291–300 of 377 posts
"Then he got in a Tesla Model S and drove himself to the airport. En route, Mr. Musk typed his fateful message." Don't text while driving. This going private thing is a strange idea. Sell Tesla to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund? The one dedicated to keeping oil a viable industry? Does he want Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as a boss? That makes no sense. Softbank might make sense. Part of Musk's problem seems to be "O…
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Saudi Arabia has the whole Vision 2030 plan in motion. The general thrust is they want to diversify the country away from being a petrostate. The headline numbers for state investment in renewables are nothing to scoff at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/saudi-ara... I can’t find the link right now, but Bloomberg did a short ~30 minute documentary 4-5 years ago on Saudi efforts to build a biofuel r…
> Saudi Arabia has the whole Vision 2030 plan in motion. The general thrust is they want to diversify the country away from being a petrostate. So the short-sellers are Big Oil shills, but selling out to the Saudis is okay (if you ignore human rights atrocities and all the oil)?
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Underrated comment here. There is little to be gained and a ton to be lost with such a casual, public forum. If anyone in a leadership position thinks “I should tweet this!”, the default should be waiting 24 hours before making a final decision and even in that case the answer should be “no”.
Would you wait 24 hours before tweeting about that new car you just bought? The thing with people in Elon's position is that the gravity of their situation becomes normalized. They're regular people doing regular things from their own perspective. For Elon he doesn't put much thought into his tweets because for him, saying something that might impact the stock price is a pretty normalized. It happened recently with p…
"Then he got in a Tesla Model S and drove himself to the airport. En route, Mr. Musk typed his fateful message." Don't text while driving. This going private thing is a strange idea. Sell Tesla to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund? The one dedicated to keeping oil a viable industry? Does he want Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud as a boss? That makes no sense. Softbank might make sense. Part of Musk's problem seems to be "O…
Musk may have made the biggest mistake of his career with that single tweet. According to rumors, Tesla's internal legal team has begun to calculate damages; possible impact from potential investor lawsuits apparently surpasses $1 billion. https://twitter.com/CGasparino/status/1030176495631839232
Pity that we've structured our world such that one tweet can so damage such clever companies as Tesla and maybe SpaceX.
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The article did suggest that some of his weird behaviour might have been a side effect of using Ambien to sleep.
Sanofi's tweet reference the Rosanne situation seems relevant: https://twitter.com/sanofius/status/1001824999496404992?lang...
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The moralizing is unwarranted. Tesla, for example, happened when it did because of several convergent phenomena: 1) Increasingly more expensive gas and more rigorous fuel-consumption standards. 2) Massive increase in lithium ion battery production from consumer electronics; 3) A willingness of VCs to bankroll years of massive losses; 4) A federal program of offering massive subsidies to electric cars. These things di…
1) Oil was pretty expensive since 2005. 2) Everyone could capitalize on that. 3) Existing big car companies could finance R&D themselves. 4) According to Wikipedia, incentives started around 2011, way after Tesla was funded and probably before other car manufacturers started moving. The fact remains that none of the existing car manufacturers decided to even try to compete with Tesla until it was painfully obvious th…
You're just completely wrong on the chronology.
The federal tax credits were in place for the 2009 tax year: https://www.tesla.com/blog/tax-incentives-why-roadster-costs.... The Roadster was released in late 2008 (only 150 units shipped in 2008). Almost all of Tesla's capital raise came after 2010: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2018/04/25/a-brief-h....
> The fact remains that none of the existing car manufacturers decided to even try to compete with Tesla until it was painfully obvious that Tesla's going to "make it" (i.e. Model S) and that consumers love their electric cars.
Again, your chronology is completely wrong. By the time the Model S came out, GM had already been selling the Chevy Volt for almost two years. And throughout both cars' run, the Chevy Volt has been selling at approximately the same volume as the Model S (both car sold 110-130k units through the end of 2017). The Nissan Leafs also came out in 2010, and more Leafs had been sold as of the beginning of 2018 than total Tesla vehicles.
To recap: other car manufacturers (GM and Toyota) were first to market with EVs, in the late 1990s. They were also first to market with mainstream popular EVs, in 2010, two years before the Model S.
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A RAV4 would not (did not) capture the public imagination like the Tesla Roadster did. Like it or not, marketing was a huge part of the EV success. And Tesla did that marketing, not the other car companies, which seem culturally incapable of celebrating an EV's performance or coolness.
If marketing EVs as "cool" was "a huge part of the EV success," you'd see other car manufacturers trying to ride that wave by engaging in similar marketing efforts. But you see the opposite. Nissan, Toyota, Chevy, BMW, are all mainly focused on "cute and practical." People here in suburban Maryland don't give a shit about high performance, "cool," cars. But they love RAV4s, and Nissan Rogues, and Honda CR-Vs. Each of…
And of course old ICE designers are incapable of marketing their EVs as anything but cute. That's why they never could have made this market what it is, on their own?
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The moralizing is unwarranted. Tesla, for example, happened when it did because of several convergent phenomena: 1) Increasingly more expensive gas and more rigorous fuel-consumption standards. 2) Massive increase in lithium ion battery production from consumer electronics; 3) A willingness of VCs to bankroll years of massive losses; 4) A federal program of offering massive subsidies to electric cars. These things di…
Your logic does not make sense here. These exact same perks were available to the established automotive industry as well. And on top of all of that they had vastly greater economc resources, infrastructure resources, and even greater talent to draw from as well. It's not like "Musk can have these, but not you guys!" The playing field was not fair, but that's because it was heavily weighted towards established player…
Tesla has done a good job making popular, well-rated cars. But this idea that they were "first" while others were "sitting on their asses" is just completely factually incorrect. Competing car manufacturers dipped their toes into EVs years before Tesla even existed, and everyone rushed to build mainstream EVs in the same 2007-2012 time frame, with Nissan and GM releasing their products first.[1]
[1] Also, I don't see the relevance of the Ford loan? I'm not the one trying to add a moral dimension to the history of EVs. There is none. The relevance of the federal subsidies is not "oh, Tesla took subsidies." But rather that subsidies were necessary to make EVs attractive to consumers. The EV1 was canceled because consumer surveys in the late 1990s showed that you'd have to sell an EV for $28,000 less than a gas car to get consumers to buy it. Rising gas prices closed up a lot of that gap, along with advances in battery technology improving range. But the $10,000 or so in federal and state tax credits also played a huge role in making EVs palatable to consumers.
But, he added, “if you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now.” I think this hits at the crux of the issue around the performance/behaviour of Musk and other leaders of hugely ambitious companies. And I think it highlights the importance of thinking about what kinds of people it will take to lead the…
> Would we rather that Musk had just never founded Tesla and SpaceX, that the world didn't have any companies doing what those companies are trying to do, and that we were left to be content with the previous status quo in the automotive and space industries? People have a serious messiah complex when it comes to Musk. Had he never been born, the automotive industry would still be moving towards electric cars. The fi…
This seems unlikely. Up until Spacex actually landed a rocket, every other launch provider in the world considered it a ridiculous goal. The launch industry was concentrated around 3 groups, none of which had any incentive to innovate. There's Bezos's Blue Origin, but given their anemic development rate, and the fact they were almost certainly heavily influenced by Spacex, I don't see them as a viable alternative in the universe where Musk does not exist.