271–280 of 414 posts
I for one completely defend him. It must be excruciating getting the self serving type of questions that all boil down to: “how well can I infer you’re doing so I make sure I make more money or lose less money in the next 6 months?” Over and over and over...
If he actually answered it with any new information or to any real degree of satisfaction it wouldn't have been asked so often.
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In the grand scheme of things figuring out how to make model3's faster than they can sell them is a boring problem for Musk and I could imagine how frustrating it must be to have all the banks freaking out as if they're going to miss a fleeting opportunity to sell a bunch of cars. It's like when Nikola Tesla was trying to build worldwide wireless telegraphy but J.P. Morgan just wanted him to make fluorescent lights.…
It may be a "boring" problem, but people aren't just paying for a reservation for nothing, ultimately they are expecting a car. And if there's no indication that they can meet the promises, that's a problem and he shouldn't be promising or giving wild production estimates in the first place. Unless you believe that Musk is selling the ability for people to say they have a reservation. In which case there's no point t…
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If you read my initial comment I started by stating why I have some sympathy for Musk. Having been at the coalface I know the feeling of facing the so-called tough questions. You always have two choices, mumble something that you are aware of the issues and you are giving the issues the highest priority. All available personnel are working around the clock to deal with the issues. The truth though is most of the issu…
Musk's "job" is not fixing technical issues, he has thousands of more competent people for that. His day-to-day job is marketing and making sure his firm gets capital when it runs out yet again. This is him failing at his day job.
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Not answering a couple of questions (to which he should have had the answers) cost him a substantial premium the next time he has to raise. And almost nobody believes that Tesla will not need money again.
Is this speculation, or are you talking about some previous time where Tesla had to pay a lot more to raise after an Elon comment? Also, can you point out who said "Tesla will not need money again"? Elon is always careful to say something like "We will not need to raise money in ". And then he raises money, says he did it because the price was right but it wasn't needed . Shorts accuse him of lying. Rinse, repeat.
As for the second part of your comment:
The Economist wrote that Tesla would have to raise money this year, 2.5 to 3 Billion $.
Elon Musk's response to that:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/984705630106673152
And as far as I can see it has no qualifiers. The complete text of the tweet:
"The Economist used to be boring, but smart with a wicked dry wit. Now it’s just boring (sigh). Tesla will be profitable & cash flow+ in Q3 & Q4, so obv no need to raise money."
Now, that's a pretty strong statement and just like the 5000 vehicles per week production in Q1 that everybody seems to have forgotten about (now it is suddenly good news they do about half that much) it is very much falsifiable. For Elon's sake (and all those employed at Tesla) I hope it works out that way but this could turn out to be a very expensive own goal.
I was on this call. It was extremely cringey/embarrassing to hear Elon dismiss valid questions. At the same time, it was fantastic to see a young, smart, retail investor (Gali from Hyperchange) get to ask so many questions directly to the leadership team. I thought before the call that Gali would get to ask only one question, like the other analysts. He was able to ask almost 10! It was surreal. I was left feeling th…
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Why do you have an expectation that a Q&A about financials should be emotionally exciting?
I don't. I even say this in the post you are replying to.
I don't believe Musk's critics are specifically disagreeing with how boring earnings calls may or may not be. I guess if I expected these calls to be not boring, I would think Musk had made an interesting observation.
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Firstly, this was not some PR event. Musk had large number of people knew what they were talking about wanting to ask tough questions. What Musk is interested in is not relevant. Secondly, Musk can't avoid short term investor questions because unless he answers them, there may be no longer term. This kind of clear avoidance of difficult questions can easily add one percentage point to Tesla's future loans and reduce…
What Musk is interested in is not relevant. Could you explain this statement? It's good to have these kinds of questions but let's not forget the bigger picture. Musk is making a contribution to the world. The Wolf on Wall Street not so much.
This is such a dumb, narrow-minded statement. Musk isn't some angel handing out miracles. He's a businessman, on a business-centric call, and was being rude to other businessmen who are essential to the success of anything he wants to do. This isn't The Wolf of Wall Street, this was Toni Sacconaghi, an extremely credentialed analyst, doing his job. And if you don't think that wall street analysts don't "make a contribution to the world", you need some perspective. Tesla as a company literally would not exist without the funding provided by companies like the ones Toni represents.
If Musk wanted to have a TED talk about how cool the future is, then he should have scheduled that on his own time. This was not that. Posters on HN complain all the time about how they get pulled into meetings and then their time is wasted because their bosses only wanted to talk about irrelevant stuff. That's exactly what happened here, only Musk was the one wasting everyone else's time.
Elon has always seemed to have the attitude of "not everyone should invest in this stock". I find this refreshing. God forbid a CEO do anything except try to drive the share price as high as humanly possible. I don't know if this carries the same weight in a public company, but setting expectations with investors is super important in a startup and prevents a ton of wasted time wrangling investors who don't get the t…
Actually as a CEO he has a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder value.
I think one could say that one's "duty" is more about what is ethically required, however. I tend to think that, ethically, a CEO is required to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't mean that he needs to agree with shareholders about what that means, necessarily, and trading off short-term value for long-term value could be the right call.
I feel like sometimes "caring only about shareholder profits" is some kind of code for being greedy, when I think it's quite the opposite -- it's much greedier to spend your company's money for your own vanity, or to set up your next job, or to do favors for friends -- often the non-profit-maximizing activities a CEO engages in falls into one of these buckets.
It is also completely reasonable to say that it is in the shareholders' best interests that their company act ethically, and in accordance with the law.
Meh. I say, fuck the “analysts”. The dude is on fire. He can afford it. This is as close to the second coming of Steve Jobs as we’re going to get for quite some time. This is rock n roll. I’m just enjoying the show over here: my TSLA position is relatively small.
I have been investing a portion of my paycheck every month for the last three years and never sold TSLA. It's bothering me to see so many high profile departures particularly in finance/accounting groups. And yesterday's conference call was a disaster, I see it as dodging valid questions related to current state of the company and answering open ended interesting questions like "When will Tesla launch its own network…