In my eyes, Larry Ellison on the Tesla BoD just damaged the brand of Tesla by an order of magnitude.
Larry's first day with the board: "Let's introduce audits to catch drivers tuning their cars!"
Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
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Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#202Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember Larry very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.” [0] Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-e…
> But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything. To be fair, in my mind this is the one most common trait I find in successful entrepreneurs and leaders. I've seen leaders who I didn't think were particularly bright, or extroverted, or empathic, but man, did they not get stressed out by obstacles that came in their way. They either sidestepped them or overcame them, but they did not dwell on them and let t…
I agree but I'd like to add that in my opinion "successful" is probably quite risky to use in general, meaning that there are multiple levels (e.g. successful for yourself, for the company/government, for the investors/people, for the future maintainability, etc...) and timelines (e.g. now, in 1 year, in 10 years, ...). For example Stephen Elop can probably be considered "successful" as having managed to be CEO of Nokia for a while, but not the same could be said for the company itself (not sure about its investors)?
In any case I think that it would be safe to say that sociopaths have at least the embedded advantage of being "quicker", as they most probably ponder less than other people about in/direct consequences of their actions.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#203After his failure, as virtually the only Theranos board member with a high-tech background, to provide any good advice on tech development to Elizabeth Holmes, this seemed incredible to me. Then, I read this in the statement: "Larry is also a big believer in Tesla’s mission, having purchased 3 million shares earlier this year." So, Musk was required to introduce more outside independence to his board, per agreement w…
Owning shares is not a negative. It's a positive. It means that he's more aligned with shareholders than with management. Boards full of non-shareholders tend to prioritize the paycheck they get as board members, so they tend to not want to rock the boat or get into conflicts with mangement. Those that are shareholders first tend to have a bigger incentive to confront or fire management if they start doing things tha…
Does this mean that a company should use somebody who owns a lot of shares during bad times (when some drastic measure is needed to bring the company back into profitability), and normal paycheck-people during normal times (to ensure that no big risk is taken without reason)? (genuinely asking)
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#204Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX. And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe? The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich. While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There ar…
Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX are most certainly related. They share engineering teams. Tesla gets a big bump in the public’s eye with SpaceX’s accomplishments. People call Teslas “a spaceship for Earth” and there’s zero ambiguity about why that specific comparison is made. It’s pretty much the definition of a mutually beneficial relationship.
They really don't share anything except for Elon.. which is both great and drives me nuts.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#206In my eyes, Larry Ellison on the Tesla BoD just damaged the brand of Tesla by an order of magnitude.
Can you elaborate why?
Edit: reading others’ posts about him in this thread. Okay, wow. Not sure how accurate this information is though.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#207Yup, that Larry Ellison. I'm not sure whether this is good news or not.
Bad news for customers, good news for investors?
I think that it's good for Tesla & investors: Elon's discovery & revolutionizing era is over (at least for a while), now it's time for consolidation & stabilization & optimization etc... .
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#208My brain replaced "Ellison" with "Wall", and until the first paragraph I was terribly excited....then not so much.
Tesla cars badly need a perl 6 API.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both Ellison and Musk are vying for the position of “real life Tony Stark”, I will wager in the next year they will have a major falling out.
It is two very large egos. But, wasn't Ellison a board member for Apple when Steve Jobs was CEO? So apparently he can get along with other big egos pretty well.
Ellison was a very close friend of Jobs. At least as per Jobs biography by Isaacson.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effe…
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange…
As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade.
In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1].
[1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...