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Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

nytimes.com

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is tesla the future? they are still figuring out how to reliably manufacture a very small number of stagnant models, whereas every other car manufacturer iterates on multiple models every year, and it all works like clockwork and yields very reliable and safe cars. my kia optima sxl is much less than 50% of a tesla and yet has a higher fit and finish and is more safe.

`every other car manufacturer iterates on multiple models every year` - that's not actually true. Every other manufacturer maintains the same base for their cars and simply swaps small details around to make it look like you are getting a different car. You are not actually getting anything radically different every year; not even every decade really.

Car companies work on a new model around every 7/8 years with a minor change at the halfway point. Essentially every decade most of the cars gets a complete overhaul.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#93

These articles about Elon are interesting to me because Tesla could not have become such a valuable car company in such a short time if it wasn't for Elon, and that includes his personality. Yet, many couch investors would prefer to have a CEO who is stable, boring and predictable. People want to put their money in for steady long-term returns, and not worry. Tesla is doing wild things which are causing crazy growth,…

I'm going to push back against this narrative, because it seems a lot of the "let Elon be Elon" arguments are neatly encapsulated in this line: Tesla is doing wild things which are causing crazy growth, but also crazy panic. But the critics of Musk's behavior would respond, I think correctly, that there is a categorical difference between "wild things which cause crazy panic because they are high risk with high upsid…

I liked Musk because he seemed to play the engineering adventurer card. Not willing to submit to the average market opinion on how to do things. For instance Model S got more safety and performance than many cars. It started to fade with Autopilot which was way more gimmicky and rushed than the rest. The latest period was just chaos.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#94
Elon Musk is not crazy or some super genius calculating 20 steps ahead of everyone else - he is simply a man who does not like being pushed around and being told what to do. I'm no psychologist, but having read his biography and having dealt with many adults who were bullied as kids, it makes perfect sense from my experience as to why he is reacting the way he's reacting. I suspect that the perception (be it real or imagined) of being picked on, (by the SEC, by his board, by the short sellers, etc. etc.) might simply be too painful for him to allow any rational ( i.e. ego-free) thoughts to win out. This and his inflated ego (a lethal combination) may be the reason he's digging his heels in.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#95
Who cares what these dead media companies have to say? Journalism in the 21st century has a glut of integrity, passion, and ethics. Elon Musk has an outsized amount of every one of those traits. I don't want to hear a snippet of a heated board room conversation; I don't want to read a rumor about who the next chairman of Tesla could be; I don't want to read any sanctimonious, scowling & contemptuous trash about men so great it boggles the mind. Wake up, 21st century San Fransisco dwelling technophiles & web developers: We have an enormous glut of people willing to stand up for truth, freedom, and greatness in America, and maybe we should all cover for our great men when they misstep instead of sneering about their personal lives or "erratic behaviour". We are a country of individuals and we would do well to police our criticisms of the rare individual who can do the thing that needs to be done - accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.

Comments on "the cult of Musk" or speculations be damned.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#97
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon musk brings entropy, with entropy comes higher reward.

Except its important to get the direction of causation right. Trying to achieve higher rewards generally necessitates risk taking. Desire for the first leads to the second. High entropy events, by themselves, do not necessitate greater possibilities of higher rewards. There is no great benefit to sticking your face in a fan, as high entropy as that might be. So the question comes, has Elon lately been doing things hi…

I think everyone is in agreement that we'd like the good parts of Elon Musk without any of the parts that have got him into trouble recently, but that's kind of a difficult ask. It also seems a lot less rude than confronting a CEO of a declining company with the question "Why are you so good at deflecting bad media and so bad at innovating?"

Please let me know if you can find any perfectly behaved geniuses with a track record of pioneering multiple world-changing companies/technologies.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#98
post #69

Is Elon Musk really an asset that Tesla needs to hold onto? I'll admit that he's a great salesman; but he's also a spoiled child who throws tantrums when he doesn't get his way. If Tesla wants to be taken seriously as a car company -- rather than as a maker of toys for people who have too much money on their hands -- they might well be better off calling his bluff.

Musk sure sounds a lot like a younger Steve Jobs. Maybe he needs to leave then come back?

When Jobs left Apple, he was 30; when he returned, he was 42. Musk is 47. If he needs time away from Tesla to ’grow up’, he better do it fast.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#99
post #75

There used to be a sort of tradition that you started with the inexperienced startup CEO. Then, when the business became large, the board got someone with experience running a big company. That's changed in recent years. Page and Brin are back running Google, Jobs came back to Apple, and Zuckerberg is still in charge at Facebook. On the other hand, Uber got rid of their startup guy and got a manager type, who has bee…

> That's the Tesla situation. Product is OK. Customers are enthusiastic. Production is in trouble. Cost and labor hours per car are way too high. The financial situation isn't good. That's usually when the board and stockholders put in an operations-oriented CEO. And in doing so risk that the company becomes another GE-like corporate which is no longer able to innovate and inspire people. Things have changed. Markets…

> Innovation cycles have become much shorter.

Yes, but you need to build up a world-wide customer support network that is willing to learn these new innovations that fast at a modest rate.

If Tesla would stay in the performance car segment, then the company doesn't need to scale the customer service that much. If you smash a bit your McLaren, you accept that only a handful of companies can fix it. But when you want to roll out and dominate the average joe market with the Model 3, you need to be able to sell it with a moderate maintenance cost. That can only happen if the local car mechanics are able to fix it, but this unlikely happen if every new model comes with radical changes.

Re: Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit

#100
It's so creepy that there is a Twitter account out there which has publicly confessed to be intentionally spreading hostile news for the purpose of feeding confirmation bias as a social media experiment and that the stories they are pushing are turning out to manipulate the news cycle to the extent that it does. It's actually disgusting, how successful they are.

The entire movement is so suspect when you look at its loudest people. A bunch of Twitter accounts, many of them intentionally anonymized with troll names, and photoshopped images of Elon Musk as their profile picture. Hundreds upon hundreds of retweets of each other. Then mocking nearly every Musk twitter post with whataboutisms to drag audience to their filter bubble.

Here is raw data about Tesla sales compared to the sales of every other electric vehicle manufacturer for the last several years:

- https://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/

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