Tesla is laying off ‘about 9%’ of its workforce as it ‘restructures’ the company
electrek.co
electrek.co
> The CEO also confirmed that Tesla didn’t renew its contract with Home Depot to sell its energy products at their stores.
Tesla energy advisors were supposed to be at 800 Home Depots across the US earlier this year.
If they had 3.5 employees per store, and a team of 200 managing the entire effort, these layoffs could be attributed entirely to the lost Home Depot deal.
It reads more like the cuts don't include the Home Depot related staff (who surely work hourly + comission anyway, these are cuts to salaries positions).
Where are these people positioned in Home Depot to make it effective? Costco’s one entrance and one exit make it ideal for this kind of badgering.
This is very striking to me. Does the power company get actual readings on your solar energy consumption, or is the tiering based on estimated solar usage?
https://austinenergy.com/wcm/connect/9c2d0f25-b56e-410a-93ee...
Dude I’m just trying to find the mold spray and get out.
I think the point of intrusive, unsolicited salesmanship is to convince people to look into products that they would otherwise ignore. People go to home depot to buy hardware, not to meet with salespeople.
My local Home Depot has zero mention of any product Tesla makes.
Valuable products don't need a hard sell.
That's really obnoxious. What an awesome way to drive me to other retailers.
Is your claim that Tesla products are doing such good business at Home Depot that they no longer need salespeople?
Is anything ever bad news for this company? They are bleeding red ink, haven't ever made production goals, claim to be growing exponentially, and yet are laying off employees because business is so good?
I'm with the poster down thread: the Fandom is hard to comprehend.
For one, I was approached cold. I too had no idea that they had this agreement, so I was looking at something when someone came up and asked me something like "what type of project are you working on?" So I naturally just described what I was doing and before realizing this was not a HD employee.
He asks me if I thought about solar and whatever, but it wasn't relevant to my situation (roof slope orients E/W at the 45th latitude, so not great for solar). He goes on his way.
It was just a weird experience. I wasn't in a department related to electricity or solar, and they had no displays indicating a partnership with Tesla or that you may be cold-approached by a Tesla employee.
I've found that my local Walmart is often cheaper than Amazon, but I've been shopping at Amazon more frequently ever since I was repeatedly ambushed by people trying to get me to sign up for a Walmart Mastercard while I was wandering around the store shopping.
Just shopping for whatever you needed and some random guy asks what you have for television.
Also seen a woman trying to sell perfume and wanted to spray some on people at another store, kinda pushy near where the cash registers are. Aren’t some people allergic to that stuff? I think it would be better to have samples next to the actual perfume for when someone is actually shopping for that.
I've had that in Costco, trying to sell me cable TV service. Then they act completely flabbergasted when I say I don't watch TV and don't care about cable.
You walk in the door and sometimes there's someone saying: "I can save you money on your TV service"
I flat out no longer shop in my local Walmart for this reason alone. Otherwise, I don't mind Walmart.
Also, those employees weren't hired yet, the "advisors" were a planned/prototype project.
I'd bet Musk saying it was Tesla's decision not to renew the deal is a classic PR corporate power myth.
Hacky solution, but it would just work.
How many accountants, tech, and office workers did the combine company have that were redundant? Have there been layoffs from the merger (if there were I missed them) - I'm curious to see if this is the end result of that combination.
> After the acquisition of SolarCity, Tesla had another round of layoffs to restructure and remove duplicate positions from the acquisition, which resulted in about 20% of SolarCity’s workforce being let go.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16545956/tesla-solarcity...
Is the only other reference that I have found and articles around this time frame don't make it clear the redundancy was the cause.
Feels a little unfair if they were the ones getting axed.
* the person removed is a distraction to the team in some way, possibly outside of their control
* the team is over the two-pizza limit, and coordination costs are out of control
* roles between individuals aren't clear, and removing one of them makes it obvious, removing a source of confusion
[edit: added some examples]
OT, but can someone please explain this to me?
From what I understand this is a team size that you can still feed with two pizzas. But how is this different from just saying "the two-person limit"?
When I'm with friends, we order one pizza per person. On occasion, when I haven't eaten a lot during the day, I've ordered two pizzas just for myself. And I'm a regular sized Dutch guy, so not one of those stereotypical Americans that can win eating contests.
Note: I hate 90% of pizza.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/2/16964154/tesla-home-depot-...
Were home installations ever projected to be a growable part of the company?
Overall Musk has been pretty straightforward and explicit with what he's doing.
Tesla (and spacex) set extremely ambitious goals, like none of their competitors do. They take big risks. They're not interested in reducing risk. They're interested in a business plan that leads to a mass migration of icbs to electric (or humans to mars). The nature of ambitious goals is that sometimes you don't hit your marks. The nature of risk taking is that you might fail, and have to do fast paced adjustments to recover.
Riskiness also means (literally) that Tesla comes with some chance of total failure. If they lose two or three big bets in a row, it could be game over. There are no cash cows or guaranteed income streams. Tesla is not Toyota or Microsoft. If you own Tesla, you need to be ok with that risk. Don't like it? Perfectly reasonable. Sell.
Personally (not an investor or customer), I think these companies are awesome. If GM disappeared tomorrow, nothing that I care about changes. If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs. If McDonald Douglass rocketry disappears, someone else will launch rockets for the US military. SpaceX... that hurts our chances of landing people on the other worlds anytime soon.
None of this risk profile stuff would even be controversial if Tesla was a fund. A fund manager can be as risky as she likes, provided that's the stated investment goal. Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope? .. at least on hacker news?
Seriously, what has he done to deserve this negativity?
According to documents from some lawsuit by ex-employees, he was told repeatedly that 5k/week is impossible by the end of 2017, but despite that knowledge, he publicly stated that as Tesla's guidance.
After Tesla got fired from NTHSA investigation, he issued a press release stating they decided to leave the investigation. After that, NTHSA had to clarify what really happened.
Etc.
Musk is criticised for doing exactly the opposite. Risking shareholders money by (for example) insisting on going to mars, when there are lower risk options available.
Maybe the hate predates this incident and has little to do with it, but a few weeks of negative articles can do a lot to change some people's attitudes. At one point CNN had an opinion piece on the homepage titled "Elon Musk is Humiliating Himself" - that can't be helpful.
I wouldn't say HN is mad at him so much as wanting him to be responsible and own up to reality. He's supposed to be an engineer, and Proper engineers don't engage in "spin." Furthermore, "spin" has to be somewhat believable, whereas Musk has had a recent history of blatant falsehoods. Just like HN calls out anyone else when they're wrong (that is, disconnected from reality), HN is calling out Musk now that he's verbally disconnected from reality. HN has a low BS threshold.
Their relation with journalists aren't also very good: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/elon-...
1. People thinking Tesla is overhyped
2. People thinking Musk is overhyped
3. Failings of the two (autopilot, product/shipping delays, etc)
On failing... thats unconsciounable. Of any place, this should be the site where we don't hate on failure. Failure is a definitive property of risk. Risk is the one thing that makes Musk unique, at the scale he's acting on. He puts everything on the line for a chance at an ambitious goal. This is exactly the ethic I come to this site for.
Its like the difference between any random saas and Theranos.
Basically, he's an empathy deficient exploitative narcissistic a-hole, an laying people off fits that picture perfectly.
I get that you have to push forward strongly for a vision to succeed, but there seems to be a fine line between strongly pushing a vision and ignoring all important criticism. And right now he's no longer on the right side of that line IMHO.
That seems to be the price of success. People made him a hero and this is the result.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-when-elon-musks-...
https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is...
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-racism-lawsuit-2...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/12/17229518/tesla-ntsb-autop...
That said, the overhyping, recklessness and hubris at this stage on the Tesla front seems like instead of helping achieve the wildly ambitious goal, they're making it more likely to fail. If Tesla was slightly more reasonable, and extended their timelines out a bit, it's entirely likely they'd be selling more, better cars.
At some point the company needs to mature a bit and become a little more structured, especially when you're dealing with devices that can literally kill people. I don't think at this stage they'd be less likely to hit their marks if they just got a little more down to earth, on the contrary I think it would help them.
And like it or not, a fund manager can be risky because they're making dozens of bets. Musk has 2, and both are in areas that can directly harm people if things go sideways, it's not the same thing.
Even if Tesla vanished tomorrow, it would be very hard to say it has had no impact.
I think Musk and Tesla are in the middle of a real life trolley problem. It is certainly true that people have died as a result of Autopilot. It is also certainly true that lives have been saved by Autopilot. There is no statistics to tell which group is larger, but Musk and Tesla obviously think the second group is larger. If that is true, everything that further delays progress is something that is causing people to die on net. They are instead flipping that switch and possibly killing people, but overall they are saving lives. Thousands of philosophers would have a better take on the ethics of that decision than I would, but that is clearly where the motivation for Musk's aggressiveness is coming from.
The Tesla deaths per mile statistics are not that much better than overall US statistics and that involves all sorts of weather and road conditions that Autopilot does not. In addition, the death statistics also include older and or cheaper cars that do not have the recent safety features. A much better comparison is with vehicles costing the same as Teslas and comparing their crash statistics.
> ODI analyzed mileage and airbag deployment data supplied by Tesla for all MY 2014 through 2016 Model S and 2016 Model X vehicles equipped with the Autopilot Technology Package... The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation.
https://www.scribd.com/document/337008436/NHTSA-Full-Report-...
This brings me to a crucial point. Nobody doubts that assistive technology save lives. Not just automatic emergency braking, but even lane keeping assists. What Tesla does is however take lane keeping assist and give it more responsibility of actively driving the car. It's not clear if that is safe. Even if it's safe, it's not clear if it's safer. You shouldn't be comparing autosteer to just a human, but a human with lane keeping assist. The difference is between the human driving actively, and the car driving itself actively.
What are you basing this on? AEB was available before Autosteer, and it says in the report that the 40% improvement was after Autosteer installation.
> What Tesla does is however take lane keeping assist and give it more responsibility of actively driving the car.
Autosteer specifically is new, but the precedent for "active control" isn't. TACC takes just as active a role in driving a car as Autosteer, and most people feel it is net helpful (regardless of manufacturer, but especially in Tesla's case because it can see things via radar that a human cannot, e.g. a second car ahead slamming on the brakes). Heck, a lot of people think even standard cruise control is net helpful! It's not clear to me why longitudinal control is okay to do actively but latitudinal control isn't; both require attention and vigilance. My belief is that people are more skeptical of active latitudinal control because it is so new. It's understandable, but it's not an intellectually satisfying reason to hold back the technology.
Read the whole article
> Tesla’s oft-touted figure is flawed for another reason, experts say: With this data set, you can’t separate the role of Autopilot from that of automatic emergency braking, which Tesla began releasing just a few months before Autopilot.
I hold the same view for TACC. And cruise control doesn't require reducing attention. That is the prime difference, active (longitudinal or latitudinal) control that encourages users to reduce attention but still relies on them, and leaves then liable is dangerous.
It's too bad that NHTSA didn't present the AEB-only cohort in the report (i.e. pre-AEB vs AEB vs AEB + Autosteer instead of just pre-Autosteer vs Autosteer).
I respectfully disagree about TACC and Autosteer (or put another way: my experience with them leads me to the opposite hypothesis, and thus my burden of proof is flipped from yours). Hopefully between Elon's promised quarterly reports, NHTSA's current and future investigations, and Tesla putting more cars on the road, we'll get better data on this moving forward than we've gotten to date.
So, let me reiterate -- we agree that autosteer is lane keeping assist given more responsibility. If that's helpful to the driver or dangerous as it distracts him is a debate were should have with better data, which we don't have. Unfortunately, I personally don't trust Tesla giving data without any hidden unsaid caveats, given their behavior till date.
However, there is another topic we should talk about. Do you think improving autosteer lane detection with vision will make a car driverless capable? Because that's precisely Tesla markets their technology as, with coast to coast drive, or cross country summon, or driverless taxis. I personally don't believe a line following robot is enough for self driving. Infact, I like Google's approach more, where they drive only when the road is free of any object (3d mapped by lidar).
Even then, I don't think that's enough either. For example, say a ball bounces on front of you. I stop expecting a child or a dog running after it. I think driving means interacting with the environment, and responding appropriately to it, and would require a general AI.
Yeah, I had read that previously. I understand NHTSA not wanting to be seen as a primary source of data that it did not collect, but I don't think Tesla handing over that data changes anything material here. I don't see how the source of the raw data is relevant to the report, barring a case of fraud or massive incompetence among those interpreting it.
> So, let me reiterate -- we agree that autosteer is lane keeping assist given more responsibility. If that's helpful to the driver or dangerous as it distracts him is a debate were should have with better data, which we don't have. Unfortunately, I personally don't trust Tesla giving data without any hidden unsaid caveats, given their behavior till date.
I hear you. I would distinguish though between Tesla citing data and crafting a story around it (e.g. what they did with the 1:340M miles figure), vs Tesla providing raw data upon request to a regulatory body like NHTSA or an advisory body like NTSB, and then having those bodies draw their own conclusions. So long as Tesla isn't committing fraud and the investigative methods are statistically sound, the source of the data shouldn't matter. I like this model because, by enabling Tesla to be the data source in a way that is trustworthy, we can get access to much more of it (and much more quickly) than if we had to know all possible queries in advance and force it to go through a third party. For all the recent riffraff between Tesla and NHTSA involving the recent accident, both parties have a long track record of saying they work well together.
> However, there is another topic we should talk about. Do you think improving autosteer lane detection with vision will make a car driverless capable? Because that's precisely Tesla markets their technology as, with coast to coast drive, or cross country summon, or driverless taxis. I personally don't believe a line following robot is enough for self driving. Infact, I like Google's approach more, where they drive only when the road is free of any object (3d mapped by lidar).
I agree that Tesla's neural network needs to do much more than line following, but I don't couple that with a LIDAR approach.
One reason I am so bullish on Tesla is that I think the conventional wisdom about self driving is grounded more in marketing and fundraising than in engineering. The great thing about LIDAR is that you can build a prototype-level self-driving car and put it on a real road relatively quickly. The problem with LIDAR is that its utility breaks down much faster than that of vision. If you want to drive in conditions where humans drive today -- heavy fog or rain, sleet, snow -- you can't rely on LIDAR; you have to do that with cameras and radar. Once you've achieved a system that can do that, LIDAR becomes largely redundant; in good conditions it's telling you what you already know, and in bad conditions it's telling you less than that. So I am a big fan of Tesla's philosophy here (and of Comma.ai's for the exact same reason). This isn't just projection, btw -- Nvidia has a neural network that's been outperforming humans at camera-based object detection in bad weather for over two years now. I'm not aware of anybody achieving that with LIDAR.
> Even then, I don't think that's enough either. For example, say a ball bounces on front of you. I stop expecting a child or a dog running after it. I think driving means interacting with the environment, and responding appropriately to it, and would require a general AI.
I think you're right that with self-driving cars, we will see new classes of accidents that we don't experience with human drivers. However, because humans are such terrible drivers in everyday situations, it is likely a huge net improvement to improve the general cases and have more failures around the edges. This is why examples like the beach ball, or even the Trolley Problem, don't move me. Those situations are exceedingly rare, and optimizing for them will only get us to a local maximum in the mission to save lives. The global maximum is to mitigate the consequences of e.g. texting and driving, or falling asleep at the wheel.
So, I don't expect the huge improvement when going from lane keeping assist to autosteer.
See my response to your sibling comment. AEB was available earlier than Autosteer, and it says in multiple places (both in the summary and in the graph) that the 40% figure is since the release of Autosteer. If I am misunderstanding or misreading the report, please tell me.
> There's no evidence that Autosteer has saved any lives, but there is evidence that it's taken at least 4.
That's not an accurate summary of the evidence. There are reports all over reddit, TMC, Twitter, Electrek, etc. of Autopilot preventing accidents. There are accounts of Autosteer in particular swerving when a truck drifts toward a car. If we're going to consider one-off anecdotes that go badly, we have to consider the ones that go well, too. And there's a lot of confirmation bias to fight to do that, because "Car Doesn't Crash And Erupt Into Flames" is not a headline you will ever read.
Tesla is not Apple, the car industry is not Nokia. Many people on HN seem to be confused here. I do think SpaceX should be renamed Tesla though, it would help selling Tesla cars.
And yet, in both cases, there is something much more compelling about it than the competitors' products. It doesn't matter if you're a fanboy, an anti-fanboy, or somewhere in the middle-- from where I sit, they both have a similar niche where they stand out, and get excessive press coverage for both the good and bad things they do.
The argument against Tesla isn't about their products, it is about the economic valuation of the company making the products.
Also, Tesla does well between car development cycles. If they can ride it out, they can print money too. The problem is whether they can get BETTER at developing new cars with less investment, and ramping more quickly, driving true volume. They might print money for a few quarters once Model 3 production is up, but that depends on there being an endless stream of buyers, and in cars, we know that's not the case.
As to SpaceX--it's an extremely interesting attempt to tread a well-worn path. Commercial exploitation of space travel is a really neat concept. But again your comparison is completely unmoored from reality. SpaceX disappearing will "hurt our changes of landing people on other worlds anytime soon?" Who exactly do you think got us into space, then to the moon? Who is responsible for almost all the progress in space exploration to date, including developing the RP-1 based rocket designs that SpaceX is refining half a century later? It was U.S. defense contractors! It's worth keeping in mind that the Saturn V developed by Boeing/NAA/Douglas in the 1960s could hurl three times as much weight to the moon as the Falcon Heavy. To date, the only proven model for treading new ground in space is large defense contractors spending gobs of State money.
The real question is: why does Tesla/SpaceX generate so much sophomoric positivity?
True. At more than an order of magnitude higher cost.
Maybe they view their payoff date in a longer term fashion, maybe the way they will make their money is 'cool' but Space X isn't more charitable than any other company.
You're applying generalizations to specifics. It is true that other industries have seen order-of-magnitude cost reductions. The companies that bring those innovations are frequently (and correctly) celebrated (see Henry Ford, et al.). SpaceX is that company in this industry, which has otherwise been stagnant for generations. Add to this the fact that space exploration has been aspirational and charismatic as a industry, and you have your justification.
Contractors are not some naturally occurring mineral, a side effect of some budget. They are companies, people. At present, they are companies comfortably using their existing operations to keep doing what they've been doing since the 70s. I think that it matters who that company is, what their future strategy is. It matters that they care about reusability, creating technology that scales to larger missions... basically, people matter.
In any case, I don't think you can compare Nissan to Tesla. You can always reduce things to parity along some metric, but in this case I just don't think 2018 sales volume is most of the story.
Thanks for the answer though.
Look at your own post for why Tesla/SpaceX engender negativity. GM revolutionized the landscape of America. Douglas Aerospace helped design the most powerful rocket ever. And you denigrate those companies and their actual achievements by pointing to the things Musk says he’s going to do. And that’s exactly how Musk has positioned himself. So is it any surprise when people react negatively to him when information is revealed that suggests a gap between promises and reality?
Another way to look at it is that what matters is the pioneering work that SpaceX has actually accomplished (and stands to accomplish) that none of their competitors has (primarily, drastically lowering the cost of reaching space while achieving high and increasing launch rates).
> What matters is that Tesla plans to bring EVs to every household in the future, not that it’s shipped about the same number of EVs as Nissan to date?
Without any intended sarcasm, I would answer this question with 'yes'.
The latter is a revolution. The former is just an incremental evolution. Laudable, but nowhere close to the same level of accomplishment.
Not at all. I am just pointing out that the popularity of SpaceX stems from much more than just ‘wishful thinking’. In a short time and against all odds, they’ve established themselves as the leading space launch provider, and they have a realistic chance to vastly increase that lead in the years to come. Speaking of pioneering technology, they are the first and so far only entity to launch, land, and reuse production orbital rockets on a regular basis. This may well prove to be a revolution, especially considering how many experts said it was impossible.
Handwaving their accomplishments away because too many people cheer them too loudly strikes me as unfair and disingenuous.
For example, here's the CNES (French space agency) Director of Launchers discussing SpaceX's achievements, and his desire to design Ariane NEXT to be similar to Falcon 9:
https://satelliteobservation.net/2018/06/02/cnes-director-of...
> For Falcon 9 for instance, they use a toss-back trajectory. An engine is relit while going against the aerodynamic flow, which is actually quite complicated to achieve. We worked on that with ONERA, the French national aerospace lab, and realized it’s pretty complicated.
and, right after talking about how SpaceX's design stages lower, has a common engine between stages, and allows experimentation in landings:
> Prometheus can be used in a new architecture which we call Ariane Next. It will have 7 such engines on the first stage and 1 on the second stage, and can be used in expendable or reusable mode, allowing to experiment reuse easily. The objective is to learn by testing, which is not a European speciality.
There's no greater endorsement than by a competitor.
On cars, no that's not what I thunk. I don't think this divides into 2018 sales volume and bullshitting hype. There is also impact on the industry, consumer perception and the active effect on the price performance of batteries. There's important proofs (to the public) of concept, that electric cars can stand on their own in every respect.
Nissan... they fulfilled a demand for low spec cars with short ranges, a relatively nonscalable source of demand too. I don't think that Nissan's sales are as relevant as Tesla's in the overall scheme of changing most cars from ice's to electric. That's not to hate on nissan. I have a nissan.
I think we understand eachother, but disagree. You think of Tesla and spacex as similar to their competition, but with lots of underserved hype. I see them as different, mostly because of risk tolerance.
I guess this is also a matter of worldview. I think we have a serious problem of too little risk & failure, and the ability (of very large companies) to avoid risk almost entirely.
SpaceX set a goal of reusable rocket or bust, fairly literally and explicitly. I don't think other contractors would have. I don't think we get to mars unless someone does.
If mars is just hype and bullshit to you, then meaningfully reduced cost per orbital kg.. I dunno thoug. I *do" believe the claim that he's after a mars service. Why else risk the house?
They contractually had the option to build their own derivative but punted and then found themselves with a Senate banning future imports. Now they want $5B to design a new rocket, or maybe use Bezos' design.
The SLS is nothing more than a patched up space shuttle launch system with a capsule on top. Except that it will cost a lot more to launch. Not much new ground there.
Watching those boosters land literally gave me goosebumps. I just thought, holy shit, this guy is the real deal.
Space-X have done great work in making landed-recovery practical and reliable but they're again building on top of work originally done by the DoD-contractor model.
There are a lot of smart people in the world who, with the same backing that Musk received, could lead a company to achieve those goals. Without spreading themselves so thin that they make mistakes affecting thousands of people. Our tendency to elevate and idolize people who are aggressive and self-promoting leaves little room for those blessed by the absence of those traits.
It's ridiculous that on a day when thousands face unemployment that there are excited stories about flamethrowers being shipped.
This is exactly the problem Space X is meant to solve.
Costs need to come down radically, and State money is too fickle to be relied on for reaching long term goals.
Trolls have gotten more skilled, and are able to convert new trolls without people realizing they have become trolls. You just have to get people angry a few times, and they'll do anything you want. Once they've calmed down, they'll continue doing the same thing for the sake of consistency.
Musk has pissed off the media by calling them out on their lack of ethics, so a storm is coming for Musk that will look very similar to what happened to Gamer-gate when they called out the media. The media literally branded them as women-haters with zero evidence and it stuck.
The only ones I've heard that haven't been trolling are concerns about their financial reports, which are always "concerns about financial reports" with no additional information.
Ok, go ahead and be concerned that the stock is inflated. It's not a real conversation.
Like, for example, look at what happened last week. We were bombarded by an avalanche of negative Elon/Tesla articles. It was consistent. "Tesla Factory is HELL". Like, I must have read "HELL" 3 or 4 times last week. This followed by a failed coup attempt to oust him from the board of directors. Turns out that there were billions of dollars invested in shorts that Tesla stock would plummet.
There was a coordinated effort to tank Tesla and oust him as CEO last week that failed. The result was that stock spiked and the short-sellers lost like 1.5B.
This is the kind of shit that goes on week after week with Tesla.
I would add to that concerns about the current state of their automated driving implementation, as well as the way they are marketing it. I think a lot of those concerns are justified, and I say this as a pretty hardcore fan.
(I don't disagree with the rest of your post.)
NHTSA will spin their wheels for a year on an investigation, and accomplish absolutely nothing.
I know you're spending a lot of time white-knighting for Tesla on HN today, but c'mon, quit being so disingenuous about this. They are not at all perfect and in fact have made some spectacular missteps.
If this layoff article ends up being a legitimate source of concern, it'll be the first time out of like hundreds of articles a month.
And yeah, I'm with you on the state of driving implementation. I think the criticism that calling it auto-pilot is misleading is a legitimate concern, for example. I would call it co-pilot until it's fully automated, and call it auto-pilot once you can take your hands off the wheel. That would be consistent with the naming-scheme they have chosen, wouldn't diminish brand value, and would be more accurate.
But again, it's just every time I read one of these articles, the comments are saturated with anti-Tesla hate that is either coming from Russia, Big Oil, or some day-traders trying to bring the stock down $10 so they can buy a turn a quick profit for the day.
He's selling things that he can't produce now, and possibly won't ever be able to produce. If you think this is simply about missing a few deadlines, you aren't following along close enough.
Telling people profits are around the corner for years on end, that self-driving is around the corner for years on end, that you'll build a mass-market $35,000 car for years on end, all the while collecting money to do so. Being very coy about disclosures. Playing the Trump "fake news" card (every negative article is fake!).
I remember coming to HackerNews and reading about Theranos, and anyone who claimed it wouldn't work was sexist or couldn't dream big enough. We are lazy bums, and these people are changing the world! Who are we to criticize?
>If Tesla disappears, this could set back electric cars by 5yrs
Five whole years of setback? Versus the hundreds of thousands of jobs related to GM, as well as their world class self-driving tech and decent EV programs? Maybe you need to reassess what you "care" about.
>Why doesn't Elon get this amount of rope?
If he didn't want to be accountable to shareholders, he should have kept the company private. Why is it that HackerNews acts like companies go public as a favour to the rest of us poor schlubs?
1. Tesla is heavily shorted. 2. Tesla and SpaceX are disrupting heavily entrenched industries (and we could argue a lot about how much or how effectively, but let's not). 3. It's become apparently easy to mobilize armies of artificial opinion on the internet, who in turn mobilize real people due to groupthink and the human love for picking sides and shouting about it.
I am not suggesting in any way that there isn't anything valid to criticize or that anyone who does so is a sockpuppet, but if there aren't any such campaigns by moneyed interests to tarnish those brands online I would be extremely shocked.
I feel ambivalent myself, I have no vested interest in Tesla succeeding or failing. Objectively, the numbers paint a pretty sober picture of their future and I wouldn't consider investing any of my money there. But ... I think it would be cool if they succeeded. I've never been particularly interested in any electric car, Tesla or not, but anybody willing to push the technology forward is appreciated.
I very highly doubt that Honda is hiring people to make negative forum posts about Tesla.
I personally was set off by Elon musk's claims about autonomy, every since he started claiming them in 2015. I still don't think a line following robot should be allowed control of a car, and good forbid not have a human driver behind it.
Having said that, I think they make well-designed, innovative and inspiring products. Build quality and financials are terrible though.
> A fund manager can be as risky as she likes
This is off-topic but... am I the only one that finds this cringey and forced, given that it's such a such male-dominated field?
You are not the only one. I also find this politically-correctness quite useless and - in this particular case - also insulting towards women.
It is also possible to avoid pronouns altogether at times. It's more work to both do that and not sound stilted and weird. I have made my peace with occasionally sounding stilted, such as A fund manager can be as risky as a fund manager likes.
When I had a corporate job, some training examples advocated finding ways to rewrite the sentence to sanitize it of gender rather than using awkward constructions like he or she. It's more work, but if you do it habitually it gets easier.
I think you'd care far more than you realize. GM is huge and it failing would have massive downstream effects.
Interesting isn't it? It's almost like someone turned on a switch and suddenly there is rampant anti-elon musk sentiment. What has elon musk done recently?
Well, he went after the biased media.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?lang...
and the "journalists" have been waging a war against him. There is a ridiculous amount of news industry workers here ( one of the reasons for the rampant censorship here and on other social media sites is to accommodate the news industry ). The news companies have social media teams pushing their narrative all over social media along with their third party affiliates and ngos.
The media's current punching bag is zuckerburg ( hence the nonstop facebook stories here ). But zuckerburg is giving in to the media, so I suspect the new punching bag will be elon musk.
Expect a lot of negative stories, comments and threads about tesla and elon musk going forward. At least until musk apologizes or gives in to the media.
Musk is notoriously anti-union, continually over-promises then under-delivers, has continually treated his wives as trophies, and has designed a worse subway just because he doesn't want his knees to touch some peasant's knees. He's just another shitty billionaire
But he's always been this way. The question is why the sudden change in sentiment?
And as bad as elon musk is, the journalists are much worse. I'd rather have a world full of elon musks than journalists.
> Musk is notoriously anti-union
To be fair, no entrepreneur in a fledgling/new industry is pro-union. Actually, no entrepreneur is pro-union.
> continually over-promises then under-delivers
That's shareholders' concern, not ours.
> has continually treated his wives as trophies
Welcome to humanity. Are you going to blame his wives who loved to be trophies? Seems like personal business between consenting adults.
> and has designed a worse subway just because he doesn't want his knees to touch some peasant's knees.
As opposed to the elitist journos who love to slum it with the peasants right?
> He's just another shitty billionaire
Who the media loved. For nearly 20 years, the media wasn't too concerned with his anti-union stance, his trophy wives, his failure to delivery on his promises, etc.
And I never said I supported the objectification of women. I said I believed in independent free choice of both men and women. If a woman chooses to be a trophy wife, that's her right as a free individual. If a man chooses to marry a trophy wife, that's his right as a free individual.
Whether a man wants to marry a man or a woman wants to marry a woman or a billionaire wants to marry a trophy wife or a trophy wife wants to marry a billionaire, it's their right. As long as they are consenting adults. If consenting adults doing what they want bothers you, then the problem is with you, not them.
However everybody agrees that they both have many costumers waiting and would be able to raise capital.
Nobody believes that Tesla is in real real serious troupe.
Lots of customers is good, but the more cars they have made the more money they have lost. Negative operating leverage is really bad for any company, but especially one as cash intensive as manufacturing vehicles.
I'm rooting for them, but Tesla is indeed in serious financial trouble. Just ask Elon who fired 3,500 people so he could make the books look nicer.
I agree, they are not in financial trouble. Being dependent on a near-term capital raise, however, is financially perilous. Lots of companies were waiting for the fall fundraising season when Lehman went bankrupt.
Take a few minutes and read https://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund-that-also-ma.... The moral of that story was, if you're "fine as long as you can raise capital", then you're actually in a very precarious position. And it was even another luxury car company to boot!
Not that Tesla is making the same speculative financial shenanigans that Porsche was, but the point is, access to capital has a tendency to dry up right when you need it most. If there's a recession in the next 18-24 months (which, glancing at yield curves, is looking increasingly likely) and lending tightens up, Tesla might not find it as easy as you think to raise capital right when they need it to avoid running out of money.
$4 billion -> $7 billion -> $11.7 billion -> ~$17 billion
How is 4x growth in three fiscal years anything other than running hot?
$889m -> $675m -> $2b -> ??? (a cool $710m in the 1Q so annualized like you did with revenue would be ~$3b).
They have ~$2.8b in the bank, so that's about a year if things continue like they have been, less if they hit a snag. Which is why Elon is firing people left and right.
More if they succeed in ramping up the Model 3 production.
If people going bankrupt have marketable skills and are doing everything in their power to find a job in a hot market, I would be brave enough to lend them some money for the transition.
My point is that Tesla's success in ramping up production is not as improbable as you make it sound. They are focussing all their resources on this goal, and at least to my mind, they are likely to succeed.
That's not looking good.
2: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/2/17312772/tesla-earnings-q1...
Or maybe they didn't, and their choice of words is unintentionally amusing and ironic.
Musk always overestimates what he will be able to achieve in a given period and that's a good thing. It keeps you busting ass to make your goal instead of getting complacent and lazy.
Investors and keyboard cowboys need to realize that Tesla is not Ford/GM/Toyota, that it is a company that is effectively still an infant and has never produced at any worthwhile scale and has to figure all that out.
Always make sure you are happy with what type of offsetting compensation you’ll receive in this eventuality before taking the job, and consider it a huge timesaver if an employer passes on you because you asked to negotiate a competitive severance package.
You don’t have to have some crazy special skillset or seniority. You just have to politely say no to any prospective employer who won’t offer it and keep searching.
Yes, of course negotiating power is limited if you’re in dire straits & must take any job. Definitely sucks and I wish we offered better protection to candidates in that situation.
But many people just don’t even think to ask, even when they already have a job they are OK to stick with if they need to turn down a different offer.
100% of the articles I have read about Tesla have been completely fabricated hit-pieces, or like this one, completely misleading. I think that at this point, they deserve the benefit of the doubt unless you're willing to actually read the article.
They purged contractors not long ago and are now laying off lots of people. Those are facts.
They reported that "production associates" are unaffected by the layoffs -- which doesn't mean that people working in production aren't impacted. It just means that they aren't laying off hourly employees in production. The editorial at the bottom of the article rationalizes the decision and reflects that it is ultimately good for the company.
IMO, it was a pretty balanced article that delivered potentially bad news in a fair way.
These articles you hear about Tesla are sometimes factual, but they're not published because they're factual. They're published to do damage and affect stock prices in a way that make specific people rich. It's the equivalent of playing poker, and affecting your neighbor's hand by distracting the dealer.
Every week there's a god damn article about Elon's "fall from grace" (what?) or about how he's trying to prevent unionization (you mean the fake unions that Ford has been trying to start, but workers aren't interested in?) or about subsidies (which are still a fraction of oil subsidies).
As a result, he made the mistake of criticizing the ethics of the media. So start expecting him to get the Gamer-gate treatment as the media pile on him even harder than before with fabricated news.
Every time I read a negative piece about Elon or Tesla, I worry "oh shit, is this the one?" and I look into the article and it's absolute bullshit. At this point, even if I read an article and it appears to be factual, I'd say the burden of proof is on the naysayers, and not on Musk or Tesla, given past performance.
In the actual email, Musk says this:
> As part of this effort, and the need to reduce costs and become profitable, we have made the difficult decision to let go of approximately 9% of our colleagues across the company
How is that not related to “financial trouble”?
Elon Musk is an amazing innovator and amazing PR guy. Few people can turn an idea into reality as well. But... he's running a high risk business whose rich valuation can go poof at any time. Because his personal name is inseparable from the firm, he's going to get heat for it.
The financial press has an obligation to talk about this stuff. Investors deserve to be informed.
Do you consider Elon Musks Twitter to be unbiased, real news?
You negotiate your starting salary, and that's it. So make sure you account for the likelihood that you will get zero notice and zero severance when you get fired. Which is to say you need to ask for more money, and save some of it in high-liquidity, low-risk form.
People wonder about salary inflation, but when you look at total compensation, it isn't quite so extreme. Companies cut or eliminate benefits, and employees have to demand higher salary to compensate. The salaries are going up at a higher than usual rate, because companies are slashing benefits packages faster than usual.
Those companies are figuring out the hard way that employees are not clueless about the value of their benefits. New employee candidates coming in will see the crap benefits and ask for more money. Existing employees will leave for either benefits more similar to what they once had, or for more money. In general, cutting the benefits results in being less competitive overall as an employer, because it usually costs less for a company to buy the benefits in bulk, than for employees to buy them piecemeal.
In the case of severance, the major advantage for the company doing it is that you absolutely cannot spend that money on anything else until you are fired. You could get that by buying a special insurance policy for unplanned unemployment, or you can discipline yourself to never touch your "severance fund" except in dire emergency. Also, you are taxed on a severance payment in a year when you otherwise have less income, because you got fired, whereas a personal "severance fund" is taxed as you earn the principal, and again when you liquidate, if you realized gains. Make sure the company will be paying for all that before you start work, because once you start, most of your leverage disappears. They no longer need to convince you to quit your previous job, and only need to do just enough to keep you from quitting your new one.
The last severance I got was in 2002. No company since has ever been willing to pay it out or even negotiate the possibility. Severance is dead. Long live the personal "oh shit" fund. Make your employer pay you enough to have one, along with a personal retirement fund, a personal vacation fund, a personal health care fund, a personal commuting budget, and personal equivalents of all those other things that many companies once paid for, but no longer do.
We don't need a union, if everybody can individually commit to asking for more money.
These are generally legally enforceable, and severance is not merely a discretionary component that is up to the company. It's something you can (generally without that much trouble) actually sue for, similar to unpaid wages, if the company terminates you without paying.
I have never once heard of a company requiring a C-suite executive to get involved for creating these very routine types of severance agreements for regular employees, and I myself have negotiated severance in a standard at-will employment agreement at my three most recent jobs.
Large firms usually have a very low baseline severance plan calculated something like 1 week of pay for each year of tenure, and they may say in the handbook it is only offered on a discretionary basis at the time of termination.
But I’ve always had no problem negotiating a customized severance package regardless of whether a firm had that sort of policy, especially because severance should fairly reflect compensation for any time or opportunity costs an employee might endure due to a non-compete agreement, etc., which means usually it should be at least several months of salary and possibly continuation of benefits (e.g. not externalizing that cost to the employee through COBRA but actually continuing to pay their premiums for a set amount of months).
Huge companies are harder to convince of this, and in that case I was able to negotiate the severance amount to instead be paid as a sign-on bonus, so that saving the money to cover costs in the event of being terminated was my responsibility, but the company still agreed to pay for it.
Don't tell me I'm wrong. I lived it.
They don't want to do it because, like offering vacation instead of PTO, it represents a cost of firing someone. They very much want to be able to drop anyone, at any time, for free, as that means they don't need to set aside money for firing people.
Of course it is in conflict with innovations in humanity impacting products like cure for cancer, malaria etc. It would be nice to figure out a solution that provides a good balance.
It will definitely slow down innovation. Some projects / aspirations will come off the table completely. Mars? Forget about it. All your mars money will be treating AIDS/Malaria/Cancer/Whatever. All NASA and space exploration money will go to feeding poor people and refugees and all manner of charitable causes, these causes will only ever multiply ad infinitum. I think there is really only money for one or the other. You can have a comfy easy welfare state life, or you can explore and reach for the stars.
You can't do discount Mars, or space exploration on the cheap, you basically can't have both. Your welfare state will make it so that you don't ever really have enough money to actually do any kind of space exploration. Sure you can send cheap drones locally within the solar system, but that's all space exploration will ever be from now on.
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-trillions-war-has-cost-us-t...
I understand though that others might have different value judgements.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1006597562156003328
I also think that this move was mandated by the board when it recently voted for him to remain chairman (maybe not the firing per se, but that Tesla becomes profitable ASAP).
The russian letter n and the twitter interface together make it a bad combination.
Trading is not easy. Plenty of folks were correct on a 2007 market top ... they still managed to lose money ... because they were too early among other things.
Lacking the above info, it could very well be the move of a company concentrating resources on a full-scale ramp effort and pruning back non-core or non-scaling lines of business.
How on earth could you possibly know that? It's entirely possible (likely) that not laying off those 3000 people would endanger the ability of Tesla to continue employing the other 30,000 people. Life (and business) is sometimes messy...
If the markets were assuming that they would recover half of what was owed in bankruptcy, that corresponds to about 1/4 odds of bankruptcy in the next few years. Given that historically markets have been more accurate than any individual commenter, the risk of bankruptcy was quite real. No matter how many Monday morning quarterbacks like you think otherwise.
The snark in this thread is unbelievable.
Equity prices give you a share in future success. They therefore predict expected future value, pro-rated by the odds of getting there.
Bonds give you back money if the company remains in business, and nothing more. Therefore they represent a prediction of odds of going out of business, with no regard to how wonderful the possible upside in the company might be.
Tesla's combination of high equity value and low bond value represents a company that has a real chance of becoming dominant in its sector, and also a good chance of cratering instead. You shouldn't invest in a company like that unless you understand why there is a real risk, and are willing to take it.
Working for a company that produces bad products is way better than a company whose product prey on the weak.
Tesla isn't exactly in a Blackberry vs iPhone situation.
Society could use a couple more people like him.
I like SpaceX because of what they do, not because they 'provide jobs to the community'.
So they’re not a profitable business, and not a charity. What are they exactly?
"What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla's history to date."
Are they a business or a charity or what?
They’re a profitable business, and became one in three years less than Tesla, without the need to tackle a hard problem like manufacturing cars.
And of course the human aspect of losing a job is completely immaterial to the Wall Street trader's mind.
EDIT: A downvote without a rebuttal enriches none of our minds.
i think
There is social utility in the efficient allocation of labor. While there are plenty of justifications for devoting resources to help people find new jobs, and reduce frictional unemployment, keeping people in jobs where their compensation is not cost effective relative to their output impoverishes an economy and the people in it.
If on the other hand Elon Musk as a household were maximizing his personal return on equity in Tesla for the sake of purely wasteful personal consumption that would be another thing. However, he seems to invest almost all of his wealth into his companies.
His stated motives are altruistic (making humans interplanetary, accelerating transition to clean energy, others), but that's quite different from altruism as a top motivator.
In this case, it was decided that laying off >3000 employees would best serve the goal of accelerating transition to clean energy.
Does that make more sense?
If this is a serious comment, see https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-... and the other parts of the series.
If you do a quick math let's say they sold 400,000 Tesla (which they haven't yet) at an average of $100,000 each (which is probably lower) its net worth comes around $44B. I feel like company is way over valued and there is lot of fluff in the evaluation.
The "standard" way to evaluate a company is to take the price of the stock, and divide by the profits. There are some details like "historical PE" vs "forward-looking PE", but that's the basic metric.
The PE ratio represents the number of years it'd take for a company to make back the price you paid. And for most people, PE of 15 to 25 (15 years to 25 years of profits) to make back their market-cap is reasonable. Some companies like Amazon have PE-ratios over 100, as they're considered to be in "growth mode".
Tesla never has made a profit however, so its PE ratio is negative, at least historically. So evaluations are most likely based on expectations of future profits. Assuming Tesla is "worth it" at $55 Billion market cap or so, then Tesla needs $2.2 billion of consistent PROFIT / year (not revenue) to get to ~25 PE ratio.
Anyway, that's analysis from just one metric. There are other metrics out there, but I think PE ratio is the most common, and one of the simpler metrics to understand.
> If you do a quick math let's say they sold 400,000 Tesla (which they haven't yet) at an average of $100,000 each (which is probably lower) its net worth comes around $44B.
This line just doesn't make sense at all. There's no metric I'm aware of that matches this methodology.
In lieu of profits, is there any way to use revenue to estimate a company's valuation?
Tesla has $28.6 billion in assets, according to NASDAQ[0], yet their market cap is nearly twice that. Is that a normal ratio?
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/financials?query=balance-...
No. Ford has $257 billion in assets for example but a smaller market cap than Tesla.
One could argue that "Market cap" is a poor metric of size and that "Enterprise Value" is better. Teslas numbers move in the right direction if you're looking at Enterprise Value, but its still kinda bad in terms of classical evaluation.
---------
Ultimately, the only way you square the round-hole of Tesla's balance sheet is imagining future earnings, future assets, and future growth. Alternatively, you invest because you believe in the cause and not because you plan to make money in the stock. Arguably irrational. But the world isn't really about money. I generally respect people who make that kind of decision, as long as they don't become an annoying fanboy.
Also note that of Tesla's $28 Billion in assets, Tesla has $24-billion in liabilities. So the company is overall +$4 Billion in assets, while Ford is +$35 Billion in assets.
So Ford is 9x bigger than Tesla by assets, and is also 9x bigger by (Assets - Liabilities). In either case, the metric suggests that Ford should be bigger than Tesla, and yet both Tesla's market cap AND enterprise value is larger.
Clearly, no one investing cares about Tesla's current size relative to Ford. At best, people are speculating on Tesla's future growth.
I think of Tesla not so much as a business than as a charitable religious nonprofit that relies on donations to assist the disadvantaged in acquiring luxury automobiles. Never underestimate the power of belief.
Fun fact: in October 2008 VW became the largest company in the world by market cap. https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-greatest-short-sq...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-nlrb/worker-testifi...
Yet to be determined by a court. Precision in language is important, no matter how heated you are about a situation.
Let's go with "immoral efforts." I think that's precise enough language.
I can make claims about my worldview. I say the sky is blue. you say the sky is white (cloudy). we can argue about it, but there's no reason for either of us to change our opinion till we look out the window and see what color the sky is.
The problem with your standard of saying nothing is illegal till a court rules on it, is we require someone accuse another to trigger the court determination of fact.
in my very humble opinion it's perfectly reasonable to call something illegal if you genuinely believe it's illegal, regardless of status as a lawyer. But once the court has ruled, you need to change your opinion, or you're a crackpot. (Or, perhaps, the court is corrupt, but that's well off into crazy person land)
As someone who is involved in multiple IP lawsuits and one other major civil matter, this is exactly how it works. I don't claim people are doing illegal things. I am filing lawsuits against them alleging improper behavior and I let the courts do their job, which is determining legality and harm to parties.
Laymen don't get to decide what is or isn't legal, nor is it a wise decision to accuse people of illegal activities when no fact finding group has found that to be true. Trust me on this one when I say courts really, really don't appreciate that kind of language.
Conversationally, saying "I think this is illegal" instead of "this is illegal" freely surrenders to those who disagree with you to use appeals to authority to bypass conversation without addressing what you said. I think this is a bad strategy if you're levying a case in the e-court of e-opinions.
sounds like breach of contract, not crimes though. shrug
If you can trespass for 20 years (varies by jurisdiction) without getting ejected, it's legal. And you now own the property.
If you don't enforce a trademark, it is void. There are statutes of limitations on a lot of crimes and torts, including those involving violence. So there is quite a lot of precedent involved in unenforced, flagrantly-violated laws becoming void.
One way around that is to elect government attorneys that will prosecute those laws, and government cops that will investigate suspected violations of those laws.
Virtually every union in the US
> its not my experience working as an M&P grade in a unionised company in the UK.
Yeah. Tesla isn't based in the UK, nor are the wroker in question here.
And I suspect the vast majority of imported H1b's would love a seniority "buggins turn" system.
You can, for instance form a union, whose sole purpose is bargaining for pay bands in a company with well-defined job roles. You can form a union that only fights 'arbitrary' dismissal of employees for their political views. You can form a union that only negotiates working conditions, and overtime rules and rates.
Pointing at the worst example of a union, and claiming that they are fundamentally broken is like me pointing at the worst employer you can imagine, and claiming that corporations are fundamentally broken.
Unions are democratic organizations, employers are authoritarian ones. You can decide what direction your union should go.
They also provide additional insurances for things like glasses, funding for education, and a range of subsidised country cottages with outdoor hot tubs for summer holidays. Seriously, you guys are missing out.
Apparently the way your 'civilized' nations work, is they pay labor a lot less. France, infamous for their powerful unions, has enjoyed annual wage growth about 80% lower than the US over the last 20 years, leaving them trailing horribly behind the US on wages.
The US median full-time income is higher than all nations on earth except for three (Norway, Switzerland, Australia).
Your recommendation is for US labor to earn a lot less. If you were right, the union-friendly nations would dramatically out-earn US labor. Nearly without exception, the exact opposite is true.
Just the amount of time saved in not having to argue with US medical insurance companies about fully insured bills, is worth it to me. So yes, I'll take civilisation - when I add it all up, I not only earn more here, but I actually have some spare time to spend it in.
Tech salaries have nothing to do with unions, infact are tech salaries in sweden also union negotiated?
I'm probably about as skilled at negotiating terms of my employment as I am at arguing law. Oh, I think I'm good at it, but I'll bet a union rep would laugh at my naivety. But it would appear that many tech workers not only overestimate their negotiating skills, they also think that a tech workers union would work exactly like the U. A. W. (compensation based on seniority, et. al.), as if "union" allows no other option.
A lawyer that you hired and pay for represents your interest 100%.
A union rep represents union interest first and then your interest. But if union interest is at odd with your interest, you loose 100%.
For example when GM hit hard times UAW agreed to firing all UAW members in California factory, the one that Tesla then bought and is operating.
As you might imagine, none of the UAW members that lost their jobs wanted that outcome.
But it didn't matter what those thousands of UAW members wanted. UAW agreed to that deal with GM to save jobs of UAW members in Detroit.
So far, the difference I have noticed between union and non-union areas is this: in the heavily unionized locales, all work done is very expensive, but it is also mostly done correctly; in the lightly unionized locales, work is inexpensive, but is slipshod, and without any express or implied warranty. Both take at least twice as long as you think should be necessary, but the union guys will at least show up and pretend to work, while the non-union guys will just ghost.
I want to be the guy that shows up and (eventually) does it right, while three other guys stand around and watch. I'd rather not be the guy that cannot meaningfully engage with the work, because the pay is peanuts, and I could get fired just for sneezing wrong. I (and my ancestors) have a deep-rooted desire to be able to dig in my heels and give someone an earful (or page-full, as it were) whenever they are about to do something stupid and involve me in it. I don't feel like "at will" employment gives me that option. If I speak truth to power, I can get fired.
Who is this magical employer that exhibits those contradictory traits:
* super harsh, fires workers for sneezing
* doesn't fire workers for not working
There are employers out there that pull this crap. You don't have to work if you know the right people. You can't make waves if you don't.
To answer your question, obviously there are both pros and cons to unions (as with basically all political issues). If unionization costs jobs, and the left considers unionization a victory, it must mean that they value the other benefits gained from unionization (e.g. improved working conditions) more than the jobs lost from it.
If we lost half of all jobs, but a family could be supported comfortably by a single-breadwinner, would you consider that a net loss, or a net gain?
Or, alternatively, if we had 100% employment, yet all lived in poverty, would that be a better world?
Consider that the Soviet Union had 100% employment. Is that the high water mark for economic success? Why not? Inefficiency is one answer to it. Another was 'Where did the wealth surplus go?' There are others.