251–260 of 414 posts
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Jeffrey Skilling had the same approach too. In fact, he was even bolder than Musk because he not only evaded an obviously mean-spirited question, but he called out the investor as an "asshole". You can listen to the excerpt at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSK0v0vTgXA
Maybe the CEO of Enron currently serving a prison sentence is not an ideal role model.
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> Elon has always seemed to have the attitude of "not everyone should invest in this stock". This is financial suicide for the company. TSLA needs more money this year or next year. Losing $1 Billion per quarter means he is relying on his shareholders each time he raises another round of equity. The $1.7+ Billion to build the Gigafactory was from the Stock Market ( https://electrek.co/2016/05/25/tesla-tsla-stock-offe…
Not really. Attracting the right kind of investors is more important to him than attracting all the investors. There are folks with dollars who can stomach TSLA, and there are folks who can not. Some might argue that it's better for the company overall (especially in the longer term) to attract the former and ignore the latter. The latter will generate a ton of noise, and cause great instability in the stock price be…
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Has he? They still deliver less cars than Henry Ford did in the 1930s.
That's interesting. In 2017 Trek manufactured more than 350 different models of bicyle[0]. I'm not sure how that reflects on Tesla. Tesla is not manufacturing bicycles. Nor are they manufacturing Model As in the 1930s automobile market. [0] https://archive.trekbikes.com/us/en/2017
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Not really. Attracting the right kind of investors is more important to him than attracting all the investors. There are folks with dollars who can stomach TSLA, and there are folks who can not. Some might argue that it's better for the company overall (especially in the longer term) to attract the former and ignore the latter. The latter will generate a ton of noise, and cause great instability in the stock price be…
Interesting proposition: deflate your stock value which makes the stock more accessible to risk-tolerant investors, while shedding the sort of nervous investor you don't want.
Unless Musk has a plan to get money from somewhere else?
Not that it's going to happen. But Apple is sitting on ~$270b of cash (1). And is run by a guy in Tim Cook that is a world class operator and fulfillment guy. And who has been criticized for lacking vision :) We can dream right? (1) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/apple-q2-2018-earnings-heres...
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The purpose of the call was to serve investors. Musk should have answered their concerns. Normally investors listen forward-looking statements from CEO, but Musk has failed all his projections so many times that they are worthless. He says that he don't need to ask more money this year. Investors look at the numbers and don't believe it. He should give something useful that helps investors to asses the risk on their…
If you read my initial comment I started by stating why I have some sympathy for Musk. Having been at the coalface I know the feeling of facing the so-called tough questions. You always have two choices, mumble something that you are aware of the issues and you are giving the issues the highest priority. All available personnel are working around the clock to deal with the issues. The truth though is most of the issu…
Elon has always seemed to have the attitude of "not everyone should invest in this stock". I find this refreshing. God forbid a CEO do anything except try to drive the share price as high as humanly possible. I don't know if this carries the same weight in a public company, but setting expectations with investors is super important in a startup and prevents a ton of wasted time wrangling investors who don't get the t…
Which is not true. Investors want to know about the risks, in detail, because then they can make informed choices. Maybe they'll adjust how much they invest, or look for offsetting investments (other companies or financial instruments that would go up if Tesla goes down), or do any of dozens of other things. But they can't do that if they don't get accurate information about the company, which is what Musk is supposed to provide.
Being bombastic and arrogant instead of providing accurate information might be good PR in certain circles (like HN), but Musk has, well, literally any other venue he's ever spoken in as a place to be bombastic and arrogant. This is the venue where he's supposed to be actually honest with investors, not the venue to be fake-honest through statements like "not everyone should invest in this" (gee, Elon, that's never been true of any other company in history... oh wait).
What a weird call. Especially the callout of the diamler CEO. Elon says that the diamler CEO does not understand physics "He doesn't know much about physics. I know him. I'd be happy to engage in a physics discussion with him. I actually studied physics in college." Wiki says otherwise: "... studied electrical engineering from 1971 to 1976 at the University of Karlsruhe; he graduated as an engineer. He completed his…
Engineering students are usually required to study physics.