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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

#211

Post by mdpopescu »

danso wrote: post #19
geofft wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?

The "whole premise of capitalism" is that the economy and its profits are privately controlled. Whether that leads to building "useful things" for a country or the world is not a requirement.

The only way to make a profit in a privately controller economy is to show people that your things / services are so useful that they are willing to give you money for them.

As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#212

Post by pas »

zepearl wrote: post #199
skj wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make it wrong.

Whenever I hear those names I personally link immediately Elon Musk to "genuinely enthusiastic & a bit crazy", but in the case of Larry Ellison I get only "dark side"-thoughts... .

I'd still want to know his opinions. With great knowledge comes great power, and thus responsibility.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#213

Post by cat199 »

sanderjd wrote: post #100
ryanmarsh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It’s not surprising at all how emotional and “short” sighted people are being about Ellison because “Oracle sucks”. I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not h…

It seems to me that you just made the argument for the opposition. We know that Ellison was successful in a business that involved selling big contracts to a small number of purchasers spending from a budget of company or taxpayer money. But that's not Tesla's business. Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots of similar competitors? Maybe? But he d…

> Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots of similar competitors?

are you buying a battery-backed electric power storage substation?

didn't think so..

tesla isn't just about cars

which isn't to say i like musk or ellison

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#214

Post by foxfired »

pastor_elm wrote: post #151
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #28

Yup, that Larry Ellison. I'm not sure whether this is good news or not.

He invented the cloud

Or didn't invent the cloud:

Exhibit A -> "What the hell is cloud computing?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#215

Post by dotancohen »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #196

In my eyes, Larry Ellison on the Tesla BoD just damaged the brand of Tesla by an order of magnitude.

My thoughts exactly. I've lusted over the Model S for years, and the minute that they become available in my country I'll be the first in line.

But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a company that uses its products. They are extremely abusive.

For the first time in Tesla's history, with all its obstacles and negative press, I now fear for the brand reputation.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#216

Post by martythemaniak »

azhenley wrote: post #16

A lot of people seem negative about this. Can someone explain why? Are there any implications I should expect (as a Tesla owner and stockholder)?

This is just the weekly Tesla hate thread. You will see this sort of negativity around essentially every Tesla-related news item. It's actually an improvement over the near-daily nature of these threads from earlier this year.

To answer your question, this changes nothing. He's been a major shareholder for a long time and now he's 1 out of 11 board members.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#217

Post by crankylinuxuser »

mdpopescu wrote: post #210
geofft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-st…

> 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.

Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways".

Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works.

We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it?

All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving.

It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview.

Because when I read

> "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!")"

I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#218

Post by barney54 »

Traster wrote: post #101
jp555 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they did, it doesn’t mean they’re going away. GM went bankrupt in 2009, still here.

The assets would definitely survive in some form, but would anyone think that Tesla brand owned by Ford is really Tesla? I don't think so. Almost certainly a default would result in a purchase from one of the traditional car manufacturers that wants to destroy a potential rival, scoop up battery IP and get a hard start on automation. Ford even have the cash on hand to refinance the debt.

What is the Tesla battery IP that matters? They don’t make the batteries, Panasonic does. https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/07/31/tesla-gi...

What Ford or one of the other large automakers bring to the table is a track record of mass producing cars. That’s not something Tesla has done yet.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#219

Post by ElijahLynn »

throwaway98121 wrote: post #206
ElijahLynn wrote: post #196

In 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.

Well, one thing that got me about him was his acquisition of Sun Microsystems to acquire the patents on Java to sue Google for Android.

Which Sun didn't have any issue with Google about the use of Java for Android. But Larry did. He saw $$$.

Maybe I am wrong about the above but that is my impression of what I have read. Open to corrections.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#220

Post by sanderjd »

nindalf wrote: post #137
sanderjd wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've stopped being annoyed by seemingly repetitive comments. On any given topic there is always both a gtirloni who has heard it a million times and a warent who never has.

Oh I love repetitive comments. Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.

This is a great example of what I'm talking about. I'm pretty certain that concept put in those words was new to me in some HN comment at some point, and I'm even more certain it was already tiresome to tons of people by that time. This happens all the time.
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