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Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

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Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#171

Post by threeseed »

anonAndOn wrote: post #113
threeseed wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management But yet he is still the CEO of Tesla. Just because someone says they want to do something doesn't mean they will.

He's OCD. If he could find somebody else willing to consistently put in 100 hour weeks and drive the ship the way Elon wants , I think he'd let go of the reigns.

There is no evidence that putting in long hours translates to increased productivity or success.

But plenty of evidence that it has a lot of negative consequences.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#172

Post by dragontamer »

caconym_ wrote: post #170
dragontamer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's really good at raising money. Which is a skill. An incredibly useful skill, and arguably more important for someone in the position of CEO. He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla. He's grabbed multiple Billions for SpaceX. Its a totally different skill than his persona identifies with. No one else I know of in the modern market has successfully grabbed as much money from people as he has. --------- Pretty much ever…

So you're essentially saying that if you look at any high-profile success of Tesla or SpaceX, you'll see a result that could have been accomplished by others working in the field for substantially less money? This seems really questionable to me. I see a fair amount of investment in these fields, but nobody else--even companies of comparable vintage, with comparable money on tap--has come close to the success of Musk…

> So you're essentially saying that if you look at any high-profile success of Tesla or SpaceX, you'll see a result that could have been accomplished by others working in the field for substantially less money?

No. You're the one saying that.

What I said was what I said in my above post. Elon Musk is incredibly good at raising money, and leverages this skill to the max in his companies. No one else in the world seems to compare against Elon Musk at generating hype and extracting money from bonds, secondary offerings, and other maneuvers in the modern stock market.

Feel free to disagree with me on this issue, but I have the numbers. The amount that public companies raise from bonds and/or stock offerings is public. I don't feel like digging them up right now, but I'm confident that I can procure the numbers if you push me on that subject.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#173

Post by tluyben2 »

krick wrote: post #96
tluyben2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some early MS company stories.

Gladly. Perhaps you could link some of them?

Google shows enough I guess but things like [0] and [1] but there are quite a few books describing it all in more detail and he has talked about it himself [2] (not only here).

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/peop...

[1] https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2021/01/leadership-styles-a...

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/bill-ga...

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#174

Post by fallingknife »

dragontamer wrote: post #152
bpodgursky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that both of these companies are profitable, right?

You know that Tesla's $1 Billion/quarter profits pales in comparison to Toyota's $7 Billion/quarter, right? And yet, Tesla is "worth more" as a company than Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, GM, and Ford put together. And there are a myriad of long-term issues being put out on display here. Such as the FSD not working (promised "Coast-to-Coast" Full self driving back in 2017). Or the huge uptick in Model3 / Model Y quality…

Are you short the stock?

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#175

Post by dragontamer »

fallingknife wrote: post #174
dragontamer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that Tesla's $1 Billion/quarter profits pales in comparison to Toyota's $7 Billion/quarter, right? And yet, Tesla is "worth more" as a company than Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, GM, and Ford put together. And there are a myriad of long-term issues being put out on display here. Such as the FSD not working (promised "Coast-to-Coast" Full self driving back in 2017). Or the huge uptick in Model3 / Model Y quality…

Are you short the stock?

No. Are you long the stock? Kind of an odd question to ask.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#176

Post by sunstone »

rebelos wrote: post #8

I've always found the reports of his behind the scenes behavior and its stark contrast with his public persona to be incredibly disturbing, because it paints a picture of someone with psychopathic tendencies. I suspect there's something really dark with him that originates in his childhood (suffered through horrific bullying and a hellishly awful father).

Personally these stories are just as likely to be hit pieces orchestrated by competitors that want to slow musk down. If he was really as you suggest he would have a hard time recruiting world class talent such as Jim Keller.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#177

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

lateobserver wrote: post #149
throwaway98797 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet where would society be without them?

Yes, the amount of ingratitude you have to see after changing the world. "You shouted at a person. You said the F word!" If I had to summarize the internet in one feeling, that would be jealousy

Ingratitude? How grateful am I supposed to be for the fact that they get some product here faster than competitors? I'll take a slightly slower world with fewer assholes, thank you very much. The world is still going to change without them.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#178

Post by caconym_ »

dragontamer wrote: post #172
caconym_ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're essentially saying that if you look at any high-profile success of Tesla or SpaceX, you'll see a result that could have been accomplished by others working in the field for substantially less money? This seems really questionable to me. I see a fair amount of investment in these fields, but nobody else--even companies of comparable vintage, with comparable money on tap--has come close to the success of Musk…

> So you're essentially saying that if you look at any high-profile success of Tesla or SpaceX, you'll see a result that could have been accomplished by others working in the field for substantially less money? No. You're the one saying that. What I said was what I said in my above post. Elon Musk is incredibly good at raising money, and leverages this skill to the max in his companies. No one else in the world seems…

> No. You're the one saying that.

I disagree.

Your first claim was that Musk is a bad engineer whose poor technical leadership verges on self-sabotage. I asked why, then, are his companies so successful? To which you responded that he is good at raising money, implying that his companies have succeeded primarily because he raised a lot of money for them. Since you previously criticized his technical leadership, the implication is that his companies succeed on the back of this money-raising ability despite his technical leadership.

Can you please explain how else I am supposed to reconcile your claims about Musk's strengths and weaknesses as a leader wrt. his companies' singular success per my first comment in this subthread?

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#179

Post by lamontcg »

belltaco wrote: post #83
luffapi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t funny to call a guy trying to rescue trapped children a “pedo”. That was very public bullying. He says a lot of stupid and hostile stuff. I’m surprised people found his public persona incongruent with the reports of abuse.

>It wasn’t funny to call a guy trying to rescue trapped children a “pedo” That guy first told Elon to stick his small submarine up his own ass, so maybe he shouldn't have told "a guy trying to rescue trapped children" to sodomize himself with a very large object?

That submarine really was a bad design and a distraction from the rescue effort. He swooped in knowing zero about cave diving and produced something that only worked in a pool demo. He could have instead offered to help, quietly behind the scenes, and asked the team if could be of assistance, but he went internet-celebrity mode and splashed all his showerthoughts in real time all over twitter. That was attention-whoring behavior.

Re: Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

#180

Post by dragontamer »

caconym_ wrote: post #178
dragontamer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you're essentially saying that if you look at any high-profile success of Tesla or SpaceX, you'll see a result that could have been accomplished by others working in the field for substantially less money? No. You're the one saying that. What I said was what I said in my above post. Elon Musk is incredibly good at raising money, and leverages this skill to the max in his companies. No one else in the world seems…

> No. You're the one saying that. I disagree. Your first claim was that Musk is a bad engineer whose poor technical leadership verges on self-sabotage. I asked why, then, are his companies so successful? To which you responded that he is good at raising money, implying that his companies have succeeded primarily because he raised a lot of money for them. Since you previously criticized his technical leadership, the i…

> Your first claim was that Musk is a bad engineer whose poor technical leadership verges on self-sabotage.

Did you read the article that this thread is under? All I said earlier was just a summary of the points made in the article.

If you think the article is factually wrong, we can start with that if you like. What part of the article is incorrect in your opinion? (Alternatively: If you think I made a bad summary, we can work off of that as well. I am prone to oversimplifying things and maybe writing in a misleading fashion by accident. In case I made an error in my summary, I apologize in advance)

EDIT: A lot of my example came from these two paragraphs from the original article:

> Adding additional assembly lines, especially unautomated ones, would require many more workers on the car than originally planned. In meetings, Musk lost track of the numbers. He kept talking about having around 30,000 employees, when in fact the head count with outside contracts had grown to more than 40,000. (Musk’s attention was said to sometimes wander after the start of budget presentations.) Deepak Ahuja, the returned CFO, finally had to gently confront Musk with the fact that the company now had many more people.

> Musk didn’t take it well. It was the kind of detail that he latched on to, as if it crystallized a bigger issue, namely that Tesla’s cost structure wasn’t working. The plan had been for Tesla to break even on a rate of 2,500 Model 3s a week. But the added manual labor was jacking up the cost. Ahuja’s new calculations that spring didn’t have the company breaking even at 5,000 a week. Musk began to freeze spending, including a halt to plans to dramatically increase the size of service and delivery centers across North America. Musk wanted to slash jobs as quickly as they could.

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