Tesla Executive Leaves for Waymo
wsj.com
wsj.com
Waymo has established a multi-year technology advantage over Uber. The best objections to Waymo winning are three-fold:
1) Google doesn't have the user-facing apps - The reality is that Google has a far larger surface area than Uber to consumers. They own Calendar, Maps, Assistant, Android, Gmail and each of these can be entry points into self-driving. "I see you have an appointment in 15 minutes, want me to order you a cab?"
2) Google doesn't have experience operating a physical business - This is something they will have to learn. Google has the choice of partnering/purchasing if needed to build fleet operations companies. There are some unorthodox acquisitions to consider here (Avis?). However, Uber and Lyft do not really have this experience either.
3) Google doesn't have a great track record of incubating new businesses - Amazon has a far stronger track record than Uber of bringing up new lines of business.
With the mismanagement of Uber over the past years, Uber is at significant risk of missing the next technology wave, the way traditional taxi companies missed the last shift. Uber might be holding the equivalent of second-generation taxi medallions as the third generation takes off.
Think about how hard it is for consumer companies to sell to enterprises. Microsoft is terrible at consumer. Google is terrible at enterprise.
This is a much bigger leap than consumer -> enterprise. Uber and Waymo both have a lot to learn here. That’s why I think companies like Avis etc are potential unorthodox acquisitions that we will see.
care to explain more?
There are minor exceptions. Xbox was incubated in a different group and only survived because they kept Microsoft’s crazy ideas out. Even there Xbox is falling behind PS under Satya.
In Enterprise, Microsoft is incredible. Azure is serious competition for AWS. Teams will take share in the slack category. Office is a monster business.
IE reincarnated as Edge
Hotmail -> Outlook (one of the best if not the best)
Windows (Hugely popular. Windows 10 is the best so far)
Skpye (Unreasonable baby cries)
Xbox one, Hololens - going good so far
Tesla could go bankrupt (as GM and others have) or it could be worth a huge amount of money if they crack automation and scale (and there are good technical reasons why they might actually do that... traditional automakers have not exhausted the trade space).
As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, "I am the alpha in this relationship." I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious.
...the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. "I am your wife," I told him repeatedly, "not your employee." "If you were my employee," he said just as often, "I would fire you."
And no matter how many highlights I got, Elon pushed me to be blonder. "Go platinum," he kept saying, and I kept refusing.
If that's how he managed his wife imagine what his execs deal with.
*https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...
>If I'm not in love, if I'm not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy," he told Rolling Stone. "I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. It's not like I don't know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there -- and no one on the pillow next to you. F--. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/elon-musk-personal-...
- Personal lives aren't really a reflection of how someone runs a business.
- He filed for divorce before starting a new relationship. If he'd done worse, presumably we'd be reading about it. That says a lot about his character.
- For his childrens' sake, it's probably better to live independent and stable lives rather than fighting constantly.
- HN is growing large enough that Elon might want to start posting here (as he does on Twitter), so it's probably not too helpful to incite a crowd into jeering at one side of a story.
Is Elon Musk like "doing too much"?
Boring Company Tesla SpaceX Dating Grimes
~ ends gossip territory ~
I wonder if Google offer more pay or a "safer legacy"?
It would be sad to see them go but at the same time it seems like they sorta did their job: they have ignited lust for electric vehicles in the general public. Car manufacturers have responded and are shifting their production plans accordingly.
Since they are a public company you can actually read their financials on the interwebs.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/an-offer-he-cant-refuse....
I'm half tempted to start asking the authors of these pieces to declare any positions they have in the stock.
More importantly, the short interest has been high for ages, and TSLA has received a ton of positive press in that time, as well.
In other words, I really don't think this kind of press silliness is accidental and "random Tesla guy takes vacation" isn't usually a hot news story.
Chief Accountant, Eric Branderiz
CFO, Jason Wheeler
Treasurer and VP of finance, Susan Repo
Sales chief, Jon McNeill
Musk’s cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive
Autopilot lead, Chris Lattner
VP of Autopilot, Jim Keller
Battery executive, Kurt Kelty
Diarmuid O’Connell, VP of business
Matthew Schwall, Director of field performance
People leave companies, no news here.
I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to find someone to replace this role. Is Elon or JB Straubel dead? No? Carry on.
Same thing happened as Waymo started ramping up a year or so ago and nobody was freaking out about that.
I’d rather see 500,000 new homes in (or within 10 minutes of) San Francisco and cars just won’t make that possible.
The idea that Tesla’s purpose is primarily anything but a Musk power play is a testament to the brand and cult of personality he’s worked dutifully to create and maintain.
There’s faith that big rockets somehow are the missing link to living on Mars. Otherwise reasonable people hang up their skepticism in favor of ignoring the evidence that Musk craves money and power, in favor of believing that he has a master plan to save the world. It’s infuriating, and ironically in a few years they’ll be the first screaming bloody murder when he fails to live up to their impossible dreams. Of course by then he’ll have enough money that he won’t need to care, and rockets working LEO rather than Mars.
I guess it’s easier praying that a billionaire has a vision to save us from ourselves without us having to make any sacrifices, than it is to do the hard work of saving ourselves.
We are all flawed characters, some more than others. Yet, we all have our parts to play. I can appreciate his positive influences while admitting he’s probably terrible to work for and has a diasterous personal life.
All of these billionaires are despicable crooks, but at least some of them don’t insist, like Musk, that we constantly applaud them.
I find it amusing that his fans reach for these “law of the jungle, apex predator” metaphors to describe him. He’s like the villain of an Ayn Rand novel who has somehow passed himself off as John Galt.
If Musk had been willing to wait one more year to begin commercial production, the Model 3 could have been amazing. Instead, it's a 90s era Kia with a body and a better-looking body.
Tesla didn’t have a year to wait. That’s why you sell to fanatics and those passionate first. Early adopters are more forgiving. I’ll worry if quality isn’t high after the preorders are cleared out.
Fit and finish is also the most important elements to most buyers. Nobody cares if the skateboard has oodles of praise if the dashboard panels are misaligned and the window makes a squeaking noise and Bob next door has a much cheaper car with a much nicer interior.
Why? It's wasn't because Elon was dicking around with design details, it was hubris.
Keep in mind, this is a company that is _fifteen years old_ now, and still has huge trouble in their bread and butter, manufacturing and logistics. These are all issues that should have been sorted out 5+ years ago _before_ they built out at break-neck speed. But, hey, Elon and the other leaders thought they were smarter than everyone. They thought they, unlike every other car company in history, could just wing it.
EDIT: Can anyone of the downvoters please explain what I said wrong? Are we expecting a ten thousandfold increase in battery production? Or are they not going to use batteries like they would in cars?
Remember the confident predictions a few years back that photovoltaic could never be cost effective? I do, because I was one of them and I was totally wrong. I even knew the trends but somehow felt confident they couldn’t continue.
"If the options fully vest, Musk could wind up owning a 28 percent stake of Tesla, which could be worth nearly $200 billion."
Dude is a brilliant sleight-of-hand artist, he's got all his sycophants focused on the "saving the world" thing, meanwhile he's picking pockets and stealing watches right off their wrists.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17147678/elon-musk-tesla-...
1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/976414452106055680?lang=...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-05-12/the-boring-...
(Pipe dreams, I see what you did there)
The hard part is figuring out how to do it significantly cheaper (10x reduction) than current methods and they haven't presented any data on that yet.
Hyperloop and Loop both suffer from the same basic problem: high fixed infrastructure costs with very low throughputs. Higher speed naturally comes with a penalty to capacity [1], but since capacity (at high speeds) is generally invariant with respect to the size of the train and the number of people per car, you can recuperate a lot of capacity by stuffing as many people as you can. Except Hyperloop and Loop are envisioned with single-digit loading, which is basically PRT-level--trash tier in terms of capacity, particularly with regards to price of infrastructure.
Okay, let's move to boring. The only suggestions for lowering prices are a) making tunnels smaller (i.e., make it incompatible with repurposing for other infrastructure, particularly if the venture turns out to be a white elephant) and b) maybe making the actual boring costs be lower. But boring the tunnels isn't the predominant cost of a tunnel--it only costs about $50 million or so to bore a mile of tunnel. That's about a third the cost of actually building a subway [2]. The big cost is the large underground stations. Okay, you say, you need smaller stations, so those would cost less--but because your capacity is so bad that you're going to need many more stations to make up for the throughput. Having run the numbers for single-occupant vehicles, you need about 100× the number of stations to match the capacity of a regular subway line, and the rounding there is flattering to Loop.
If The Boring Company were serious about making tunneling cheaper, they should be bidding for the tunneling subcontracts of current public infrastructure projects. The fact that they're pitching a different transit system instead suggests a form of bait-and-switch.
[1] Essentially, your problems grow with the square of velocity, so multiplied by the linear improvement with velocity, you end up with total throughput running proportional to O(1 / v).
[2] The cost of building a subway is generally only about $300 million a mile. Some subways (cough MTA cough) cost up to $1 billion a mile, but making better TBMs isn't going to make a meaningful dent in those high prices.
That rather depends what problem you expect it to tackle. I reframe everything Elon Musk does as testing/developing technologies for interplanetary colonization, which don't forget is SpaceX's very specific vision statement (http://www.spacex.com/about). Back in 2017 he specifically said "I do think getting good at digging tunnels could be really helpful for Mars" and went on to discuss the value of underground colonies in terms of access to ice, radiation protection etc.
Did you miss this one?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/04/16/bor...
In the case of individuals it's mostly just noise, but investing is often trying to read tea leaves slightly better than the next guy.
Really appears to have quite mediocre ability to me. Has focused on some quite interesting problems, but mostly his ability seems like PR/marketing.
Like, those results don't qualify to you as someone who is intelligent and skilled?
I guess this isn’t the place to suggest it, but really in success like PayPal there is a large element of luck at play. He maybe reasonably smart, but the way some people treat him like the most amazing person who has ever lived is ridiculous.
but that's not what you said. You said he is mediocre. What made you say he is mediocre?
I don’t see this (or any of his other ideas) as coming from someone with an abnormal level of intelligence.
He may have the ability to hire people who can execute well on ideas (though I also think that Tesla’s achievement are over-hyped). He may have good business sense, and the ability to raise money. But I don’t see him as having an amazing intellect... so I’d be interested in evidence that shows that...
So you look at Elon's entire history of ideas, and the one thing that caught your eye first was Hyperloop?
Why did you name the Hyperloop? Is Elon working on a Hyperloop company?
Those things you mentioned "hire people who execute well on ideas", "good business sense", "ability to raise money". Those are medicore skills?
We don't know each other in person, but from online-chatting with you, you sound like you have good intelligence. Can you do any of those?
I think you underestimate the degree to which luck plays a role in the development of companies.
High vacuums are expencive to maintain and take longer to achieve after a leak, but would allow for faster speeds. They also force maglev or something like it to achieve those speeds which is expensive. It also forces you to carry an indecent air supply, and cooling becomes a significant issue.
At STP you just have a normal train which is limited to a few hundred miles an hour.
Between those extremes you need to deal with some air but you can compress it for passengers. Further, you can quickly pump down the air pressure using fewer pumps. You can fly / use ground effect avoiding the mag lev issues.
Heat is really the largest issue, compressing air heats it as does friction, and your passengers / equipment also generate heat. So, you would want the air kept at very low temperates.
Why not just use nag lev? You get faster speeds and as strange as it sounds lower cost per mile of track.
TLDR; Lots of useful trade offs.
- The Boring Company - betting on self-driving tech - getting kicked out of Paypal - sleeping on his factory floor - trying to run 3-4 companies at once - SolarCity - claiming he wants to overengineer the tolerances on his cars - an iPad instead of a dashboard
Basically, I just see a lot of his decisions are not well thought out. His main skill seems to be getting people to give him money.
You sound like a 100% rational person who looks at only hard evidence, instead of making rash assumptions based on emotions.
What evidence can you provide that Elon is mediocre?
I find it worrying that “Elon is a hyper-intelligent Superman” seems so closely tied up with individual identity in some cases... I guess creating hero’s sometimes makes the universe easier to deal with. But it has an overall negative effect on SV culture.
Even if you ignore all his other achievements, the man sent his car to Mars. And people are still sitting there going "meh, not impressed. Hyperloop. Average intelligence. Medicore".
THAT attitude has an overall negative effect on SV culture.
You said several times Elon has "mediocre intelligence". I asked you questions about it, and you repeatedly clarified and doubled down on that statement multiple times. I don't see where the misrepresentation is. It seemed we are both pretty clear on each other's position, no?
Now you are saying others are "misrepresenting the statement"? Come on. What part did I misrepresent?
All those factors of company success you mentioned, like hiring, getting external funding, are all things Elon was responsible for. You literally just listed those exact things as things Elon is good at.
Maybe give Elon a break? Is that too much to ask?
If you take the time to google that quote, you’ll find it’s been used in opposition campaigns. I guess to suggest Obama is anti-business.
His phrasing, allowed his comment to be misrepresented, which is unfortunate.
2. I never said he alone takes all the credit. I would never say that. All I am saying is, maybe Elon is not mediocre?
Maybe give the guy a break? The guy worked his ass off and ended up flying his car to Mars. Is asking you to admit "Elon is not medicore" too much to ask? At what point do we say "hey, may be we have been too hard on Elon. Maybe all this negativity about his intelligence being mediocre is a little too much?"
I just not really agree that he’s super-intelligent or a genius. Most of it seems like PR and marketing..
When you work for jerks, you mean. As a society, we tend to tolerate jerks who get results, but let's not hide the fact that those people are still jerks, and that behavior should be seen as something to avoid rather than emulate.