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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has the biggest short position of any stock. Beware astroturfing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/04/15/tesla-has...

I'm glad the vote didn't pass; if Musk were to be ousted, Tesla's stock would crash and the company would be dead. Not dissimilar to Apple, except I get the feeling Musk has a much bigger influence on the company than Jobs had at the time he was ousted.

publicly maybe but I'm pretty sure internally Musk is way less important than Jobs at Apple

Really? What makes you conclude that? Elon Musk is kind of like Steve Jobs and Wozniak molded into one person. Musk has deeper technical knowledge than Jobs ever had while he also has some of Jobs intuition about design and products.

The cultish adoration of Jobs is strong and they exist in their own reality bubble.

Nothing to do with Musk credentials, I just think in the context of car / factories there's a lot of people as knowledgeable as him. Jobs was dealing with a different field, computer tech is a little weirder, and a lot more to do with culture / brand, which Jobs exuded.

For SpaceX probably especially since SpaceX's president has started to become more visible. However for Tesla I doubt it, at least not yet. Musk wouldn't be sleeping at the factory if he didn't need to micromanage.

I based my comment on SpaceX actually. But I may be wrong, it's just easy to equate Musk with Tesla when you only see him. But he's not alone. About the factory couch .. I wouldn't conclude that his presence is a sign of greatness (nor the contrary)

True,

Tesla is not worth 50B. But Elon musk as a brand is worth billions.

He created a cult with spaceX. Even if his company is dead, his cultists will die with him.

Beware it from both sides. Tesla spends millions a quarter on advertising, including hiring people to monitor and post on social media.

Citation needed

You can find Tesla's' advertising spend easily in their quarterly findings. As for using it to have people monitor/post on social media, you'll regularly see job postings from them that explicitly list this as part of the job, like [1].

[1] https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=e0d97bcb4da6ad04&tk=1ce4ru...

I can't seem to find that advertising spend number. Got a link?

That role looks the same role as any medium/large company would have for social media engagement.

[1] Under 'Selling, General, and Administrative Expenses', you can easily see that Tesla spends around 2.5B a year on expenses relating to 'personnel and facilities costs related to our stores, marketing, sales, executive, finance, human resources, information technology and legal organizations'. They don't give more detailed breakdown, but they only have to include the marketing term in the overview if its a material amount (which is obviously at least millions per quarter given that the total is in the billions).

[1] http://ir.tesla.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-18-2956&C...

This is true -- but almost every company monitors social media and has people post on it in an official fashion. There's no harm in watching twitter mentions for "my Tesla is broken" and reaching out to people.

What about spamming upvotes on reddit?

It doesn't seem to be working in /r/realtesla

1k subscribers?

Nah, /r/news is a much better use of resources.

>You can find Tesla's' advertising spend easily in their quarterly findings.

Musk played Trump's "fake news" card. If you now try to say anything negative about this company, the fans will brush it off as "fake news" and ignore it.

Remember when the HackerNews crowd told us they were too smart to fall for such things?

Unrelated to the story, but I got this when (trying to) opting out of tracking: https://imgur.com/a/sw9wFY0

Besides opt out not really being ok, the processing took a good minute or two. As in the progress meter arbitrarily increased. That must be bullshit right? And after completion, the request to set preferences failed anyway!

Does anyone have an explanation?

Wow, yeah I had the same experience. Looks like they do some network requests to 3rd parties (I guess to notify them as well of my consent preferences?). Total time took about 3 minutes, which ultimately resulted in a failed request.

Here's a video capture if anyone else can weigh in on this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3944v7137opknty/Kapture%202018-06-...

>Beware astroturfing.

It also has an obscene valuation. Beware stock pumpers.

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