Tesla and SpaceX are businesses and I never understood the public fandom behind them and Elon Musk. 3,500+ people losing their jobs is pretty significant for a leader who touts altruism as one of his top motivators.
I like SpaceX because of what they do, not because they 'provide jobs to the community'.
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
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.
Working for a company that produces bad products is way better than a company whose product prey on the weak.
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.
Society could use a couple more people like him.
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.
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.
Tesla isn't exactly in a Blackberry vs iPhone situation.