Monday, May 20, 2019
IN != EN
The $TSLAQ crowd have noted Elon's latest utterance:
Am super appreciative of Tesla shareholders. Will ensure their prosperity in any scenario.
This is a sneaky Clintonian use of language. Devices like credit default swaps supposedly INsure the value of a bond or share. Tesla cultists will (consciously or not) believe that Elon intends to INsure their share value, since he has also made meaningless promises to start an INsurance company. But he didn't say INsure, he said ENsure, which has no legal power and doesn't imply any sort of written policy or device.
Cute.
Classic scams often used similarly tricky phrasing with horse bets or sports bets, forming ambiguous promises about "showing a victory" or "placing all your trust" to mislead suckers into betting on a third or second finish when the fix was really for a first. You think the scammer is speaking in code for privacy. He's not. You lose all your money, and you don't have a legal defense because the scammer didn't literally mislead you.
¶ 11:07 AM 
