I do like overthinking. This article is just my ramblings about Elon Musk and his actions lately, merely me overthinking with a keyboard. Maybe most of the ideas I will write will be common knowledge, and perhaps some of them you will read here the first.
I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did while writing it. Let's start.
In the last few days, while following what's happening with the US Stock market and GME stocks(the war against short sellers), Elon Musk tweeted "Gamestonk!" which created a positive response in the WSB community. But why did he?
Well, if we go back to 2018, back to the struggling days of Tesla, he was having lots of issues with short sellers himself. Tesla was lots of problems with production and scaling departments. The quality of the cars was not on par with anything that European counterparts. While not knowing about the short selling, I remember reading about "how tesla will fail, how it's going to get bankrupt soon" articles, one after another. All from reputable sources. All from respected writers. I believed in those articles, I repeated what's written back then, and I was in the wrong by doing so.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018
Around the same time, Ellon tweeted, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.", which looked like a joke, but some took it seriously. The falling stock raised a bit, and by doing so, crashed lots of short-sellers. I didn't know this part until I began reading more about short sellers and GME. But I did notice the general sentiment of what's published started changing rapidly. Most articles were cheering how the HEPA filters made the air in developing countries more breathable, how the cars are sealed to the point that drivers can use them as boats during floods, the list goes on. Self-driving became "less impossible". There was even more evidence for people following him regularly, "Oh and uh short burn of the century comin soon. Flamethrowers should arrive just in time.", "Short shorts coming soon to Tesla merch" etc. No need to go further though, let's focus on what happened next.
Tesla became one of the stock market's rising stars and solved most production/scaling issues. No need to talk about this anymore. But there is still a trial pending for the entire saga delayed due to covid. I am not expecting anything negative to come out of it anymore, as he is the wealthiest person on the planet right now.
He paid 40 million and gave up being the chairman of Tesla for three years to become the wealthiest person alive. Mad respect.
At this point, I and probably most of the world learning about short-selling started disliking the idea of driving potential to the ground for a relatively small amount of monetary gain. Or more like, we just learned how disgusting it is, now.
But his hate is probably on a different level, very understandably.
So let's get back to the tweets and start from the "Gamestonk!" again. I didn't care much about what he tweeted, but the way he tweeted it in a "meme" format made me think quite a lot.
His tweets always impacted trading, as at this point, the man became a trusted source. And what do the large players in the trading business(short-sellers, hedge funds) do? They try to analyze everything which can affect the market faster than everyone else. Earlier knowledge about what will happen gives them an advantage in trading as they can act more quickly than the rest.
I imagine the people trying to analyze the market with data science magic examine the sh*t out of his tweets. Probably there are hundreds(if not tens of thousands) of bots buying anything he mentions. And it's effortless to create a bot that will long "Gamestop" stocks as soon as his tweets include anything related to "Gamestop". But can an algorithm detect "Gamestonk!" will be pushing people to buy "Gamestop" shares? I am not so sure. Maybe some can, but most of them definitely can't.
Of course, after the tweet, many more bought GME stocks. The next day others jumped the wagon and drove the price up 300%. Crazy. But I believe most of the winners "humans" who followed him, due to the simple tricks. The tweet's time was also pretty much "weaponized," as he tweeted that minutes before the stock exchanges shut down. It seemed like humans won against bots by his actions.
So why update the bio?
Moving on the next day, out of the blue, he changed his bio into "#bitcoin". Why would you change your bio instead of tweeting it out? The same reason. Most bots are going to react incredibly fast to a tweet and buy bitcoins before humans can. The bitcoin price raised sharply before dropping back to a similar level. Step by step,
People following Elon send their orders.
Bots following news articles read about the event and send new buy orders.
Hopefully, people following Elon sold those bitcoins back at a premium.
Is this Overthinking?
The last paragraphs were probably just my imagination, yet I would believe if he spent some time thinking about how to conjure those results. Due to his hatred towards short-sellers. More straightforward explanations would be,
He didn't want to get sued by saying telling people to buy "Gamestop". Instead, he tweeted the meme'd version "Gamestonk!"
He is following the suit with @jack, nothing special.
So my speculations might be wrong in every way, but let's talk about what we can learn from my "overthinking".
Getting the upper hand against data science
I think this is a crucial subject moving towards the 21st century. We already have models that can infer sentiment from articles, models that can find the verbs, subjects, nouns in sentences, models that can generate very human-like texts.
Soon (maybe right now), we can easily imagine that none of the public announcements will be read by humans first. Insider trading will become the only way to get a better position than an AI following the same sources. Insider trading between humans. Yet, we have to figure out a medium that is relatively inaccessible for machines. Business language is maybe the worst option here as its structure is easy to digest. We need to have an incredibly chaotic medium. We need to have a medium that inherently carries no data, but it is understandable for humans due to an always-changing context. Always changing context is essential because it's hard for an AI to learn. In this format, we need to combine text, images, videos, generating waves of contexts that will replace the meaning of those messages every few months.
Hello Meme's
There we go; in this thought train, I ended up concluding using memes for communication will be, at least for now, a way of human-human public knowledge sharing without an AI or a simple bot eavesdropping on what's going on.
I found the idea of using memes as a solution for encryption against machines quite funny. Maybe the machines in Matrix would've never won if humans utilized memes as a weapon against them :).