they became super popular during the early pandemic, with more than 50% of newly listed public companies in 2020 coming via SPAC according to the Harvard Business Review. That same HBR story has a prescient section:
Today, most SPACs focus on companies that are disrupting consumer, technology, or biotech markets. Some of these firms are speculative, have enormous capital requirements, and can provide only limited assurances on near-term revenue and viability. (Electric-vehicle companies often fall into this category.)
There are many reasons why SPACs were popular, but it does feel like a weird symptom of the ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era, when central banks made it almost risk-free to borrow huge sums of money in order to try and encourage economic activity.
The Fisker SPAC went up in October of 2021 and was a success. The company was viewed as a potential next-Tesla and was suddenly valued at over $2 billion, which resulted in glowing pieces like this Forbes profile of Henrik and his wife (then COO) Geeta.
Henrik Fisker seems straight from Hollywood central casting for the role of “famous European car designer.” A tall, blonde, handsome 57-year-old Dane, he first became known outside the car world in 1999 for styling a silver, convertible BMW Z8 roadster for Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in The World Is Not Enough. In the early 2000s he ran Aston Martin’s famed design studios before serving as an early design consultant to Elon Musk’s Tesla. In 2007, he founded Fisker Automotive, which made one of the world’s first plug-in cars, before failing spectacularly six years later.
Now he’s back–and three things are different. First and foremost, he has a vital new partner: his wife, cofounder and Fisker Inc. CFO Geeta Gupta-Fisker. Second, his Los Angeles-based company is public this time around, raising more than $1 billion in an October 2020 IPO. And finally, Fisker’s stock price, up 56% since its debut, has made both Henrik and Geeta billionaires, each worth about $1.1 billion as of Friday’s market close.
Henrik Fisker is a pretty handsome dude, I don’t disagree there. Less than a year after the IPO the couple bought the 11,000-sf house for $21.8 million.
While Fisker had a few things going for it, including a handsome car, the timing was pretty awful. Part of Fisker’s idea was to use contract manufacturing and the existing world of automotive suppliers to bring the cars to life, focusing instead on design and marketing. The pandemic ripped apart the supply chain, and being a smaller customer likely put Fisker at a disadvantage. Once the Fisker cars got to market the two-row EV crossover world was too crowded and a price war in China put the automaker in a difficult pricing position. The surprise Inflation Reduction Act also benefitted certain automakers (Tesla, GM, Ford) over others (Fisker, Vinfast).
Even if the Fisker Ocean launched with zero problems, that deck was already stacked against the company. Unfortunately, the car launched with many problems. The Ocean may be better now, but it’s hard to reverse that headline.
The company’s stock started to fade with other EV brands and, after a long period trading below $1 per share, it was de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange and production was paused. It’s possible the company could avoid bankruptcy, but it’s certainly in a tough position, as Nick Bunkley, who reported on the listing, points out in Automotive News:
Fisker Inc., which the billionaire couple founded in 2016, recently warned that it could file for bankruptcy protection within 30 days unless it can get relief from creditors and enough liquidity to meet debt obligations. The company, which had a market cap of $33.7 million when it was suspended from the New York Stock Exchange in March, recently missed an interest payment and has appointed a chief restructuring officer who works with distressed businesses.
As of this morning, Google Finance shows a market cap (the value of all shares) of $25.31 million, which is a lot less than the listing value of the house.
Elon Musk Visits China
Honored to meet with Premier Li Qiang.
We have known each other now for many years, since early Shanghai days. pic.twitter.com/JCnv6MbZ6W
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024
Elon Musk might be kinda bored with being the CEO of a car company, but China is an important market, and so when he got the chance to meet with Chinese Premier Li Qiang he took a break from tweeting nonsense and hopped on a plane.
From the Associated Press:
Chinese Premier Li Qiang told Musk that he hopes the U.S. will work more with China on “win-win” cooperation, citing Tesla’s operations in China as a successful example of economic cooperation, China’s state broadcaster CCTV said on its main evening news program.
For China, Musk is a welcome antidote to the tough talk from U.S. officials, which played out most recently during a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Li’s remarks also reflect China’s efforts to attract foreign investment to boost its flagging economy.
So this dog-and-pony show is good for China, but how is it good for Tesla?
This time from Bloomberg:
Elon Musk’s quick visit to China paid immediate dividends, with Tesla Inc. receiving in-principle approval from government officials to deploy its driver-assistance system in the world’s biggest auto market.
The US carmaker was granted the approval under certain conditions, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because details of all the criteria aren’t clear. Tesla did manage to clear two of the most important hurdles: reaching a mapping and navigation deal with Chinese tech giant Baidu Inc., and meeting requirements for how it handles data-security and privacy issues.
Isn’t that convenient?
Genesis Declares Independence
If you’re of a certain age and grew up in an American suburb, there’s a non-zero chance that you went to a movie theater and cheered when Bill Pullman gave his big speech in the film Independence Day.
Claudia Marquez, the North American COO of Hyundai’s Genesis brand, doesn’t have to face off with genocidal aliens, but she’s still excited to talk about independence, as she does in this interview with Automotive News.
“When we launched, we needed a lot of support from Hyundai, but now we are growing and every single function that is consumer facing is becoming completely independent,” Claudia Marquez told Automotive News. That includes adding dedicated teams for sales, field operations, marketing and customer experience.
Hyundai Motor North America CEO Jose Muñoz, who is CEO to Genesis in the region, has been vocal about the critical need to build Genesis apart from mainstream Hyundai to compete on the same level as established rivals. That includes the physical separation of dealerships.
I think that’s probably the correct path. Hyundai (and Kia) have a great reputation, but even if everyone knows that a Lexus is also a Toyota, the separation between Lexus and Toyota helps the brand.
Economy Is Mixed Ahead Of Federal Reserve Meeting
A quick and helpful way to keep up with the economy comes in the form of these little weekly summaries from Cox Automotive economist Jonathan Smoke. The U.S Federal Reserve will have its quarterly meeting and it’s a good time to look at where we’re at to try and guess what the Fed will do:
The first estimate of Q1 real GDP performance showed a bigger deceleration in growth than expected, falling to an annualized rate of 1.6% from 3.4% in the fourth quarter. Personal consumption decelerated to growth of 2.5%, a decline from 3.3% in Q4.
Spending on goods also decelerated, falling to a 0.4% decline from 3.0% growth in the prior quarter, while spending on services accelerated further to growth of 4.0% from 3.4%. Accelerating residential investment drove a 3.2% increase in private domestic investment despite declining inventories. Government spending decelerated in Q1 but remained positive. Exports increased less than imports, so net exports were also a drag on growth. Real GDP growth year over year decelerated to 3.0% from 3.1% previously.
GDP price measures, which are quarterly but consistent with the monthly PCE measures that the Fed follows closely, showed troubling reacceleration in inflation as the GDP price index grew 3.1%, up from 1.6% in Q4. The core price index accelerated to 3.7% from 2.0% in the prior quarter.
There was a brief moment last year when inflation seemed to wane considerably and there was hope that the Fed might lower rates, but that seems a distant memory today. This impacts car buyers as higher interest rates have contributed to higher financing costs.
What I’m Listening To This Morning
Rubblebucket is a weird band, but there’s something about that voice and those horns. Also, this appears to be a 360-degree music video for some reason.
The Big Question
The Fisker mansion is a three-car garage, but it has 20-foot ceilings so it can fit six cars. What’s the minimum acceptable number of garage spots for a house that costs more than $30 million?
If Genesis was wise, they’d be forcing their dealers to not only build standalone shops, but locate them not even within eyesight of the local Hyundai dealer.
Nobody who’s looking to buy/service a luxury car wants to see the Hyundai salesman’s slicked back hair, or overhear him boasting about his night eating sloppy steaks at Truffoni’s.
I agree. Went with a friend to McGrath Hyundai in Chicago with the intention of leaving with an Ioniq 5 as long as it was within $2-3K of MSRP at the beginning of this year. No Ioniq’s were sold, and now I’d rather drive 50 miles out of the way than to visit McGrath Lexus or McGrath Mazda for parts or service for my cars. The salesperson was a good guy, but the sales manager wouldn’t give us a price on the car until after my friend would sign an agreement to buy the car.
Ah yes, the classic agree to mystery price scheme. That’s an instant walk out and never come back for me.
My ideal $30 million dollar house has an entire warehouse for car/toy storage
My ideal $30 million dollar warehouse has a house to live next to it.
Gonna take more that SPACkle to patch the holes in Fisker.
I heard the Chinese want to install Tesla self driving equipment in their military tanks because they don’t want the tanks to stop for pedestrians.
Never trust the project of billionaire that is not ready to invest his own money into it.
I didn’t realize this ass is a billionaire lmao. That sure throws a wrench in his whole environmentalist act, doesn’t it?
Well, if a significant portion of his wealth was in Fisker shares, he may not be a billionaire at this point.
He’s done this before–he knows to sell while things are overvalued. He also wasn’t investing his money to any significant extent, I believe. He just got others to invest so he could make money as the CEO before it crumbled.
Dude has mastered the art of conning people into investing in companies he’ll siphon money from. It’s pretty ballsy to make your wife the CFO while you milk the company for all it’s worth.
I’ll give this company credit, though. When he started it, I thought it was going to be worse than the last one somehow, but they delivered some Oceans before the whole thing came crashing down.
Making cars is hard. Scamming investors is easy.
The Forbes article says that he and his wife put all their money into it, and their billions were in company stock, so I suspect they’re selling the house because they’re broke AF now.
A load of butt kissing to Fisker, who ended up taking everyone for a ride, twice. And then on the same page you continue your thinly veiled attacks on Musk, who actually delivers EV’s. Autopian is on a right path to become Jalopnik 2.0 with this guy!
Come on now, lets be nice.
You don’t want to end up in the grays do you LOL
Where is the “butt kissing” to Fisker?
This is the internet. If one doesn’t spend 40 hours a day shitting in XYZ, then you must be an XYZ apologist, according to some detractors.
Somedays it feels like the internet was a mistake. 😐
It kind of was a mistake. It was designed for government communications and the military. Then we civilians repurposed it for kitten videos, posts about what we are eating for dinner, and vitriol.
I am not a part of this “we” you speak of. Just sayin.
Tonight’s dinner will be kitten with vitriol sauce.
What you get when you ask AI for content based on social media posts.
Well, the easy access to kitten videos is a positive, can’t say the same about the rest of it.
I shit on Fisker constantly. Dude’s a charlatan.
Tom is a (not very good) troll, just ignore.
Ah. I was not aware. Will avoid in future. Thank you!
Too be fairrr to Mr. Fisker, he’s a conman who seems pleasantly surprised that people continue to fall for his obvious cons. Which is a bit endearing. Musk is a conman who fell for his own obvious con, and then spent 44 billion dollars to amplify how much he fell for his own con. The absurdity of it all is just easier to ridicule.
That $44b is not like someone sold a country’s GDP or something, though. That was relative pocket lint. I don’t get why people get so hung up on it.
It’d be like getting a $10k check as a bonus for back pay from the new UAW contract and buying a $400 e-scooter. It’s really not that big of a deal.
Imagine being worth (whatever the actual number) $200b and dropping $44b. You still have residual value of at least half, all the while knowing that you can “scrape by” on a Billion, lol.
It’s seriously not as dumb of a choice as people think. Shit, even Michael Jordan made a few hundred mil owning the shittiest NBA franchise ever. And, don’t forget the tax write-offs for a depreciating asset, if applicable. Buying Twitter was actually kinda a genius way to add value to what is assuredly an already well-funded DAF.
Buying twitter wasn’t necessarily dumb, but it did extend Musk and force him to take on debt against his TSLA stock to do it. The way he’s running it on the other hand is dumb.
-Driving away advertisers
-Getting rid of core operational talent
-Rebranding so incompletely that the website still redirects to twitter
-Letting Threads pop up and get to over 100M users in a week
There are plenty of reasons to be impressed with Elon and what he’s accomplished. The twitter fiasco is not one of them.
100%.
The thing people don’t grasp is that it somehow matters more to them if it does well or not, rather than if Musk cares. It’s a toy and probably a nice place to stash cash.
For me personally, it works just fine for what it is. That’s all. It could go poof tomorrow and I’d just find a different online media outlet for my hobbies. I’m certainly not thinking about it in terms of “look how dumb/shitty this billionaire is”. That attitude is exactly the same shit that they cry twitter devolved into, lol.
Because the luckiest conman on Earth spent 1/4 of his wealth on social media sight because him and his friends shitposts weren’t getting enough traction. Then proceeding to run said social media shit into the ground, thus having even less traction than when he started. Is overall pretty funny. Sure, it might not lose value. But he did lose the one thing he craves, respect and admiration from the general public. And to watch the richest man on earth get pissy like a teenager over fake internet points is priceless.
So what? It’s crazy to me that you would waste the energy to hate laugh about someone you don’t know and think it’s “priceless.”
You don’t think that is lame?
When that guy is the richest man on Earth, no. That’s punching up, subversion of power. Mixed with a bit of absurdity. Really the foundation of good humor right there. It’s literally a self imposed The Emperor’s New Clothes situation! How is that not pretty gosh darn funny.
It’s an interesting scale if a story about a guy driving the value of a company down so far it’s worth less than his house is… butt kissing.
The Autopian and the commentariat has been dunking all over Fisker for… basically forever? It’s not like this story is at all favorable to Fisker either, unless you think a car company being worth less than a house is somehow favorable.
There isn’t any butt kissing? The positive quote about Fisker was used as a way to contrast the excitement that was being generated at the beginning of the company with the reality that it was a disaster in the end.
So I saw my first standalone Genesis dealership a few weeks ago while on a road trip for spring break. It was interesting to see, but it was also right next to the Hyundai dealership and didn’t seem to have enough inventory to warrant a standalone location. It reminded me heavily of when Lincoln tried to do their own standalone dealerships a couple decades ago, only to realize they didn’t move enough product for it to make sense and they moved back in with Ford and Mercury (and the former Lincoln dealership buildings became standalone used car stores for the associated Ford/Lincoln/Mercury dealership).
They’re doing this again. My local Ford dealer just built a Lincoln building next to it.
Interesting. My local Lincoln dealer has a dedicated end of the Ford dealership, to the point where that end of the building is styled very different than the Ford part, but that’s about as separate as they got. Well, and the Lincoln end has some carpet in addition to the tile, because nothing says luxury than a 2’x10′ rectangle of carpet!
Actually, they might be one long-ass building, I’m really not sure as I only see it from the driveway to Home Depot.
Or in a weird pairing in my town, a combination Mazda/Lincoln dealership.
Ah, yes, the holdovers from when Mazda and Ford were bedfellows. A decade ago I lived in a small town where the local Jeep dealer was also the town Buick dealer, which was a holdover from the AMC days. It was a Buick/Jeep/Saab dealership until Saab went under. Super odd, but actually a really dealership (if that can be said about any dealership).
Wonder if we might be in the same area (or there is more than one combo Mazda/Lincoln). Of course it used to have Mercury too which made a little more sense to be paired with Mazda, but then the nearby Ford dealer wasn’t part of that same dealer group, instead a competing one which was the only other dealer of any kind for a few miles around. Which kind of begs the question why that location was chosen in the first place…
The whole point of Mercury in its later years was to give Lincoln dealerships the volume needed to justify keeping separate showrooms, and that was when the Town Car was selling more per year on its own than the entire Lincoln model range combined does now. If Lincoln-Mercury weren’t viable in their own spaces then, I question how it’s going to work for Lincoln today
Minimum is 1 car garage for each 1,000SF.
Must have had Art Vandelay as their architect.
I heard Vandelay Industries is really doing things in the rubber space.
In any event I think they’re a better investment than anything Fisker can offer.
What would an Art Vandelay home look like? Lower ceilings, so short people seem taller? Storage for toupees?
Not completely sure, but it only has a one car garage for Jon Vogt’s LeBaron Convertible.
Jon Voight the actor or Jon Voight the dentist?
Gonna have to math around a little bit on that Big Question. Let’s see, I can shoehorn 5 cars in my 3-car-garage, plus another in the outbuilding and one more in the original garage under the house. So, the starting point is 7 spots. But, that’s on a house that cost $265,000 (adjusted for inflation). I would certainly want the same spot-per-dollar ratio on anyplace I would consider buying.
So… $30,000,000 / $265,000 = 113 spot multiplier x 7 spots = 792
792 garage spots would be the minimum number to get me to spend $30,000,000 million on a house, although I could probably be talked into thinning the herd slightly and rounding down to 790.
This math checks out.
Well, once Fisker Inc goes under, I wonder what his round 3 will be? He’s already done a hybrid luxury sedan and an electric crossover, maybe the next one will be some sort of personal luxury coupe?
At any rate, he’ll be able to keep using the same name and logo, since the trademark won’t be affected by Fisker Inc’s impending collapse. They’re owned by Fisker Coachbuild LLC, Henrik Fisker’s mostly dormant original company, which is owned privately by him, and are licensed to Fisker Inc for a per-car royalty (same deal that existed with the former Fisker Automotive). Also likely makes Henrik Fisker a significant creditor of his own company, since they probably haven’t been making their payments on time lately
Not that I’m defending them, but what is with this website and consistently getting all of the details about SPACs wrong?
A SPAC by definition is a publicly listed company that has raised funds by an IPO. That IPO is subject to all of the normal rules and regulations regarding public listings. The opportunity for due diligence exists in exactly the same fashion as it does with every other public listing. When it acquires another company, the entity is not de facto a public company, it is de jure a public company because once again, the SPAC was a publicly traded entity to begin with.
Complaining that people are getting fleeced investing in the merged entity is like complaining that Dutch tulip futures turned out to be a really shitty investment in January of 1637. All of the pertinent data exists to make informed decisions, if you ignore that and invest anyway, you deserve what you get.
The correct number of garage spots is 0. You just need a helipad. Driving on the roads with the proles, as if.
Everyone’s a Free Speech Absolutist till the Communist back up the Big Money Truck. When the Great Leap Forward finally includes the amount of digits in my saving account and I’m out 30 million dollar home shopping. My yacht better be parked about six steps from back door or don’t bother showing me that shack. I’m taking the helicopter to the Whole Foods. Only cars I’m parking are pristine examples of all your favorites, in a some warehouse somewhere. Never going to see or touch’em. Just have them, to say I do.
The big question on the number of parking spaces is whether they need to be attached to the house. If so, that’s getting you far fewer than if there’s an outbuilding in play.
Barndos are in style around here currently. That’s a reasonable way to have 100+ spots attached to your house if desired. Especially since that money puts you into “mezzanine and elevator” range.
“What’s the minimum acceptable number of garage spots for a house that costs more than $30 million?”
Two.
Like all things, this depends. In a city with robust public transit, even a two-car garage is a luxury. In a city with no transit options, a two-car garage may be seen as standard.
For me, a house with that price tag would probably need an attached three-car garage and a detached shop. Depending on other features and size, more could be nice, but there are plenty of features I would prioritize over a garage larger than that.
I’m also not in the market for a house that expensive, so it’s really hard to consider what I’d need in the price range.
BTW the correct answer is: go-kart track. https://www.theautopian.com/get-unlimited-seat-time-at-this-20-million-home-with-its-own-go-kart-track/
That is one of the things that would be worth more to me than more garage spaces. Three is plenty, and any more than six would be wasted on me. A go-kart track is significantly more interesting.
Man, I’d love to hoon my trike around on that thing. Especially after the upgrade to AWD and 25+ kW is complete…
If David Tracy were looking over the listing of the $35 million Hollywood Hills house, my guess is the first thing he’d check to see is if the garage is heated . . . . because old habits die hard.
Act now! We’re 3.5 million subscribers away from David Tracy sleeping in the Hollywood Hills forever. Eating shower spaghetti from two starred Michelin restaurants. Will the HOA be cool with a few Jeeps in yard? With your subscription, he can go from in the shadow of the Palace at Auburn Hills, to a palace of his own in the Hollywood Hills.
If you’re David Tracy you really don’t care about the garage but need to know how many cars can you fit in the yard.
Who spooked Rootwrym off, anyway? Today’s Dump is right in his wheelhouse for a 4 paragraph missive…
Who bullied him off?
Autoplay vids scared him off.
Hopefully he did it on his own accord. Dude loved to drop knowledge bombs, but got way too worked up over the details. I’ve known a number of people like that, and all of them had early onsets of health issues you would normally associate with the elderly. Being angry all of the time is not healthy.
That’s what made it fun. It was like snorting coke from a blender smoothie, where even the ice had ice in it. lol
It was extremely fun to watch, but yeah- not sustainable.
This pretty much sums it up. I enjoyed reading his comments and soaking up some of the knowledge he wanted to drop, but he’s an angry fellow who did not take too kindly to dissenting opinions.
I think something happened on Discord. He changed his screen name to bullied or something like that and hasn’t been back. That was like months ago I think
LMAO the irony of that word from that particular individual.
What’s funny and typical of that type is how often he was confidently wrong.
The smartest people in the room don’t feel the need to prove it (and in fact are usually the most acutely conscious of how much they don’t know).
I think it was “successfully harassed away.” I looked just now and it is currently “rootwyrm-gone due to harassment.”
I never was clear on what harassment he’s talking about. He took a break from commenting, came back a couple times, and has been gone since. I hope he’s alright. I feel like he may have had stresses elsewhere that contributed to how interactions went here.
Yeah, that was the name. I scrolled up in discord and couldn’t figure out what happened. Hate to see voices go, unless they’re disruptive which I don’t feel he was.
Yeah, I liked hearing from him. He could certainly rub people the wrong way sometimes, but he did have some knowledge that added to conversations and he didn’t shy away from getting into the details. I don’t think he was disruptive, though he didn’t shy away from telling a few people how he felt about their views.
Ooops, didn’t mean to start a gossip thing. Kinda a stream of consciousness post.
My apologies to the communitarians and the staff.
I personally read his posts in the voice of Lewis Black. And I mean that as a compliment.
I don’t care one way or the other, but I did notice my mobile data overage charges went way down after he stopped commenting.
A tangential thought I had about the Fiskers section – would be interesting to see a score card of all the COVID-era SPACs and how they are faring.
Calling on my Google Fu . . .
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2byvnsk2lozplahp4jj7k/portfolio/the-disastrous-spacs-and-painful-ipos-of-the-pandemic-years-wipe-out-years-of-gains
Wow the url really tells the story, doesn’t it?
I mean Henrik Fisker has very transparently been a grifter for a long time. It’s remarkable to me that people still fall for his stupid “I’m just a harmless environmentalist who designs pretty cars” act. I won’t be shocked in the least if he and his wife are charged with serious financial crimes by the time all the Fisker dust has settled.
I think the best-case scenario is for Fisker to be bought by an automaker with nascent EVs and to use the tech/designs to become slightly competitive. Or hell, Geely could just take over with a shell company as a way to gain a foothold here.
Basically…I don’t care how it happens…I just want the Fisker Pear and Alaska (or a version of them) to see the light of day. Both are stupidly charming and in theory, are the affordable EVs we are sorely lacking in the U.S. of A.
I worked for company a couple decades ago that had what everyone refered to as a “serial CFO”. The guy wasn’t necessarily shady, but he had been CFO for like 20+ companies before he was 50. I later found out that he was a serial entrepreneur, and almost all of those 20 companies were designed from the start to be built up and sold as fast as possible. The money then went into the next to each successive company to do it faster and bigger.
Fisker (old and new) always gave off similar vibes, of hyping up to hope it gets purchased by a bigger fish, and I think Henrik just isn’t as good at the art of flip as my former employer’s CFO.
Well, the modern-era Korean cars are wonderfully designed and the 5-year/60,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty and the 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain warranty is possibly the best in the business. However, the dealerships are pretty lacking compared to my experiences at Ford, GMC/Buick, Toyota, and VW. I know YMMV, depending on the staff/ownership group, but I’d imagine Genesis seeking to create more separation from Hyundai is related. No one wants to buy a luxury brand-marketed vehicle and be abused (non-consensually) by the average Kia experience.
This. Might be decent cars but I am not subjecting myself to the Hyundai/Kia dealership experience.
I can relate, having learned the hard way. Last time we ever leased as well.
Bought the Sorento on a Saturday, which I think happened to be new years eve. The sales manager was the typical jerk pushing various worthless warranties and whatnot, and the tough sell tactics drew everything out late into the evening. Finally he printed out the paperwork on a dot matrix printer, and then got a little pissy when my wife and I insisted on reading through every page of it.
There were items with options that didn’t have anything checked and blank lines that had no value in them, but when we asked about them he pretty much waived it off and said it didn’t matter. We get to the last page and as we’re signing it he told us not to date it as he’d take care it it in a minute.
After we handed it back, he kept us engaged in conversation while he fed the form back into the printer, and then tapped a few keys on the keyboard and tap-tap-tap went the printer. Then he pulled it out, separated the multi part forms, stuffed our copy into an envelope and walked us out to the car.
At this point I noticed the temporary tags were dated to expire in the middle of January instead of at the end of the month (at that time, temp tags were valid for 30 days). Again he waived that off and said the guy that wrote it must have made a mistake, it was no big deal, we’d have the paperwork from the state by then anyway, and if not just come on back and they’d take care of us.
Of course none of it worked out that way.
We didn’t get the paperwork in time and had to pay a fine for being late. Examination of the paperwork showed they listed the purchase date as Dec 18th instead of the day we actually bought the car (no idea why), and added a $400 lease turn in fee into the mix that wasn’t there when we signed the papers.
Long story short, never leave fields empty, date it when you sign your name and never ever let them run the documents through the printer a second time. Ideally, keep your copy right after you sign it and only give them their copies.
Oh, and if anybody from corporate Kia/Hyundai is reading this, yes, that Sorento was the last Kia or Hyundai product I will ever buy.
I’ve heard their dealerships described as “predatory” by more than once source.
My daughter recently totalled her car (2018 Ford Fusion Hybrid). We went looking at cheaper chicken cars (Sentra, Forte, Civic) to keep costs down; she also was not interested in a crossover. She seems to have settled on the Sentra, even though I warned her the CVT may explode if she doesn’t keep up on maintenance.
Of the three dealerships we visited, the Kia dealership was the best, then Honda, and then Nissan. We walked into the Nissan dealership and said we wanted to test drive a car. A salesman was sitting in some comfy chair in the lobby talking on the phone. He paused and asked us if we were buying that day. When I replied no, he waved us off with his hand while mumbling no, find someone else. Another saleman returning from the back showed us the car and took us on a test drive. Guess who we’re asking for when we return to make the purchase?
“What’s the minimum acceptable number of garage spots for a house that costs more than $30 million?”
Since we are talking Powerball money, A condo on the Gulf with 4 spots that are professionally maintained. They exist.
As far as the economy, I forget the member that was “all-in” about how great things are and that inflation was low, unemployment is low, things are looking pretty good, etc. I tried to say it then, and it fell on deaf ears there, which is…whatever. But, they are mighty silent these days on that stance.
The notion that our economy is strong is a fallacy. It’s not even remotely close to acceptable. There are solutions to aid in a way that is more than a band-aid or tax-supported infusions of capital, but that would require selling out on the position of “morality.” Quite the conundrum for the confused.
It was me, and while I still believe the overall trajectory is positive and the arguments I made then are still true, I’m not so stuck in my ways as to not recognize that the last few months have been worse than Q2/Q3 of 2023.
I remain confident that there is nothing structurally wrong and that we are nowhere near a recession. I’m less confident in a speedy recovery to low rates and 2% inflation, which is IMO what people mean when they say a “good economy”.
If I’ve been “silent” on the topic, it’s because it’s become overwhelmingly clear to me that people here simply believe what they wish to regardless of facts or trends. Perhaps I’m guilty of that myself. In case there’s any doubt though, I believed then and continue to believe now that the 2021-24 economy is the best of my lifetime. That belief is backed by statistics from the most reliable sources I’m aware of. If I’m deluding myself, I’m not alone.
That’s right, it was you. lol. I get how you might think that way, but it’s fundamentally flawed. The St. Louis Fed stats don’t tell the whole story, and it’s pretty easy to cherry-pick the good ones.
I can’t help but feeling baffled how you remain confident in the current trajectory, because it’s not what is happening in real-time in the “boots on the ground” reality.
We are kinda fucked right now, and to think otherwise is to be duped. I say this as I was writing mortgages in the ’06-’08ish era and witnessed it first-hand.
I’m glad you are optimistic, but I just don’t see it that way. While getting tied up in wars makes for a nice cocktail, the hangover is gonna be harsh. I think we are already seeing it form. After we wake up to pee and go back to bed for another 45 winks, our head is gonna really start pounding.
The only rebuttals anyone can give to the facts I present are vibes.
I’m agree people *feel* the economy is bad and getting worse, but on what objective measures do they base those feelings? If by “boots on the ground”, you mean talking to people, of course I get the sense of malaise and negativity that you refer to, but that doesn’t make it any more true.
The nice thing about statistics is they are broad-based and comparable over time.
If I’m cherry-picking the “good” Fed stats, where are the bad ones?
I’m not being argumentative here, but yeah, talking to people is the true barometer of the truth. It’s certainly subjective, so we agree on that. But, there is a point where the subjective belies more truth than the projector of the topic. Happens all the time.
Any of the Fed branches are debatable in their worth to begin with, let alone rely on. While stats can be useful, they are easily Bob Ross softened and blended. As you know, naturally.
The thing is about “vibes”, is that you infuse yours as much as anyone else. No more, no less. So you can have your stance being either verified by the STL Fed or, at the very least, boosted by it, and form your opinion in that fashion. I tend to think this is the wrong way to go.
The proper way (imo) is that you can co-mingle with those that have never had any knowledge of any Fed branch and only know that things are pretty fucked up in their world these days, and see that it’s not all bars and charts.
If your belief is that truth comes solely out of co-mingling and discussion without recourse to objective facts, then we simply aren’t going to agree on anything and I bow out of the discussion.
Your way leads to “just asking questions” type doubt over vaccines, chemtrails, evolution, election fraud, GMOs, whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. That’s not a path I’m willing to go down.
I don’t think you need to accept everything broadcast by official sources at face value, but I don’t think it’s automatically suspect either. And I don’t automatically find “the man on the street” a compelling source of truth on just about anything besides their own narrow worldview.
Fair enough. I’m certainly not going to get into a full-on word salad about it.
I will say that I’m not talking tin-foil hat stuff, just what I see in a public facing job, that even on its best days of ripping off tourists, still sees its share of the malcontented and disconnected.
I’m no Alex Jonesbaughcarlsonrogan, but my ears hear the words of various economic strati. Those words contradict the “official” numbers by magnitudes, regardless of the native language spoken.
“But, there is a point where the subjective belies more truth than the projector of the topic. Happens all the time.”
But that always plays out in the facts (ie. it’s shown in the statistics) And, yet, most of facts point to a generally healthy (if not excellent) economy.
Public sentiment does not mean the economy is not good. But, public sentiment CAN eventually lead to a poor economy when people start acting on their sentiment. It’s just that people like to talk a lot. And when their favorite idiot is droaning on about whatever talking point currently brings them ratings they have a tendency to repeat those same talking points. But their actions speak louder… and that is where the statistics and facts come in. Which currently shows that things are OK, even if people would say otherwise.
My boots are on the ground, last I checked. While the world is clearly fucked, the economy seems basically fine, maybe good even. Maybe great if you don’t need to borrow right now.
But I’m sure my boots don’t count for some reason.
“people here simply believe what they wish to regardless of facts or trends”
Here = Earth
So much this. I stopped arguing with people on most topics because the odds are overwhelming that they will not change their minds/behavior/hygiene practices. I find it’s not worth my frustration.
When I engage with people who are clearly not worth having a discussion with, I allocate one reply and one reply only. The reason I do this is to provide a counterpoint to whatever crazy nonsense they posted in the first place so people don’t get the idea that it’s accepted wisdom, but I do not further engage when they reply with some batshit-insane response (and you almost always know ahead of time if that’s going to be the case).
My purpose is more to make other readers think about things (maybe Bill Gates isn’t using the covid vaccines to inject 5G trackers into my blood stream!) than to change the mind of the OP.
That’s a reasonable practice. Which therefore has NO PLACE on the interwebs!
That makes sense to me, but I rarely engage in those types of things online. I’m mostly referring to real life encounters. People I work with/live around who have such opinions about Mr. Gates and how he spends his time. There are precious few people with minds open & free enough to have an unemotional, genuine exchange of ideas.
Yeah, much harder to walk away from such a conversation in person.
I regularly spend time with some people whose political opinions I vastly disagree with and mostly I just let them spew when they get onto one of those topics, but not long ago someone explicitly pulled me into one of them. Next time I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear them because it led to nothing of value. 😉
Amazing to me how many people take a difference of opinion as a person affront. Some of those people are willing to defend their opinions physically.
Be careful out there.
Yeah, not too worried about that in this group. They break a hip if you look at them funny. 😉
It’s just frustrating to talk to people who can only parrot talking points they heard on Facebook. It was a completely pointless “conversation” and I regret having it.
Depends where you want to live. In San Francisco or Manhattan, $30M probably gets you a two car garage to go with your decent sized house (note, I have no idea what it actually gets you in those places, having never wanted to live in either one).
Here in the Midwest, you better get 20 indoor parking spots for that kind of money. But you never really know. I’m acquainted with a guy who probably has close to $30M worth of vintage and collector cars stored in climate controlled garages behind a relatively modest house.
$30mm in San Fran will get you shot, lol. In NYC it’ll get you plenty if you go the townhouse way. However, that’s a lot of sacrifice to endure just to live there. Plenty of better places to spend $30mm for a roof than those two cities. e
San Francisco is actually one of the only places in the Bay Area (the suburban sprawl of the South Bay, too) where ample garage space is actually common! A shocking number of the surviving pre-1906 houses, and most of the 1920s-1960s attached houses throughout the city dedicate most or all of their lower level to parking, so at least 2 spaces, and often up to 4, is very common.
Where I live, across the Bay, the norm is a tiny single-car detached garage that’s been converted to a crappy ADU.
Sorry, what’s an ADU?
“Accessory Dwelling Unit.” In theory, a tiny house-style studio apartment that could be rented out to ease the housing shortage, but in practice usually used as a home office or gym.
TIL. Thanks!
Even here in some parts of Boise, the detached garage to ADU conversion is becoming really common. But people still drive (the bus routes are limited in scope and time), so street parking can get CRAMPED. And they recently eased restrictions on ADUs, so it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.
Luckily, a lot of them are AirBnBs, and the perceptions are shifting and more people look to motels first, so it may get better.
I wouldn’t say 2 or more car garages are common in SF. I’ve spent way too much time in that city in moneyed people’s houses, and IME you can get 1 car garages for “cheap” ($2-$5m) in a desirable area, maybe 2 if you’re willing to live way out. I’ve never once seen a house with more than 2 spots, even with coworkers and bosses worth 9 figures.
The inflation rate is understated. In order to stop inflation, we really need 10-15% interest rates. Enough to match the real rate of inflation people are seeing in terms of rent, groceries, new car prices, ect. while ignoring the hedonic adjustments. That will entail its own set of negative consequences, but those consequences are the natural result of the policy that has existed since 2008. The money printer has been running non-stop since in order to delay the consequences of the crash that happened, and the events of 2020 have only multiplied those same consequences.
In the long term, Ron Paul will be proven entirely correct about U.S. monetary policy.
You do realize that a 10-year bond at 10% would effectively bankrupt us, right? Everything would switch to the Yuan.
The USA is a bankrupt country that hasn’t accepted it yet. It has been such since at least 2008. The other route is to hyperinflate the currency to worthlessness.
$35 trillion of national debt is simply not manageable.
The Yuan has its own set of problems not entirely different from the U.S. dollar’s problems. If it takes over, don’t count on it to last. Most of which stem from the lack of being honest money. All fiat currencies that aren’t backed by tangible resources are in the same boat worldwide. The money printer in the USA as well as in the BRICS and EU, continues to go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
I agree for the most part. However, there is another way around hyperinflation. It’s called culling the (government) herd and stop paying for dumb shit like wars that have nothing to do with us, and stop paying off bills for people that chose their own debt. It’s one thing to help out the disabled and elderly, it’s another to pay off the debts of secondary education that effectively doesn’t mean all that much, only to make sure that those Colleges (businesses) still get their coin.
We are in the squeaky wheel era of government, and we haven’t learned our lessons from the past to ignore the squeaking.
The war in Ukraine (to which you’re obliquely referring) doesn’t even come close to a top expenditure. Most of the stuff we’ve sent them are things that are 2 or more generations old and would have been thrown out anyway. Student loan forgiveness is, of course, a cynical handout to those that don’t really need it ahead of an election year, but even that doesn’t make a dent.
If you really want to reduce spending, you have to jump on the entitlements grenade which neither the left nor the right have the balls to do.
entitlements is something close to 2/3 of government expenditures. Crazy stuff.
Ukraine is certainly one of them, but there are many more conflicts going on that are picking at our “snack jar” of disposable income, when it turns out our garage door is about to fall off the hinges.
But, we do make one hell of a missle and tank.
Also, I believe (I’d have to look it up to be sure, but it’s almost lunch) that the student loan reprieve is closer to a $50b than $1b.
The big advantage the U.S. has right now is that it’s *still* the safest place to put your money despite the shenanigans of running the money printer and bailing out colleges. We suck less.
And the dollar is backed by the massive US military, so it’s unlikely to lose all value in the foreseeable future.
The USA isn’t even close to bankrupt lol. Or do you think the US does not have 35 trillion dollars in assets? And only 25% of that debt is owned by foreign countries, most of it is owed to ourselves making it debt on paper more than an threat to our economy.
We do need to deal with our deficit, but that’s difficult when one party seems to think we can have a first world country without actually paying for it, and hypocritically pushes trillion dollar tax cuts while selling fear about the US debt.
Backing currency with gold or other finite tangible resources is problematic as population and productivity grow and the resources don’t.
That said, the amount of borrowing going on and the regular military budget (excluding Ukraine, just the regular stuff) are crazytown.
Ron Paul has been wrong about everything his entire career. And inflation is driven by more than monetary policy.
You know what is much much worse than inflation? Deflation. And that’s what 10-15% interest rates in the current economy could trigger.
For 30 million? I would say it better fit about 500 cars. I only need a 10×10 cell to sleep in.