Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: The DOGE Doubt Trade

Musk skepticism trade

One widely known fact about Elon Musk is that he says a lot of stuff that isn’t true. Most famously, he has a long history of promising that Tesla Inc. is months away from rolling out fully autonomous cars. Here is the Wikipedia page “List of predictions for autonomous Tesla vehicles by Elon Musk,” which goes back to 2013. You could imagine a world in which:

• When Musk says “our cars will drive themselves perfectly with no human oversight in six months,” Tesla’s stock goes up, because that would be good and people believe him; and
• When, six months later, ...