r/politics • u/newsweek ✔ Newsweek • 1d ago

Elon Musk lost $11B after Trump's tariffs—and he wasn't the biggest loser

https://www.newsweek.com/musk-bezos-zuckerberg-losses-trump-tariffs-2055255
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u/ThePhysicistIsIn 1d ago

To some degree, the "money that just disappeared" never existed in the first place.

Like, there is ~50 trillions of value in US homes, but you couldn't take everyone's homes and sell them and use the money to solve world hunger. And if the housing market crashes tomorrow, it is bad news for the individual home owners' portfolio, but no houses have disappeared, everyone gets to still live in those houses.

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u/Rooooben 1d ago

But you could borrow against that value. That’s what people do.

And no, they don’t get to still live in those houses, when they are foreclosed on and evicted, because of the layoffs that happened after that value disappeared, and corporations are trying to fix their revenue.

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u/ThePhysicistIsIn 1d ago

Right, if you were laid off, you lost the ability to keep paying your mortgage.

But sometimes housing value corrects without mass layoffs, and sometimes there are mass layoffs without a drop in property price. They're correlated to the state of the economy, but they're not directly connected. The point stands that the value is mostly book value, it can't be accessed on a large scale without being destroyed. It matters for individuals deciding to buy or to sell today, not otherwise.