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Comment by matte_black | Hacker News Reader

A vacation of several weeks when you’re a chief? Most certainly. Investors need to know.

> Investors need to know.

Really? That's nonsense. This sentiment is a great example of what's so toxic about the public markets now. Everyone is complaining that so much value creation is happening in private companies going public later - a big reason is because of this idea that investors should care about when one person at a 36,000 person company goes on vacation and that this should move the stock price. Ridiculous. It's distracting noise.

I agree. There's gotta be a limit to how short-term-oriented/short-sighted investors can be. What's next? "Stock plunges when CEO goes to the bathroom"?

"Stock plunges when CEO gets testy on earnings call" -- that was last week's headline.

Don’t want to deal with it? Don’t go public. Zero sympathy. You take the public’s money, you owe them your word.

Maybe if you had hundreds of thousands invested in TSLA and were concerned about their downward spiral you’d think different.

What have they taken that wasn’t offered?

If I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in TSLA it would mean that I had tens of millions elsewhere. But then, my parents are both actuaries and even my groceries are hedged.

This is a company when dozens of senior leadership have left the company. So yes, confirming he's just "on vacation" is relevant as the assumption could be he left too.

Btw - I don't believe he is "on vacation". It's something else, but probably doesn't matter in the end.

To add to this, I think it would be a worse sign for the company if they have a number of people in such a critical path, that they can never take significant time off. If you're doing your job well as a leader (and an organization), you have people who can fill in for you.

Yeah but isn't that something that could be handled between the company and investors, not on a public news site?

> handled between the company and investors

There's no such thing for a public company. It either talks to the board, which represents investors, or to the public, since it is impossible to know who owns shares of a public company.

And in practice, given index funds, most people do.

Okay, not an entirely unreasonable point.

But then that would imply that Tesla has an obligation to make sure third party news outlets report on every holiday taken by every executive. I'm not saying it has to be private information, but why not announce it on their website? Why does the Wall Street Journal have to do it?

> But then that would imply that Tesla has an obligation to make sure third party news outlets report on every holiday taken by every executive.

Public companies have to publicly report any "relevant facts" that could seriously impact the company and the investors. A Senior Vice President of Engineering taking a leave of absence of many weeks (or more, with no end announced) during a major engineering crisis in the company is by all means a relevant fact.

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