Tesla Accounting Chief, HR Head Resign on the Same Day; Stock Plunges | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Accounting Chief, HR Head Resign on the Same Day; Stock Plunges

bloomberg.com

172 pointsdsr12288 comments

And their Chief People Officer, is not coming back from her leave.

From the outside it looks like Telsa is about going to go into a tough winter like moment.

They are almost losing by winning. They are at capacity in their Fremont factory but still not making a profit.

They need to start designing and building out manufacturing facilities for their next car and the help bolster Model X manufacturing.

Stop and think for a second that Tesla is one earthquake away from no longer being a company.

- They are cash flow negative,

- they have about a year of cash runway left( optimistically)

You can't just collect insurance money and build a new factory like you can with a house, this is a many year project.

Tesla can't afford to not build cars for multiple years.

Forget the SEC investigation hanging over their head. From what I read, they are likely to get a large fine and a strong talking to.

And the most worrying thing for them is that their next car will compete head on with Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and GM. That will be the first time they've had to compete head on with a competitor.

> they have about a year of cash runway left( optimistically)

Much less than that actually. At their current burn rate they won't even be making it to the end of this year without either selling enough M3 to generate some real cash, or by raising some new money from the market. Also, they have a lot of debt come due next year (and even more over the following years) while yields are up to over 8%.

However, M3 production numbers are actually looking good now, and they are hitting their targets for the first time. And their cash burn for Q2 came in lower than expected after some cost cutting. So they might be able to turn the corner just in time. Musk has repeatedly stated that the company will not need to raise new money, but had also done that before some previous financing rounds, so the market does not put that much faith in his words at this point.

It all hinges on the M3 now. Can they get production (and sales) numbers to where they need to be in order to become cash flow positive?

Hey, honestly though...the name ‘M3’ de facto belongs to BMW. You know that. Everyone else who’s commenting on a thread about luxury cars knows that. The fact that you’re using that name to describe some upstart car company’s new model, it’s...it’s weird. Like, just call it the model fucking 3.

God I can’t wait for the Tesla fanboydom to just be put in its place. Cool concept, not cool people attached to it. M3, lol.

Who refers to a Tesla Model 3 as a “M3”?

“M3” has and will always refer to a BMW.

It's not purely about the production volume - remember, the Model 3 was billed as a $35,000 car and a lot of the M3's projected demand is predicated on that range of price. Wall Street analysts have been vocally skeptical that Tesla can produce cars profitably at that price point. Tesla needs to simultaneously dramatically slash costs and dramatically increase volume, while also presumably retooling their production lines on the fly to address the quality issues that have been in the headlines lately.

They're also going to sell somewhere between $100 and $200 million in ZEV credits this quarter.

Don't they also have some heavy debt obligations coming due very soon?

>However, M3 production numbers are actually looking good now, and they are hitting their targets for the first time.

Really? Where can I read the official quarterly numbers? Of what quality are these cars? Do they all need to be reworked?

>Musk has repeatedly stated that the company will not need to raise new money

He said that prior to raising cash the last 3 times. He also said he was going to take the company private at $420. For some reason, I'm doubtful.

Given that he knows his memes, and that “420” is a weed meme, and given it was a ridiculously stupid thing for him to tweet, I’m of the opinion he was literally high when he said that.

If he really did do it while high and without any factual basis, then the SEC case against him is solid.

"I did it for the lulz" is unfortunately not a valid legal defense.

Not sure if that is better or worse for the CEO of a public company with a market cap well into the billions. Regardless it doesn’t inspire confidence in his leadership.

I have to agree with you on all counts.

When I first heard that he did 100 hour weeks voluntarily, I was envious of his ability to put that many hours in. I’ve done that once and… vowed never again.

Now I am of the opinion that it broke him and he was unaware of it, and that all of his goals will be better met if he halves his work week.

Having worked +100 hour weeks for years at a time in the past, i found that it has an insidious effect on your judgement. You think you are ok, but you slowly start to drift out of alignment with reality. Looking at Elon from a distance he appears to be acting the same, functional but with impaired judgement.

Maybe that’s his backup plan if it doesn’t work out... use a BoringCo drill to “accidentally” trigger an earthquake, collect insurance money, funnel it all into SpaceX and launch himself to Mars.

Taking the meaning of "playing the long game" further than anyone else ever has.

Maybe he's gonna use a BoringCompany drill to DRILL to Mars. Ever think of that?

There was an old story that I can't seem to find by Googling, but the gist of the plot that I recall was that Mars was stealing Earth's atmosphere through a kind of vortex, like a huge double ended tornado, and some guy in an old plane flew through it, getting to Mars without a spaceship.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

I agree on all points except that the most worrying thing is the entry of Mercedes, BMW etc. First of all, GM and BMW have sunk a lot of money in electric cars that are on the market and being crushed by Tesla in sales. Second, and most importantly, car brands are incredibly valuable.

People said that the Prius would go away when other car makers started making hybrids. After years of competition, the Prius still dominates. Why? Because the economic reasons for owning a hybrid really aren't that compelling. The social signaling reasons are. So, if you want to say those things about yourself you own a Prius because everyone knows you are driving a hybrid at a glance. A Tesla makes a different-- but I would argue equally powerful-- statement to all who behold it. If Tesla goes into bankruptcy the brand and the cars will be revived.

They can't afford any capex on new factories though. They are extremely close to breaching covenants on their debt and personally can't understand why they are not raising equity money as their stock price, despite Musk's crazy antics, is holding up well.

Their stock price has been highly volatile in the last year. It's "holding up," but only by the hairs on its teeth. They're hovering very close to their 52 week low when the rest of the market is having a banner year.

Management said they don't need to raise funds to cover the capex needed to ramp up Model 3 sales to 7/week, which is (as confirmed multiple times by Musk) more than needed to turn a profit. They just need to turn a profit in Q3 to get the stock price back up and then, they might raise funds to finance the next products (Model Y, truck and Semi). Why raise funds when Wall Street bet on the company to go bankrupt? Raising capital in this environment would mean that the management don't believe in their ability to turn a profit. But then, why raise further equity and make the problem worse?

Occam razor: they expect to be profitable this quarter and are more patient than short-term speculators.

"Wall Street" is not betting on them to go bankrupt. Collectively, investors value this company that produces, at best, 7K cars a week at $45 billion. The idea that one quarter of profitability achieved through slashing capex to the bone fundamentally would fundamentally change their valuation doesn't carry much water in my view.

> "Wall Street" is not betting on them to go bankrupt.

27.88% of all shares in existence are short-sold. Its one of the biggest shorts on the market at the moment.

Wall Street is CERTAINLY betting that they're going down.

There's a difference between overvalued and bankrupt.

That's a solid point, and I guess the stock market is a bad figure to talk about bankruptcy.

Instead, we can look at the Bond market for that. Moody's rates Tesla 2025 bonds at Caa1, and today the interest rate on Tesla has risen above 8.8%

The bond market certainly is pricing in the risk of default and/or bankruptcy at this point. 9%ish bonds are really bad on a 7-year bond, especially in today's market that's got relatively low-interest rate.

I work at a hedge fund specializing in corporate credit. No serious market participants think that Tesla is going actually bankrupt but does run the risk of debt restructuring. Bankruptcy vs debt restructuring would happen under very different terms. As a better metric clogged by less noise, Tesla 1yr CDS is pricing in a 12% chance of default while 2yr is 20%. The bonds you mentioned should actually be a lot lower but they had a large retail allocation and are hard to borrow to short.

BTW, you mention the "interest rate" on those bonds when I think you meant yield. Very big difference.

> BTW, you mention the "interest rate" on those bonds when I think you meant yield. Very big difference.

I'm not very knowledgeable here, but is the key difference that yield is more a result of the market (i.e. bonds fluxuate in value but the return on the bond itself is fixed, so the yield reflects the relationship between cost and payout)?

>Collectively, investors value this company (...)

Most large investors are just holding. The small amount of shares that are exchanged every day are bought/sold by speculators and they are backed by institutions that get paid for this intraday activity. Also, with all the short positions on TSLA, the bank are risking an almost infinite sum of money (in case of a short squeeze).

Since Tesla doesn't intend to raise capital for the foreseeable future, banks can only gain from volatility or from a major event that would force Tesla to raise funds.

>The small amount of shares that are exchanged every day are bought/sold by speculators and they are backed by institutions that get paid for this intraday activity.

The largest shareholders were dumping shares last disclosure. Do you have data that says otherwise?

Tesla is more than just a car manufacture. I doubt self driving + solar + battery + charging network etc is worth the kind premium they have over just being a car company.

But, analysis based strictly on car sales a mistake, especially as established car companies outsource so much parts production.

Agree with Jacques M on solar, and would also add that much of the battery tech is Panasonic's and self-driving is a long ways away from being road-ready.

In terms of cash flow I agree.

But, if you had a company that just did self driving and had as many cars on the road as Tesla does people would value it. Likewise for a giant battery factory, or a company putting out those solar shingles even with just a handful of installs.

Now suppose they sell those lines of business off to some other company to free up some capital. It's a path through the cash crunch that may catch people off guard.

PS: I am not saying buy the stock, but I don't think it's dropping enough to become a 45 billion dollar company any time soon.

How are they going to sell the battery factory when it's owned by Panasonic, not Tesla?

Panasonic is a partner Tesla still put up money for the factory.

EX: Several companies could sell Hulu to free up some cash. The Walt Disney Company (30%), 21st Century Fox (30%), Comcast (30%), AT&T (10%)

The Solar is a liability.

> Stop and think for a second that Tesla is one earthquake away from no longer being a company.

This is highly unlikely in the short term and in the long term they'll be building more plants. It's also something anyone can insure against by placing a bet that an earthquake will destroy their factory in the next five years. You'll presumably get 50:1 odds or better (a good chunk of which is the vig), which means the insurance would cost less than 2% of the sum you want insured.

> they have about a year of cash runway left( optimistically)

Unless they turn a profit (or come closer to it), which it's plausible they're about to do.

> You can't just collect insurance money and build a new factory like you can with a house, this is a many year project.

No, but you can buy insurance in the amount of the value of the output (or of your shares) rather than the cost of building a new facility, if you were really that worried about it.

> And the most worrying thing for them is that their next car will compete head on with Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and GM. That will be the first time they've had to compete head on with a competitor.

The entire EV market is production capacity constrained and will be for a couple more years at least. They can't lose sales to Mercedes or BMW EVs because they'll all already be selling 100% of the EVs they can manufacture, all of which are coming at the expense of petrol cars.

Tesla's liquidity issues are completely overblown. Nevermind that their cashflow and spend numbers are improving. People also tend to overlook the amount of investor liquidity we have in the market. SoftBank has a $100bn fund. Saudi's have a $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. I believe the UAE have something similar as well. Raising a couple billion dollars in this environment would be extremely easy. Especially when you have a backlogged demand on your product and the product has a 20% gross margin

The complaint isn't that Tesla faces challenges in raising money, but that Tesla is delusional in believing that it doesn't need to raise money.

Yeah, but Musk always said that he won't raise money, but does so anyway.

I bet you Musk does another stock offering by the end of the year. Its kind of a yearly-tradition at this point, with exception of 2014 when Musk decided to raise a few billion in bonds instead.

Tesla automotive does not have a 20% margin, it's much closer to 10%. In the '18-H letter they claimed 20% margins including ZEV/GHG credits and added back Services & Other (in all Tesla 10-Q's the Services & Other are subtracted). Tesla calculates gross margin by not only including the ZEV/GHG credits but by basing the margin on the retail price of the vehicle rather than the bulk invoice. Cost of stores and R&D expense are also omitted from the gross margin.

Can you point to a source ? I am looking at Q2 statement and gross margin before ZEV is 20%. With ZEV it is 21%. It's on page 2 here

http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/7235e525-db16-470c-8dce-9ec...

Also, gross margin is literally margin after cost of goods. Doesn't include SG&A expense.

>I am looking at Q2 statement and gross margin before ZEV is 20%. With ZEV it is 21%.

The statement given is ex ZEV and stock based comp, not ex ZEV/GHG and Services/Other. ZEV/GHG accounted for ~2% of margin in the first half of 2018 while Services/Other accounted for a little over 5%. Check the 10-Qs.

> Also, gross margin is literally margin after cost of goods. Doesn't include SG&A expense.

Most OEMs use the delta between the retail price and the bulk invoice including cost of stores to calculate their margin.

Sorry, it took me a while to get back. Why would stock based comp be included in gross margin ? That is not part of Cost of Goods sold. That is reflected in net income.

I have no idea what your last statement means. There is US Accounting definition of what gross margin is and it is Revenue - Cost of Goods. Other expenses such as compensation, stores, are part of operational expense and it included in net income.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin

I don't think you'll find many people claiming that Tesla is on the brink of bankruptcy. You'll find plenty of people saying that the stock is overvalued and they bet it will go down (possibly to zero over a longer time horizon).

The point is that if Tesla wants to remain solvent then it will be forced to offer an attractive chunk of equity as part of a raise, and that will be a blow to the share price. They're out of assets to put up as security and their unsecured debt is already yielding north of 8%. They'll have to offer equity.

Who cares if they offer equity ? Would anybody remember that 5 years from now ? I have no recollection of when they raised equity in the past.

With its unsecured 2025 bonds trading at 83 cents on the dollar and an SEC investigation ongoing, they might have to accept a lot of equity dilution on a raise big enough to keep them operating. 10% dilution in exchange for operating cash that will be promptly burned would add 10% more headwind on their earnings per share. If the market had at least to some extent believed Musk that another raise was unnecessary then that would negatively affect the share price.

I have a friend who bought a Tesla and is now asking for a buy-back. His experience has convinced me the negative hype isn't all just shorts propagandizing and "Musk fatigue." This company has huge, huge problems.

When he first got the Tesla it had huge body panel alignment problems. Eventually these were fixed, but it took too long and was difficult to get Tesla to fully acknowledge them.

After that he had a range of little annoying problems, many of which were likely software bugs, but then he (actually his GF) experienced something in autopilot mode known on the Tesla forums as "shadow braking" -- the car braking hard on the highway because it seems to see the shadow of an overpass and think it's a wall. This is extremely dangerous. It was on the I-405 (SoCal) going 70-80mph, and such a thing could easily cause a rear end collision.

At that point they're starting the process of returning the car. Not only have there been many problems including a major safety issue, but Tesla has apparently been evasive and difficult getting them fixed.

I hate to type this because I love most of what Musk has done and I really credit Tesla with helping get the ball rolling on EVs. EVs are tipping now, and I'm not sure that would have happened without Tesla. It at least would likely have taken longer. But... it is what it is. I'm just telling the truth.

Reading between the lines a little Musk seems horribly burnt out. If I could give him advice I'd say pass Tesla to someone with more experience in the car industry, start gracefully exiting Tesla, take a break and do a little personal inventory, and then focus 100% on SpaceX. The latter is the far more important of the two companies and is in much better shape. I also feel like it's his real true love.

If Telsa can't be righted its fate will probably be purchase (or purchase of its assets in bankruptcy) by another car company. That's fine. As I said: EVs are tipping.

Finally to speculate a bit... I wonder if Tesla is an indirect victim of the latest wave of AI hype? It seems like they were on the right track until they decided to go all in and shift their major focus from making a great electric "driver's car" to self-drive or bust. Self-drive probably consumed insane amounts of capital, and has greatly harmed the company's reputation by causing serious accidents because it is clearly not ready.

The shadow braking thing really reveals how primitive "AI" actually is-- this is something a bumblebee would not do, and its brain consumes milliwatts of power. From what I've read self-drive is really just object recognition combined with spatial mapping, path finding, and a lot of heuristics. The latter is what worries me. "Expert systems" can't capture complex problem domains due to the exponential nature of a combinatorial explosion. There will always be edge cases. Needless to say we will not be uploading consciousness anytime soon, nor will fully autonomous AIs be taking over the world.

Sorry to take things off-topic but

>Needless to say we will not be uploading consciousness anytime soon

I'd say that uploading consciousness is an entirely orthogonal problem to AI. Uploading a consciousness is all about scanning the brain and simulating it accurately. It doesn't involve any AI since the intelligence already exists. Conversely if you succeeded with uploading it wouldn't necessarily help with AI, since it would still be hard to see how the brain was working.

So I don't think progress in one field can tell you anything about the other.

I feel like the comment was poking fun at the "fields", which are so hyped that they might as well be called hunting for the philosopher's stone.

Where do you upload it to? What hardware? How much RAM? What's the CPU's clockspeed? Bus speed? Those are the right questions to ask when researching a new electronic gadget's capabilities, but I'm sure those are the wrong questions to ask if presented with hardware that could hold consciousness. Humanity understands so very little about consciousness, that, were we able to simulate it under the umbrella of AI, it would still advance the pre-natal field of uploaded digital consciousness.

I can think of specific exceptions, especially using a very strict definition of the field of AI research, that says that the fields are separate, but until we've succeeded at both, it's impossible to say what was actually necessary in order to get there.

>After that he had a range of little annoying problems, many of which were likely software bugs, but then he (actually his GF) experienced something in autopilot mode known on the Tesla forums as "shadow braking" -- the car braking hard on the highway because it seems to see the shadow of an overpass and think it's a wall. This is extremely dangerous. It was on the I-405 (SoCal) going 70-80mph, and such a thing could easily cause a rear end collision.

Why is he not leaving the beta of Autopilot then? The car would still be better than the competition in most domain (acceleration, navigation, range...) wouldn't it?

Does your friend believe the car is worthless if it isn't on Autopilot? All benchmarks of driver assist systems show that Tesla is far better than comparable cars, so it's pretty dumb to ask for a buy-back for a car because of such a small and extra feature. He could have asked for a buy-back of the Autopilot option but then, your comment wouldn't add to the conversation (that would be a non story, actually, considering all the Tesla owners who love it).

What does he think of the rest of the car?

It's been an overall bad experience. Here's a rough chronology:

(1) Serious and clearly visible body panel alignment issues. They got fixed, but it took a while and Tesla didn't have a loaner car. There was also a scratch on the car when it was delivered.

(2) Door handles not extending. This problem occurred multiple times. The first "fix" was to reboot the computer.

(3) A whole host of software bugs including constant apparently false (according to Tesla) warnings about suspension problems, inability to pair with Bluetooth devices, UI glitches, inability to lock the car (turned out this was a 'feature' but one with no documentation and no UI feedback), etc.

(4) Dangerous autopilot failure modes.

The car's drive train is indeed excellent. It accelerates great, has great range, and performs and drives well. The rest of the car however is really problematic.

The big thing causing him to want to return the car is that Tesla service has apparently been less than helpful and evasive. It's been back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... The dangerous failure modes in the autopilot are the brick that broke the camel's back.

He said he's been many times more patient than Tesla than he would have been with any other car company because he like me believes in what Tesla is trying to do.

Given that Tesla owners are the most satisfied (cf. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/12/21/tesla-po...), that implies that the other owners are even more happy with their Tesla that I would have expected.

All surveys about panel gaps points to Tesla being above average (expect in the first few cars out of the line, which are generally owned by employees).

If your friends' Tesla has serious software bug, I'm curious to know his experience with other brands! Unless he can't stand a small bug in an optional, beta feature.

As for autopilot, he knows he can turn the autosteer off and still get the best ADAS available on the market?

>inability to lock the car (turned out this was a 'feature' but one with no documentation and no UI feedback), etc.

I don't own a Tesla and only test drive one and somehow I was aware of that. Looks like PEBCAK to me.

Most of this you’re arguing against someone’s subjective opinions, which makes no sense. They are unhappy with the car and service and are taking advantage of a program to return the car. This is how it’s supposed to work. The customer has less bad will against the company and gets out of a car they don’t like. And other potential customers can see that there is less risk for them is they don’t like their new Tesla.

But this part...

Unless he can't stand a small bug in an optional, beta feature.

That’s not okay. Shadow braking is not a small bug. It’s a dangerous thing that can happen. Calling something “beta” doesn’t work when you’re driving down the road at 70 MPH. That’s just plain dangerous. Putting something like that out into the public as a “beta” feature puts not only the customer but everyone else on the road in danger.

I have no problem with a company testing car features on the road with test drivers who are well trained (with well marked cars). But “beta” doesn’t belong on the highway in the hands of a customer.

>If your friends' Tesla has serious software bug, I'm curious to know his experience with other brands!

Most brands have actual knobs and handles instead of putting everything in a digital interface in the entertainment console.

He showed me pictures. The panel issues were really bad. It wasn't something you had to squint to see. It was visible from a distance. There was also a clearly visible scratch on the delivered vehicle.

Maybe he got a "lemon," but in that case Tesla should have been much more ready to fix or exchange the vehicle instead of dragging their feet and arguing over minutia.

I also question what's happening at Tesla when they even ship a vehicle with such obvious defects to a customer.

My Subaru never shadow brakes. Its driver assistance technology is certainly more rudimentary than Tesla's (only has lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control, and the adaptive cruise control doesn't see speedups far ahead and doesn't catch people switching into my lane until they're already halfway switched), but it is very reliable at doing what I expect to, and not having any dangerous shadow-braking like that.

> My Subaru never shadow brakes.

Do your Subaru is electric? Does it range compare to the Model 3? How does it compare to its acceleration?

Don't ever buy a product for a feature in beta. For the sake of anyone, never ever EVER do that.

My Subaru is not electric. Its range is significantly higher than the Model 3. It has much lower acceleration, but it's plenty to meet my needs (and indeed, I did not get the version with higher engine power because I do not need high acceleration). It also cost me half as much as a Model 3 would.

On the other hand, none of the features on my Subaru are in beta. Most importantly, it has fully functioning adaptive cruise control, which is a crucial feature for making highway drives more pleasant (particularly when driving in traffic), and in this day and age, I wouldn't buy a commuter vehicle which lacks a fully functioning adaptive cruise control system.

Indeed, though I think tesla is part of a strategic solar plan, so losing one pillar could see the roof fall.

"The shadow braking thing really reveals how primitive "AI" actually is-- this is something a bumblebee would not do, and its brain consumes milliwatts of power."

I'm not impressed with self-driving AI so far, but I think you should be fair if you're comparing it to bugs. Insects are notoriously not good at avoiding collisions on the highways.

I'm comparing path finding and other navigational and body maneuvering abilities within the context of their world and constraints. Insects are very good at navigating their space and other very complex behaviors that are at least as difficult as driving a car.

I was comparing the two to illustrate how far behind biology we still are when it comes to AI. Our AIs consume hundreds or thousands of watts and are demonstrably inferior to the brains of insects that consume milliwatts. We are many orders of magnitude behind what biological brains can do both in absolute terms and in terms of efficiency. The difference in efficiency is so large I think it argues strongly for unknown unknowns -- things living brains are doing that we simply don't understand at all.

"Insects are very good at navigating their space and other very complex behaviors that are at least as difficult as driving a car."

And yet, they are commonly seen splattered over the front of cars. Which is failing at exactly the same problem driving AI needs to solve.

You seem to be dismissing this as not part of "their world", but if we're going to compare them at all, I think it is. Conversely, avoiding being eaten is not something driving AI needs to solve.

> After that he had a range of little annoying problems, many of which were likely software bugs, but then he (actually his GF) experienced something in autopilot mode known on the Tesla forums as "shadow braking" -- the car braking hard on the highway because it seems to see the shadow of an overpass and think it's a wall. This is extremely dangerous. It was on the I-405 (SoCal) going 70-80mph, and such a thing could easily cause a rear end collision.

This is a known issue. It isn't a software bug. It is autopilot learning that the overpass isn't a tractor trailer or other large object the camera can't discriminate crossing the path of the vehicle. [1] It was introduced after this fatality [2].

With that said, if that causes concern for the driver, the vehicle isn't for them.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...

[2] https://electrek.co/2016/07/01/understanding-fatal-tesla-acc...

Holy shit!!!?!

Potential life threatening maneuvers on the road are a feature of the self-learning Autopilot system???? Because without it the car will just ram itself into a wall???

>With that said, if that causes concern for the driver, the vehicle isn't for them.

What if it causes concern for the driver behind them, what then? My family will get a settlement after a Tesla kills me?

How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere???

> How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere?

Because product defects don't (in general) make the car illegal, they just incur strict liability for the manufacturer (and the chain of commerce, but in Tesla’s case that's moot except as to defects that originate upstream of them, since they sell direct to consumer) when they cause damages.

The driver behind a vehicle is primarily responsible for any rear end collision (US-specific, YMMV elsewhere). Should probably not tailgate a Tesla (or tailgate in general).

> How the fuck are these cars legal anywhere???

They're legal because Autopilot is driver assistance. The driver is still 100% responsible, just as they would be for cruise control.

> The driver behind a vehicle is primarily responsible for any rear end collision (US-specific, YMMV elsewhere).

Not if you slam on the brakes without cause on the highway.

Here is the general state statute you're up against (as the person rear ending someone on the interstate):

“Any person driving a vehicle on a highway shall drive the same at a careful and prudent speed not greater than nor less than is reasonable and proper, having due regard to the traffic, surface and width of the highway and any other conditions then existing, and no person shall drive any vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than will permit the driver to bring it to a stop within the assured clear distance ahead.”

Maybe if you have a dash cam. Maybe if you can prove there was nothing in front of the person in front of you. Lot of maybes.

You've described the statute in some state for spacing between cars or something, but in some states "brake checking" is mentioned explicitly in the criminal code, and in others it can be prosecuted as vehicular assault. It's harder to prove without a dashcam, but if there are witnesses it is certainly possible.

That's a bit of a sideshow. Tesla needs to worry about the civil liability involved in making a car that stops suddenly in the middle of the road. For example, "The driver is still 100% responsible, just as they would be for cruise control" is absolutely not going to impress anyone as a defense if there is enough property damage or personal injury involving such a feature to justify a class action.

> For example, "The driver is still 100% responsible, just as they would be for cruise control" is absolutely not going to impress anyone as a defense if there is enough property damage or personal injury involving such a feature to justify a class action.

Class action vs. direct action is immaterial; Tesla can't disclaim it's liability for manufacturing g defects even if it tried, and stating that the driver remains responsible for following traffic laws isn't even superficially a disclaimer of product defect liability anyway.

Product defect liability is strict liability for damages produced, and there's a fairly high bar for excluding liability due to intervening causes which would not generally apply to the simple negligence of a driver (either of a Tesla or the other involved vehicle) which contributed to a collision where the defective operation of an assist system was also a contributing cause.

If you’re not at a safe following distance behind the car in front of you, regardless of why they’re stopping, your driving skills are deficient. Following distances don’t change because it’s a Tesla; you shouldn’t follow closely as a tire blowout or a piece of debris falling into the path of travel of the vehicle in front of you is just as possible. Im sure there are states with more strict statues; they aren’t the majority of states.

Anyone can sue anyone in the US. Take it up with their general counsel.

Being in a car is life-threatening.

Which is why there are so many laws and regulations surrounding them, the most basic of which is a technical inspection every few years.

If your brakes don't work your car is illegal on the road (at least here in Europe). But apparently if its a software bug in the brakes then its okay to drive it around...

The number of question marks and exclamation points in your original post does not fit the relative severity of the issue you are describing. If you used that many question marks to describe a car with an imperfect auto-braking system, I can't imagine how many you'd use to describe a car with a human braking system. In the U.S., those humans fail to brake, with consequences, 2.5 million times a year. https://www.scmitchell.com/blog/2017/may/rear-end-collisions...

Even when self-driving cars become popular, people will still be injured and die in them. And it won't be just a subset of the people who would have died without such cars. It will almost certainly be a different, randomly selected group of people. If it's your time to go, does it matter to you whether you died because a texting teenager slammed into your stopped car? Or because an edge case triggered in a car's software? The former case is just stupid. The latter case is something society can learn from and prevent from ever happening again.

If you are in favor of more people dying in "normal" accidents, then by all means, please continue expressing your outrage.

The cost of progress in this area is computers making mistakes instead of people making them.

The US NHTSA and state regulators have allowed Tesla to continue to offer Autopilot, therefore I believe your argument to be invalid (versus that of domain experts), although you are entitled to your opinion.

There is no way that Autopilot is worse than human drivers: https://i.imgur.com/au8A1o3.gifv

Oh well then I guess high speed braking maneuvers on a highway without user input are just fine then.

Hard braking at 80mph isn't as dangerous as not seeing a tractor trailer, but it could definitely cause a serious accident.

I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar. You need that to compensate for the fact that the AI actually driving the car is less intelligent than a honeybee.

A self-drive "AI" is dumb. It's just a glorified expert system with a lot of pattern recognition and other stuff bolted on. But the performance of dumb things can sometimes be improved by giving them more information. Self-driving cars need super-human senses.

Lidar is doubly special because its an active sensing system. If the car hits an undecidable edge case it can probe it to see if it's physical or a lighting artifact. It needs to be able to do this because it has no higher order conceptual model of the world to reference. It doesn't "know" what an overpass or the sun "are."

Edit: This principle is also why "big data" has helped revive "AI." We need big data because our AI isn't very I. Biological intelligences do incredible things with very small amounts of data because they have more I. What's so impressive about biology is what it can do with small data.

> I'm starting to understand why all the other self-drive companies use active sensors like lidar.

Every roboticist since the DARPA Grand Challenge knew this, as every team that finished had a Velodyne LIDAR. It was THE piece of tech that made that race possible. So for everyone who learned that lesson, to then see Telsas out on public roads with a feature called "autopilot" that did not have any LIDAR sensor attached to it... well... Let's just say we've been saying "I told you so" since then.

I think it's a little early for people who don't "do" to call it that LIDAR is mandatory, and that optics and radar aren't sufficient. Autopilot is still in development.

LIDAR is not necessarily categorically mandatory, but shadow braking and other autopilot failure modes demonstrate that it or something with its capabilities are probably necessary right now to enable today's "AI" to safely drive a car. My point about active sensing being able to decide edge cases explains why this is likely the case.

IMHO doing without precise active sensing would require a breakthrough in AI that hasn't happened yet.

On the plus side the fact that Tesla's autopilot is able to work as well as it does without lidar might indicte that with a lidar system it might be the best autopilot on the market. Who knows.

Seems weird that the Tesla can't infer that there is no wall there from GPS data.

What if a wall is there tomorrow?

They do over time. The vehicle “learns” from no impact at the overpass and uploads that to the mothership for fleet-wide distribution.

Obviously LIDAR is not mandatory. We have a billion proof of concept controllers that only use binocular image data to navigate just fine. So one day ostensibly that could be enough. But we need a computer as good as the human brain to make it work, and that's not happening anytime soon. So until then, dropping LIDAR from the sensor suite is really going to limit your performance.

It's clearly a software defect. I don't know how you could possibly claim otherwise. The reasons behind the defect are irrelevant from a customer standpoint.

A human driver who did that during a driver's license test would be failed.

"If you don't want your Tesla slamming on the brakes on a highway at 80mph, don't buy a Tesla."

You must own a lot of Tesla shares to make such a ridiculous statement.

> You must own a lot of Tesla shares

I do, but I also entrust my wife and kids in a Model S. I specifically bought the Model S (a used 75D) for them due to its safety record. That's worth far more to me than any Tesla shares. With that said, my wife is aware under what conditions it is safe to engage Autopilot, and is also aware that she is still the responsible party if an accident happens when it's engaged. She doesn't use her phone, she doesn't not pay attention, she is babysitting the vehicle while at speed and still has final authority.

> to make such a ridiculous statement.

You think the statement is ridiculous. 40,000 people a year die in the US driving due to human decisions. Several friends I attended high school with were killed in car accidents. Loved ones have been killed in car accidents. I don't think my statement is ridiculous in that context. These sorts of efforts are necessary to move the needle on transportation safety. Perfectly happy with my TSLA shares going to zero in the process, as long as progress is made.

The ridiculous thing I was commenting on was your suggestion that if sudden high-speed braking maneuvers on a highway were "cause for concern" then you shouldn't buy a Tesla. MV death statistics are completely irrelevant to that point.

Your issue isn't with my suggestion, it's with regulations that specifically allow Autopilot to continue to be sold and engaged in Tesla vehicles.

"The vehicle could do X while under your control. If you are not comfortable with X occurring while under your control, do not buy the vehicle (or buy the vehicle, but do not purchase Autopilot). The vehicle feature that could cause this is still permitted by regulators to be functional. You are solely responsible for the actions of the vehicle while operating it."

As someone who may be behind a auto-brake slamming Tesla one day, where is my opt-out from this dangerous beta?

> where is my opt-out

Don’t tailgate.

That's not a panacea. Realistically, you can easily be rear-ended because you slowed or stopped for a traffic jam caused by something like that Tesla. It is a fantasy that people are in control of every significant danger around them.

Your stopping distance should always allow for the slamming on the brakes of the car in front. If not, you are tailgating by definition.

The scenario is that I am at a standstill because the car in front of me stopped, and am then rear-ended by someone who didn't notice traffic was stopped. Legally, the car behind me is probably responsible, but the car in front of me contributed.

A randomly stopping car is dangerous even to people who aren't tailgating. A human would be charged with dangerous driving for that - which is a felony in my jurisdiction.

Both behaviours aren't great, but the at-fault driver would be at the back. Even though the stopping frequently randomly is likely more dangerous.

Fault isn't necessarily exclusive, and drivers of the front vehicle in a rear end collision may be at (legal) fault. [0]

More importantly for discussion of an automated system shadow braking, however, fault of drivers based on negligence (or more serious mental states, like recklessness) is a separate concept from fault of manufacturers for product defects (which is based on strict liability, not negligence, and therefore bars to liability based on negligence of the injured party due to contributory or modified comparative negligence theories would not generally apply; liability might be barred on a theory of superseding intervening cause, but that would require the intervening cause to be unforseeable—too close freeway following is not so rare as to be an unforseeable intervening cause and thus would not usually limit recovery on a strict liability product defect claim.)

[0] see, e.g., https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-fault-automatic-r...

Kind of depressing that yours is the top comment, given how many outright lies it is based on.

>From the outside it looks like Telsa is about going to go into a tough winter like moment.

From the outside, it looks like they have a product that's a generation ahead of the competition and is flying off the shelves.

> They need to start designing and building out manufacturing facilities for their next car and the help bolster Model X manufacturing.

They are. Apart from the Shangai one, they've never actually stopped building the Reno factory, which still has to triple in size before it reaches its final form.

>They are cash flow negative, they have about a year of cash runway left( optimistically)

Based on 2 quarters during which they built up a factory. Their guidance for Q3 or Q4 has them turning a profit. Usually, people doing these wild extrapolations form the basis of jokes (ie Discu Stu's record sales).

> And the most worrying thing for them is that their next car will compete head on with Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and GM. That will be the first time they've had to compete head on with a competitor.

This is growing the EV market as a whole. Tesla does not want to own 100% of a sub-5% EV market. They want to own a decent chunck of a 100% EV market.

People really, really don't like hearing this particular point, but their cars are approximately a generation ahead of other EVs. Specs wise, Taycan and EQC are essentially matching a 2016-era Model S / Model X and will be available about 2 years from now.

Everybody seems to have forgotten how the Bolt was supposed to be the "Tesla Killer". Look, I even found one specifically from the same source as this article: https://twitter.com/business/status/554725778420957184

Then people were "worried" about their ability to manufacture at scale: https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HkNUFo57f

The problem is that when you actually have to put real money down and these theoretical comparisons become real, things go the opposite direction. Current Bolt sales are flat/declining around ~1500/month, while Tesla is pushing out 5000+ Model 3s per week.

> Specs wise, Taycan and EQC are essentially matching a 2016-era Model S / Model X and will be available about 2 years from now.

A 2016-era Model S is very, very similar to a 2012 era Model S, and a 2019-era Model S looks a lot like a 2016-era one with a less-safeguarded but comparably capable cruise control added on. The Model 3, as far as I know, is similar but hopefully has less technical debt.

As far as I can tell, Tesla leads in four respects:

- A good drivetrain. It’s impressive to build a reliable <300lb motor-and-controller-in-a-box that outputs up to ~400kW and is efficient at a wide range of operating points. But everyone else will get it eventually. As far as I know, it’s not actually that hard.

- A willingness to put monster screens and few buttons in a car. It’s unclear that this is actually a good thing. Certainly every other major manufacturer could follow suit if they wanted.

- Cruise control that claims to self-drive. Enough said.

- Cachet. Teslas are sexy.

- Superchargers. This is a big deal. The technology is boring. The fact that they’ve built and deployed a bunch of them is important.

Your post is spot on except, I think, for the point about any other major manufacturer being able to make the switch over to a screen based interface. I think that's far from clear. Building the whole user experience from navigation to climate control to the app on your phone to control everything remotely requires a very different skillset from the firmware type development that car manufacturers are used to. This might be one of those things like when smartphones appeared and makers of feature phones found that the whole game had changed from making great hardware to making great software. Elon Musk talks about a marketplace for apps to run on your car, which is a bit much, but integrations with smart homes and solar systems for power management or first class car-to-car communications could be key differentiators. Software is a totally different game.

Software done well is a different game. Tesla’s touchscreen software quality, at least for the Model S, appears to be very, very low. There were some fun posts on HN earlier about a former Tesla employee whose NDA expired talking about the software.

A couple of decent embedded Qt developers should be able to cranks out a system of comparable quality in a few months. The major exception is the map app, which would take at least some real effort.

> Kind of depressing that yours is the top comment, given how many outright lies it is based on.

Most of the time I comment, its more to get my ideas clarified, if you think I've outright lied then please correct me.

As your comment stands you didn't actually refute any of my points.

Is the Reno factory going to be building cars if not then its irrelevant to the topic of factories to build cars with?

The China factory hasn't started yet, so I think I'm on strong footing with this.

Tesla has also been cash flow negative for not just two quarters, but almost its entire life, now to be fair to Tesla, this was by design. It's possible with all the cost cutting and M3 sales that they could be profitable in Q3 but does anyone think they have finally turned the corner and will leave their trail of losses behind them?

I'm not convinced of that:)

I'm looking for actual thoughtful dissent to change my mind, but so far you haven't actually provided any facts or even opinions to show "outright lies" in my statement.

> Most of the time I comment, its more to get my ideas clarified

As others have noted in this thread, the unceasing torrent of negativity around Tesla has made it practically impossible to tell trolls and haters apart from regular folk. So how can I tell from your writing which one you are? Honest question here. Does your writing express doubt, pose questions, use qualifications? Or is it judgemental and prescriptive?

After all, commenting takes time, why would you expect others to invest their time in responding throughtfully to you, when you come across as simply wanting validation for your negativity from the echo chamber?

> The China factory hasn't started yet, so I think I'm on strong footing with this.

You mean they're not building the physical building at the moment? No, but they've signed the agreement with the government, hired people, etc. So they've started on it, and it will make cars. But... that doesn't confirm your pre-existing views, so you have to discard it.

> Tesla has also been cash flow negative for not just two quarters, but almost its entire life

No, you said they have a one year of cash left. That's only at the rate they were spending when building their factory. If they're not spending at that scale, they have years left. You're trying to change your assumptions, while keeping your original views.

> I'm not convinced of that:)

Yes, but have you actually purchased on EV in the last year? I mean, it's really easy to hold any opinion you want when it costs you nothing (actually, here it gets you internet points, because negative denouncements are rewarded handsomely). But what would happen if you had to actually pay tens of thousands of dollars based on your opinion?

I mean, you said they'll have to compete with GM, completely ignoring the reality that they are competing with GM today https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9dm0i2/the_tes...

> I'm looking for actual thoughtful dissent to change my mind

I don't see that at all. I think you just want the echo chamber to confirm your views. How else would you explain looking at the above graph and thinking "oh boy, Tesla's gonna be in big trouble because of GM"?

Your comments have been repeatedly crossing into incivility. Could you please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing that?

Online arguments can certainly be annoying; we all feel this. That makes it more, not less, important to follow HN's rules.

compete head on with Mercedes

Tesla’s brand is strong enough that they can charge Mercedes level prices with poor quality interior fittings. Sit in a Tesla, it feels like a car costing half as much.

If Mercedes can maintain their user experience in EVs without a significant price premium, Tesla is toast.

With their current production rate they have 11 billion in revenue from the Model 3 alone.

They guidance suggest they should be profitable this quarter because as of right now they are hitting their production target.

May i see your napkin math for the 11 Billion figure?

5000 cars per week * 52 weeks * 50000 average selling price = 13 billion dollar revenue per year

I think that would be something like 5,000 cars per week times 52 weeks times the average price of 42,000 dollars per car

If they are at capacity, why don’t they charge more money?

Who says they aren't? They're already charging $60k for their "mass market" $35k sedan.

Update: I guess technically it's $50k, the other day I read the average selling price was $60k and that was stuck in my head. Regardless, far away from $35k!

Why wouldn't you build out the higher priced orders first?

The more concerning part is that they're still losing a fortune while only building out the supposedly high margin top end models.

Tesla gross margin on an AWD Model 3 with Autopilot is ~$20,000.

Twenty thousand dollars.

And they are outselling BMW’s entire passenger car lineup.

It cost them a pretty penny to get here but cash is literally pouring in for Tesla right now.

> It cost them a pretty penny to get here but cash is literally pouring in for Tesla right now.

And also pouring out, they are losing a massive amount of money every quarter.

>They are almost losing by winning. They are at capacity in their Fremont factory but still not making a profit.

Source?

They are now at capacity and they are expected (by Tesla top management) to announce profitablity for this quarter. In other words, they were not a capacity last quarter and not profitable.

That's why with the record sales and production of this summer, Q3 earnings publication will be very interesting. But we won't know the actual result until end of October. By then, the shorts (with billions in backing) will do all their best to give the company an extremely bad look. Because if Tesla manage to turn a profit this Q3, they'll lose dozens of billions. It's now or never for them.

> By then, the shorts (with billions in backing) will do all their best to give the company an extremely bad look.

Please stop with this thought process. TSLA is doing a fine job all on its own making themselves look bad. On the business side, Musk has missed how many production estimates? There are also concerns about quality. On the personal side, he's still harping on this pedophile thing /facepalm. Then what looks like a complete lie about being bought out.

The way you fix the shorts problem is to actually deliver on your promises and make some money. Deflecting that it's the shorts causing problems for TSLA is typical TSLA deflecting the horrible job they have done at running TSLA.

I don't think you realize how much FUD is disseminated daily in the mainstream media.

Take this Reuters article for instance, which has been published and translated by dozens of top newspapers: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-germany-daimler/ele...

3rd paragraph: "The market for upscale electric cars is Tesla’s to lose, with sales of its entry-level Model 3 sedan expected to reach about 50,000 cars this year and almost double that in 2019."

All sources indicates that Tesla has already produced 50K Model 3. In the first three quarters. There's is still one quarter to go in 2018. And Tesla plan to produce more than 300K Model 3 next year, not 100K.

What kind of error is that? Reuters is aware of this "mistake" and they are not correcting it. All media who published the report and were made aware of the wrong numbers kept it "as is", even though the 50K has already been proven wrong.

How can Reuters and co keep such blatant errors while knowing it's bullshit? For some reasons, the disinformation only increases as Tesla pressures the legacy automakers margin (Tesla surpassed both BMW and Mercedes in US car sales this summer while the German are losing big time).

Reuters & co might not be short themselves. But they knowingly play the short game and kep spreading the FUD ("See these terrible numbers? Who can expect Tesla to turn a profit? Now, let's hear what competitors and short sellers have to say...").

Ford makes 50-90k F-150's a month without the drama.

There is no universe where Tesla will be manufacturing 25,000 (300k/12) $40-50k cars per month. BMW alone sells something like 9,000 3-series vehicles in that price range per month. It's not credible that Tesla, with a limited sales network, limited charging infrastructure, high costs and long backlog is going to magically take away double digit percentages of the highly competitive small luxury sedan market.

They have been an amazingly innovative company. Hopefully when they do bankrupt the carcass gets picked up by a company who is a good steward of the assets.

We are practically living in that universe today — never mind once slack capacity opens up and they go down market with the standard range model at $35k.

Did you miss the report last week that Tesla is outselling BMW’s entire passenger car lineup? [1]

Also, double check your numbers - “The BMW 3 Series (the Model 3's direct competitor) sold only 3,751 cars in August.“

Tesla delivered between 17,000 - 20,000 Model 3’s in August, by comparison.

> Ford makes 50-90k F-150's a month without the drama.

“Production of the F-150, the most important vehicle in Ford’s showrooms, has ground to a halt.

Ford on Wednesday was forced to suspend all production of the F-150 after a fire at a key supplier’s manufacturing facility. It remained unclear how long the plants in Kansas City, Missouri, and Dearborn, Michigan, will need to wait before building F-150s again” [2]

That was back in May. Today they announced a recall of 2 million F150s due to a fire risk which is estimated to cost them $140 million dollars. [3]

[1] - https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2018/09/06/tesla-model-3-outsel...

[2] - https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/why-the-ford-f-150-is-a-...

[3] - https://interestingengineering.com/ford-recalls-more-than-2-...

Mmmhh, I don't understand what is meant with "selling" in the first article ("https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2018/09/06/tesla-model-3-outsel...). Is it related to "delivering" the vehicles that were ordered long time back or is it related to brand new orders for new cars?

Asking because if it's the first case then of course the comparison would not be fair.

These are cars that Tesla is collecting $50k+ at the time of delivery for each one.

Yeah there are about 400,000 people lined up to buy them, and they will keep on selling them just as fast as they can make them for many many more months.

We don’t know how many new reservation holders are being added at the end of the list, just that the total dollar value of all deposits on hand is increasing.

You’re right though it’s not a comparison. No car company in history has been able to get 400,000 people to put down $1,000 on a vehicle, sight unseen, never mind an electric one at that.

The BMW i3, by comparison, sold a grand total of 418 cars last month. No one is lining up around the block to buy that one.

Does the tesla fan really want to get in to an argument about build quality right now?

A fire at a factory shutting it down is not hte same type of drama as constantly missing estimates and using a tent to extend the line.

Fan or not, GP said there was no way Tesla could make and sell 25,000 cars a month and here they are last month selling 20,000. Would it be so shocking to see a month with 25k?

GP said Ford makes the F150s with “no drama” and yet their factory is burning and their cars are catching fire — something I recall Tesla getting flack for, but Tesla never had a $140 million recall for it.

I get it, different standards for different companies. The company making 20 mpg pickup trucks in business for 115 years I completely agree it’s a different kind of drama for their factory to burn, all F150 vehicle production to cease, and to recall 2 million vehicles for spontaneously combusting.

GP said, “It's not credible that Tesla, with a limited sales network, limited charging infrastructure, high costs and long backlog is going to magically take away double digit percentages of the highly competitive small luxury sedan market.”

Except that’s exactly what they’ve done. Fan or not, those are the facts, and I think to debate about Tesla it helps if you’re not in denial about their actual accomplishments.

Deleted comment

Incorrect.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

Tesla dropped production to 4716-ish cars this week. A few weeks ago, Tesla was at 6000 cars/week, but apparently that was unsustainable.

They're now below 5k/week and dropping. Rumors is that they have supply issues with SiC MOSFETs and can't build enough power-inverters.

Apparently Tesla is already producing 5,000 a week, which isn't very far off from 25,000 a month.

>What kind of error is that? They've aware of this, they are not correcting. All media who published the report and were made aware of the "mistake" kept it, even though the 50K is already proven wrong.

Who cares? What influence do you think this article and that estimate has?

"Disinformation"; that's laughable. Tesla and Musk are being sued and investigated for stock manipulation, but you're crying about Reuters being off on their prediction. Who is showing bias? Where is the outrage?

>And just as Tesla surpasses BMW and Mercedes in car sales in the US, it's only getting worse.

Sedan sales, while the whole industry moves to CUVs and SUVs. Do you think this is sustainable, or is it clearing a backlog? Why can you get a car in 2 weeks now?

> "Disinformation"; that's laughable. Tesla and Musk are being sued and investigated for stock manipulation, but you're crying about Reuters being off on their prediction. Who is showing bias? Where is the outrage?

I never understand how this is a legit argument.

Just because one party shows disinformation doesn't make another party's disinformation right.

>Just because one party shows disinformation

I don't think you know what disinformation is. You really believe one party is deliberately misleading, while the other is not?

> I don't think you realize how much FUD is disseminated daily in the mainstream media.

FUD is what people do to Apple when they are making money hand over fist every quarter. TSLA is just a terribly run company that may end up out of business. Which is sad, because they have what appears to be a good product. Their production arrogance may not be able to be overcome though.

This is also standard Musk to blame short-sellers for TSLAs financial and production woes. Please tell me how short-sellers impact TSLA's production floor? The short-seller problem fixes itself if TSLA ever delivers.

>And Tesla plan to produce more than 300K Model 3 next year, not 100K.

I'll be amazed if they hit that number. They had to pull out all of the stops to hit the last one.

A company that went from selling 11 cars in 2011 to 200k cars in 2018 is poorly run ?

A company that went from losing $49 million per quarter in 2011 to losing $742 million per quarter in Q2 2018 is poorly run.

Yes. That's pretty bad. Their growth is quite backwards, they've learned to lose more money over time.

http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla...

http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/7235e525-db16-470c-8dce-9ec...

Not sure what your point is. If you are growinig like crazy in a capital intense industry, you are bound to grow your loses. Tesla could have chosen to sell zero cars and have zero losses. What matters is demand and profitable unit economica (Tesla cars have healthy gross margins)

TSLA is horribly run and managed. Another responder already mentioned the losses from TSLA itself, but I think the SolarCity bailout is proof enough.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2016/07/12/ba...

>They are now at capacity and they are expected (by Tesla top management) to announce profitablity for this quarter.

Honest question: when did you start following this company? Elon has claimed profitability for years. Where is it? Where are the economies of scale that were promised?

>By then, the shorts (with billions in backing) will do all their best to give the company an extremely bad look.

The shorts will? Really? Which stories are false?

They did. I put in my order on August 1st, and they increased prices by about $1000 per car on August 3rd. I just got in before the increase.

> Tesla is one earthquake away from no longer being a company.

So is most of Silicon Valley, which is actually in an earthquake zone that some believe is overdue an earthquake.

Most of Silicon Valley is not as highly indebted as Tesla. Apple, for instance, could literally afford to send all of its employees on vacation for 10 years while their headquarters is being rebuilt, without going into debt (Not that they would, of course).

Your typical Internet startup wouldn't lose its means of production, which are people with computers, assuming they are deployed to the cloud. Even those that do any kind of hardware (say scooters) aren't the factories elsewhere and then shipped?

Are many/most companies with billion dollar valuations so exposed?

I would imagine most billion dollar companies have multiple sites and manufacturing and data centers spread across multiple sites.

As someone who's not obsessively following Tesla, I'm a bit jaded by these. I'm sure there are problems, but what feels like massive PR efforts by the "shorts" has effectively poisoned the well for negative news.

As a casual observer I can't tell what's actual bad news and what's well-orchestrated market-manipulation "OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" by people trying to drop the price, and I don't actually care enough about the company to put in the effort to find out.

Kind of depressing, really.

> I'm sure there are problems, but what feels like massive PR efforts by the "shorts" has effectively poisoned the well for negative news.

What kind of PR effort do you need when every CFO you hire keeps leaving? Think about it. The person in the company who completely knows the financials stays for a month and bounces? Why? Could it be that the financials are so bad they are unfixable? Could it be that that person is being pushed to stretch things a bit here and there to make them look better?

Deepak Ahuja has been CFO forever with a brief break in between. What are you talking about ?

Could it be it's a very intense place to work and people who get in that position decide they don't want to work the long hours when they could be making just as much money somewhere more cushy?

You're kidding right? Any CxO position at a publicly traded company is long hours with a lot of work and responsibility.

Exactly. We can be quite sure that whatever CFO Tesla hires is well-aware of the expected workload, stress levels etc in advance.

While we don't know for sure why they resign so quickly, it has to do with something surprising that happens after they join.

The CFO and those who hire him have decades of industry experience collectively. A CFO quitting so quickly is not a result desired by any of them. This is not some fluke or a minor issue.

There's no positive way to spin this.

> Any CxO position at a publicly traded company is long hours

I don't think that's true at all. The CFO/CEO at companies I've worked at are not working 120 hour weeks, and they were publicly traded. If anything, they were there about 40 hours a week.

And most CEO positions don't involve you smoking a joint on air during those 120 hours either.

This is a hilarious non-issue that pulls on antiquated notions of drug usage. This whiskey he was sipping for 2 hours in that podcast was much more harmful then that single puff of legal weed he took, but nobody cares about that.

And if everything was going well we would be talking about how hip he is, but it isn't.

When you've said you will take your company private at $420 a share, then completely back track and admit you weren't and get investigated by the FTC you invite more scrutiny than usual.

#420 #YOLO #BLAZEIT is not a good way to run a company that has three months of funding left.

I think you're mostly correct, but more or less I was just trying to suggest that there could be other reasons why people leave companies a month in, other than just sketchy, the-company-is-on-fire type issues.

There's a difference between a publicly traded company and the most talked about publicly traded company.

Why? Could it be that the financials are so bad they are unfixable? Could it be that that person is being pushed to stretch things a bit here and there to make them look better?

Maybe. Could it be that qualified people with financial backgrounds don't understand what it's like to be under THE SPOTLIGHT and think they can handle it before they get in there and say "Oh hell no" and walk?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all finance and accounting people moving up in management spend time in boot camps with training sessions for "Being a public face in a personality-driven company" and "Learning to love being vilified." That's never been my impression though. I may be stereotyping, but I think people who can thrive in that kind of public-facing position are a lot more likely to have gone into Sales or Marketing positions.

And on the internal side of things, it's probably almost as difficult dealing with an erratic and public CEO like Musk as it is dealing with an erratic and public President like Trump.

> What kind of PR effort do you need when every CFO you hire keeps leaving?

It's really gotten to a point where all the Musk-haters now believe their own bullshit. This post (and many others in HN's bi-weekly anti-Musk thread) is a classic example. Tesla had had a grand total of two CFOs since Musk took over.

> Could it be that that person is being pushed to stretch things a bit here and there to make them look better?

Could it be that that person is an alien sent from Venus to stop Musk from returning to Mars?

See, it's easy to ask stupidly leading questions and spout completely baseless speculation. What's more difficult is actually examining the facts and drawing a rational conclusion.

>See, it's easy to ask stupidly leading questions and spout completely baseless speculation. What's more difficult is actually examining the facts and drawing a rational conclusion.

In the first quarter of this year, the company lost Morton’s predecessor, Eric Branderiz, and Susan Repo, who was treasurer and vice president of finance. CFO Deepak Ahuja retired in 2015, only to return in 2017 after his successor, Jason Wheeler, quit after just 15 months.

A rotating door of financial executives screams financial problems. Please tell me what rational conclusion I'm supposed to draw?

It doesn't scream financial problems, it screams difficulty. Tesla is under a microscope, it gets lots of criticism, and it's an inherently volatile place to work because it's doing something new and uncharted. These (often) millionaires in these positions don't want to be associated with a potentially failing business and don't have the stomach to deal with the uncertainty. It says more about them than it does about Tesla.

Yeah that's not a rotating door of anything. Both those executives were with the company for 2-5 years before they decided to leave. Wheeler was almost certainly fired because Musk wanted Ahuja back. Consider that the announcement of Ahuja's return occured one day after Wheeler's announcement. Sorry, this entire narrative you have invested in of executives running for the hills just has no relation to reality.

And the head HR person.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/another-tesla-executive-leav...

> Sorry, this entire narrative you have invested in of executives running for the hills just has no relation to reality.

TSLA supporters thinking everything is fine are the ones that have no relation to reality.

yah but that's not what you said.

damn, I think Tesla is an incredibly dysfunctional company and has a lot of problems, but you're literally making things up. admit you were wrong and you're initial statement was completely inaccurate and move on.

From the original article:

Tesla has long struggled with high turnover involving its senior executives, and its finance team in particular has gone through a period of significant tumult. In the first quarter of this year, the company lost Morton’s predecessor, Eric Branderiz, and Susan Repo, who was treasurer and vice president of finance. CFO Deepak Ahuja retired in 2015, only to return last year when his successor, Jason Wheeler, quit after just 15 months.

And I said:

> A rotating door of financial executives screams financial problems.

3 (4 if you count the return of Ahuja to fill in) CFO/CAOs in the last 3 years.

- Ahuja - Wheeler - Ajuha - Branderiz - Morton

This doesn't count the VPs that have come and gone or other executives.

More than 50 vice presidents or higher have left the company in the past two years. Mr. Musk has said he sees executive turnover as being in line with that of other large companies and has announced plans for a reorganization aimed at flattening the layers of managers. [1]

Please tell me where I'm making things up.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-appears-to-smoke-mari...

So then short the company and make your money? Why do you have to publicly trash talk them so hard if your analysis has merit?

I was long TSLA for a long time and made good money. I sold them off in the $350s once I decided they still had a very long road ahead, and they were already priced to execute perfectly. I've shorted them off and on, but shorting requires more time than I have to spend watching stocks right now.

Other problems with shorting is that the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. TSLA has a huge fanboy level following that ignores any financial metric. I almost entered another short after the $420 tweet, but I thought no way would Musk commit fraud and lie.

> Why do you have to publicly trash talk them so hard if your analysis has merit?

I also do not think pointing out facts is trashing them. Again, all of this bad news and press is of TSLAs/Musk own doing. Stop over promising and under delivering. Stop acting crazy in public. Stop losing $700M+/quarter. Stop committing what looks like fraud.

It's a public startup company with ~$45bn of market cap.

A lot of people want to jump on the hypetrain but once they realize it takes actual work to get this company from Elon's wild dream to a steady-state market leading EV manufacturer while working under pressure from an obsessive man and near limitless public scrutiny, they immediately jump ship.

> but once they realize it takes actual work to get this company from Elon's wild dream

If what you claim was true, Musk is not good at picking people. CxO level hires are not people who managed to breeze through an HR phone interview, they are vetted by the CEO himself.

Yes, Musk has no experience running a company this big -- he's clearly bursting at the seams -- so it's not surprising that he's not good at picking people. He's also known to be obsessive and I don't think anyone has ever described him as a great team player, so it's not surprising that he picks terrible teams.

CFO and Chief of HR both left? coincidence? must just be the shorts and their propagandizing

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/another-tesla-executive-leav...

Chief Accounting Officer != CFO

"Shorts" didn't cause the CEO to invent a $420/share offer for the company out of whole cloth, nor did they force him to smoke a blunt on video. The mental gymnastics you have to do not see the red flags here, completely the result of the CEO's actions and mismanagement, is something.

Neither of those things bother me. Being a conformist is not a virtue in a business culture marked by top-heavy bureaucracy, mediocrity, me-too hype chasing, and slow decline. Economists, board members, bankers, c-level execs - the shot callers of the world are much less clever and equipped to lead than they collectively think they are. If you think hitting a joint is a red flag, I wonder what kind. It's just showmanship - he's building up his normal-guy folk-hero persona. It means nothing else, is completely harmless.

> Economists, board members, bankers, c-level execs - the shot callers of the world are much less clever and equipped to lead than they collectively think they are.

I completely agree with this, but disagree that Musk is constructively channeling his creativity and nonconformity here. He's trying to pivot from a niche product for tech enthusiasts to a mass market car, with a client base whose first questions will be about the car's reliability, not how quickly it can go 0 - 60. A guy who flies off to Thailand, accuses people of being pedophiles, curses out journalists, and yes, smokes a huge blunt during an interview, does not inspire confidence to most people at a time when his company is hemorrhaging cash, straining to meet production goals, slashing investments in the future, and losing senior execs left and right.

If Tesla was humming along it'd be one thing to have more of this edge, but to me this looks like a slow motion breakdown prompted by deep problems at his company.

To me, the senior execs leaving is what's probative. Reading between the lines, the CFO left because he feels Musk is unstable and doesn't know what to expect. I take that as much more significant than my own perception of Musk or some random person on the internet. Also, I tend to discount FUD about cash and production goals, but again, I weight the insiders' actions much more highly.

He also drank whisky. In California, those are both legal.

legal != smart

It's probably only "not smart" because you're assuming some hypothetical people are going to be hypothetically upset about the weed use when they have no real reason to be. In effect, you'd be that reactionary person you're worried about.

If Tesla needs more money, investors will use that as a leverage to get the Elon Musk problem addressed.

It would be good for everyone if there is intervention that corrects the problem and Musk could continue. Investors can demand to have someone who can veto his craziest decisions and publicity or they can force him out. Musk has structured the board so that nobody has power over him. He must know that if asks more money that changes.

Musk seems to be highly functioning bipolar (he thinks so himself). It's probably mild form of bipolar disorder called cyclothymic disorder or something similar. People with cyclothymia are at increased risk of developing full-blown bipolar disorder over time.

The problem is that that his mental issues may get out of hand during stressful situations. Musk has been showing signs of slipping from hypomania to full mania for the last year: little sleep, endless energy, lowered inhibitions, erratic quick decisions and unnecessary confrontations. If he publicly calls people he has never met pedophiles, I just can't imagine how bad the situation is with the people who have to deal with him every day.

Musk has already achieved so much. It would be shame if it all ends in tragedy.

>If Tesla needs more money, investors will use that as a leverage to get the Elon Musk problem addressed.

Sounds you are lost into your own bubble. Every vote for removing Musk has failed completely in the past.

Those votes have failed due to how the company's voting structure is set up. It takes about 90% of the vote outside of Musk and insiders to oust him.

They barely hit single-digits though.

The first line I wrote addressees this issue.

That changes when Musk wants to raise more money next time. Investors can use their power and set the conditions.

Due to how the voting shares are allocated, it takes about 90% of votes outside of Musk and company insiders to oust him.

Voting structure has nothing to do with raising money. Investors have leverage over terms when company is in trouble and finding it hard to raise money. They can include terms that can limit CEO power or change his/her behavior. Typical way they might do this is by demanding board seats and taking control over hiring of CxOs. Voting structure can become more or less irrelevant when you are in desperate need to raise money.

"Musk seems to be highly functioning bipolar"

It could be that pot is exacerbating problems with that.

>>get the Elon Musk problem addressed.

That's like addressing the Steve Jobs problem in Apple, Bill Gates problem in Microsoft, Thoman Edison problem in GE etc.

There is a reason why car manufacturers despite sitting on those 100s of billions of $s arent able to hold a candle to Tesla.

Some people are irreplaceable.

You can't go to Harvard get an MBA to become Thomas Alva Edison.

Here's the none-AMP Bloomberg article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-07/tesla-chi...

I just watched a part of the Joe Rogan podcast with Musk and I have to say he looks very unhealthy. Maybe I am wrong but to me he looks like he is drinking a lot or on some other drugs.

I can imagine working with a CEO who is pushing himself way other the limit is a pretty unpleasant experience.

Didn't he actually smoke weed live as part of that broadcast?

He had a single puff and did not appear to inhale (his body language made it look like he was a very inexperienced smoker). He said he'd tried it before but wasn't a big fan (a pretty common experience).

edit: people are going to need to get used to the fact that weed is going to become as normalized as alcohol (which is a harder drug than weed).

Sigh. I suspect you're right about the normalization, I just absolutely hate the smell of it. I grew up on the East Coast, where cigarette smoking was commonplace, and I always found it revolting. Here in the Bay Area, I've had a few years to enjoy the relative scarcity of tobacco smoke, and now suddenly cannabis is out in the open. Seems like there's no escape from second-hand smoke.

Smoking it in public is obnoxious I agree. Hopefully people choose to eat or vapourize it rather than burn it.

Is he human after all?

>I just watched a part of the Joe Rogan podcast with Musk and I have to say he looks very unhealthy.

What does that even mean? can you use your words to describe what you mean by unhealthy? were you able to see his blood pressure through the tint in his skin?

Your comment is spam especially when everyone knows the hours that he works.

"What does that even mean? can you use your words to describe what you mean by unhealthy"

His skin looks grayish, he looks tired. Don't you ever see people and think "he/she doesn't look good"?

It's very possible that I am wrong but he looks like somebody who should take a vacation to heal and get some clarity back. The fact that he is picking fights with cave divers while his company is in serious trouble shows to me that he is not thinking clearly and doesn't have his priorities straight. If I worked overtime to meet deadlines at Tesla I would be very concerned if my CEO didn't focus 100% on the company.

That's what Elon looks like.

I disagree. There have been times where he looks like he feels great, is on fire, excited about everything, even when he’s overworked beyond measure. He’s obviously tired, but clearly fulfilled and proud of what he’s doing. He’s exhausted in all the right ways.

This was much more of a defeated look.

I'm not losing optimism because of this. Musk fits right into the current political & cultural trajectory and the Tesla brand is sleek & timeless. The media is framing Musk's flaws (Twitter insults, weed & booze) as a bad thing, but outside of the media, people do not care about such things nearly as much. It just requires a few years of optimization and the cars are going to be en par with established brands.

Musk is truly visionary. But that doesn't dictate success.

> It just requires a few years of optimization and the cars are going to be en par with established brands.

The world is littered with visionary companies that paved the way for new technology but ultimately failed themselves. "A few years of optimization" gravely undervalues the complexity of modern auto manufacturing. I will concede that it's astonishing that Tesla has come so far, so fast. But perhaps this is time for an inflection point.

> people do not care about such things nearly as much.

You're right that Tesla's customers aren't influenced much by this news in particular. But Tesla's long-term success will be impacted by their capability to attract talent. If Musk drives away all the talented R&D, marketing, finance leaders, he'll be stuck with second-rate talent. It's clear that he has shown that there's a luxury EV market. True, the big players move slowly but won't hesitate to pivot into this space.

I don't think he's visionary. We all want to play with rockets and electric cars. He just happens to have enough money to go out and do it.

I think you are drastically over estimating how many people with his money would go out and start a rocket company and an electric car company and risk losing all of their wealth because of it.

Then why is Musk (and Bezos with Blue Origin) the only ones who have done so? There are a lot of people who have more money than Musk had when he founded SpaceX and Tesla.

Interest?

Look at Bill Gates. He could certainly build rockets, but he'd rather help people solve other, arguably more important, problems.

Or Larry Ellison. He'd rather go race boats and play with swords.

I’d argue that opening up a new frontier for society’s restless (space) to relieve the pressure that’s been mounting from the lack of any kind of frontier is as important as anything else. If we keep ignoring that pressure it’s eventually going to have massive destabilizing effects… in fact, I think we’re seeing some of that already.

John Carmack has also burned some money playing with rockets.

(And Musk did not really found Tesla.)

Whats the explanation for why all the talent leaving?

You're right that Musk does not need to score political points with the everyday person in order for Tesla to succeed.

But by the same token, Musk's "fitting into the current political and cultural trajectory" (whatever that means) is also of no value to Tesla.

The actual concerns people have are much more concrete.

Tesla has already had "a few years of optimization". They have been making cars for ten years now. They are still burning bales of cash. They have consistently failed, by large margins, to deliver on production targets. Major competitors who DO have a consistent history of large-scale production are coming out with comparable products that will actually be possible to buy without waiting in line for two years.

Their accounting chief quitting after a month only adds to the pile. Anyone who has been in management at a failing concern knows the numbers people are the canaries in the coal mine. No, it's not a guarantee they will fail, but only an inexperienced person would ignore it.

> whatever that means

I mean that he is a rare kind of public figure who is really down-to-earth, yet proponent of the free market & innovation. Like Trump he breaks with the norms, but he's a lot more sincere. He also does not seem to outsource overseas very much, which kind of fits into the MAGA narrative.

Well, like you said, the average person does not care about stuff like that.

By the way if you like sincere down to earth people who break with norms and are in favor of tariffs, check out the chapo trap house podcast

There are good reasons to assume that tariffs are not enough. From the episode I've listened to it seems they are hypergamy deniers.

For the general public, SpaceX = Elon Musk = Tesla. The successes of SpaceX have carried over to the Tesla brand for consumers and probably many investors, both large and small. If Elon Musk was separated from the Tesla brand, it would be a negative.

It is also worth pointing out that Elon Musk's "other" public company, Paypal, today is valued over 2x Tesla's market capitalization ($105.7b vs $44.6b.) While what Paypal is now is far disconnected from Elon Musk today, that is a big win for creating an enterprise able of delivering incredible value over the long term for investors.

I don't have a problem with critical reporting on Tesla and Elon Musk from any media entity, backed by hedged funds otherwise. I do have a very, very big problem when they compare Elon Musk to someone like Elizabeth Holmes. (e.g. "The Age of Tech Superheroes Must End" WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-of-tech-superheroes-mus... )

My big concern is what happens if consumers do not want Tesla vehicles. The current problems are solvable. If Tesla vehicles become as desirable as a chunk of lead, then no amount of cash, engineering, or R&D will fix it.

Talk about gaslighting yourself. If you are not recoginizing that something fishy is going on at tesla you are not reading the same articles as the rest of us.

What's fishy? I've been following Tesla since 2010 and the main changes since then isn't what appears to be fishy but what the media are making of it.

Do you realize that Tesla sold more cars in the US that Mercedes and BMW this summer? How many media reported that?

Do you know that the most trusted car analysts who tear-down the car said it's expected to be the most profitable car produced in high volume?

Do you know that all data analyses about turnover in top positions at Tesla indicated that they are average? How many reports about such moves (at legacy automakers) make headlines?

They've only increased their coverage of the company and try their best to make every thing more clickbait. It's worked great so far, for sure.

"We think Tesla is worth zero" -Jim Chanos

You haven't been reading the same news I have. While there were plenty of red flags prior, Musk began digging Tesla's grave in earnest in fall 2016. He Started with the Alien Dreadnought, which was bonkers. He sold shareholders on buying Solar City using fake solar shingles which don't exist, that was $5b+ flushed down the toilet. Also he implemented HW2, which is thousands of dollars of hardware going into every new car regardless of whether customers pay for it. When Solar experts, finance people, Vehicle manufacturing experts and Autonomous vehicle experts get together and compare notes there's only one conclusion to arrive at: Tesla is fucked.

Alien Dreadnought, Solar City, HW2. I call it the ASH doctrine: Musk's 3 point plan to reduce Tesla to ashes. Post chapter 11 Tesla may have a life ahead of it, but it's been a slow motion trainwreck for years. The Shorts, the Media, the Koch brothers, they didn't destroy Tesla. Musk did. He's incompetent, and nuts. It's pretty obvious now, but if you were paying attention, it was obvious before too.

>he implemented HW2, which is thousands of dollars of hardware going into every new car regardless of whether customers pay for it

Seriously? Do you know the take rate of the option? It's been widely considered to increase margin, but if you have other sources, I'm interested.

>He sold shareholders on buying Solar City using fake solar shingles which don't exist, that was $5b+ flushed down the toilet.

That's false. The solar roof thing was accessory to the acquisition. More than a hundred have been installed and are being used as beta tests to improve it further. Since the beginning, Musk said the v1 should be considered like the Roadster 1, i.e not intended to be mass produced until v3 (remember "BlueStar"?)

As for Alien Dreadnought, he did say that wouldn't be possible with Model 3. So OK, that was one failed promise, but the Model 3 production and assembly lines remains one of the most automated one in the industry.

So for this one little think (which is more a name than a project), you conclude that Tesla is fucked. Okay.

>Tesla sold more cars in the US that Mercedes and BMW this summer? How many media reported that?

Please, that was one month of backlog deliveries (July, 16,000 deliveries) and only in the US. 16, Nobody expects that Tesla manufactures 16,000 Model 3's per month.

Meanwhile Mercedes sells 30,000 C-Class Saloon and Estate models per month globally. In the US Mercedes and BMW each keep delivering 12,000 or so vehicles per month in the same category as Tesla models are.

You're right, because August is the month during which Tesla surpassed both BMW and Mercedes. We're in September so how can there be more than a month? Both BMW and Mercedes US car sales are falling hard: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180904005710/en/Mer..., https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180904005748/en/BMW...

Is there something going on with tariffs?

It was well publicized that the President doesn't want people buying Mercedes.

>Nobody expects that Tesla manufactures 16,000 Model 3's per month.

What are you talking about? They are sustainably producing 5000/week now, and have backlog for the next 1.5 years at least.

You know that you are literally falling for all the PR moves tesla made in the last year? The whole tent thing to get the quota up or delaying deliveries so they can ship a lot of cars in one month or the going privat stunt. I don't mind if some little startup wants to pull shit like this but Elon really thinks he can outsmart everyone with stuff like this and it gets annoying real fast.

That's not how you use the word "gaslighting" in a sentence. I don't think you know what the word means.

By definition, it's not something you can do to yourself, so what you wrote is like saying someone stole their own car. Unless there are some strange mental gymnastics going on, it's not possible to steal your own property from yourself.

Nor is it possible to maliciously conspire against your own healthy sanity in secret. You can try and argue about cute ideas where that might be curiously plausible, but the definition of the verb doesn't play into that idea.

You are just retarded. The guy which tells people with depression to snap out of it. If you think there is no way to manipulate yourself into a delusion you better read a bit more than the wikipedia article of the term you want to school people on the internet.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating HN's guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hey, wow, you still used the term incorrectly the first time. And continue to do so even now.

Did I say it's not possible to do something like that? No. No, I didn't. I did not say that anything is prevented by anything.

I'm saying you used a word incorrectly. What you just said you're trying to talk about? That word doesn't mean what you just said.

Can you please not add to flamewars here, even when another comment is wrong or has broken the rules? We're trying to avoid this level of discourse and do a bit better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Being crazy subjectively seems like being gaslighted by everyone else. I think "gaslighting yourself" amounts to a figure of speech that means the same thing. While you may not think it's a technically correct usage, there are other similar expressions in English. I would say it's an example of an oxymoron.

Delusional. Being delusional.

A person is simply delusional, if they are deceiving themselves.

May as well start gangstalking myself. Hold on, let me stand outside my window with all my other selves. brb

There are lots of ways to express similar concepts in English, but in this case, I think "gaslighting yourself" expresses an incremental, progressive, or recursive concept whereas "simply delusional" is more static.

Same.

It doesn't seem anymore fishy than a lot of software/IT companies. Tesla is designed to produce a product not necessarily for profit. CFOs, like most corporate execs, are more concerned about money than philosophy. Musk thinks he is/can change the world. He's not concerned with how much he can profit.

> Musk thinks he is/can change the world. He's not concerned with how much he can profit.

Then why didn't he start Tesla as a nonprofit? Your characterization would be much more credible if he didn't personally own a very valuable chunk of a multi-billion dollar company.

Can't complain about any of that if you're a public company.

He is bipolar and it's going to end with tragedy if it's not addressed.

It's strange how much Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla have in common.

If you could maintain mild hypomania (hyperthymia) endlessly without succumbing to depression or slipping to full mania most people would prefer to stay in that state forever.

People in hypomania maintain mental clarity and don't suffer from functional impairment. They have energy, confidence and increased creativity.

But it's usually just a phase between depression and mania.

Non-amp URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-07/tesla-chi...

Better formatting, no hideously pixelated photos.

And the next article, when I kept scrolling, showed Musk smoking a joint and then holding a flamethrower!

It is worrying, but I don't know if I'd really call that a stock plunge.

A while ago I considered reserving a model 3, but I eventually decided against it. Feel like I dodged a bullet, there.

There was a time where Tesla had a genuine advantage over the incumbents, but it never was enough of an advantage to overcome their lack of experience. That's only obvious in retrospect, I suppose.

I’ve had a Model S for about 3.5 years and it’s been wonderful. It’s not perfect and there have been some dumb issues, but nothing severe. I’ll probably be ordering a Model 3 soon as a second car, whenever the standard range version becomes available, or possibly sooner if the standard range isn’t available this year. There is still no real competition.

It was a full refund even at the time, so not a major bullet. I wasn't sure if I was going to be living at a place that would allow me to install a charger, so there was never a chance for me then. Maybe in 10+ year next wave of advancements will have arrived.

https://www.tesla.com/support/model-3-ordering-FAQ#refund

Can I as you what you are basing this on?

Tesla has more experience in terms of electronics, batteries, electronic drive train and software. They might not be as good in terms of building car frames but they basically figured it out and the M3 is not a mass production car.

It seems to me its the other car companies who are missing core experience on many of the core technologies needed for the future.

Can you cite one source that indicates that Model 3 owners are somehow dissatisfied? All reviews (by the general public and by journalists) say the car performance, quality and experience is excellent and above Mercedes / BMW's.

Have you driven one?

https://www.businessinsider.com/survey-uk-drivers-say-tesla-...

I think Elon Musk is a genius and I don't use that word lightly. I think he's also one of the boldest men that ever came down the pike. Put me down as saying I've always been afraid of the guy whose IQ is 190 and he thinks it's 250. I like to think there’s a little of that risk with Elon - Charlie Munger (in 2014)

I think it's time for Elon to step away from Tesla. He is an incredible visionary and that's what made Tesla possible and revolutionized the car industry. That work is done now. Everyone is making electric cars now. There is no need for Elon to innovate at Tesla anymore. I might even go so far and say that Tesla had moved the entire industry so much that there isn't even much need for Tesla itself.

I think it's best for everyone if Elon focused on SpaceX, the Boring Company and his AI endeavors. Tesla sticks out from this list because mission is accomplished.

I tend to agree. He's been fantastic at getting the impossible to happen, but he's not as good at just running things.

There was a bit in time when he offered to help Flint, MI with their water. It turns out they don't need the help.

However, if he were to turn his fantastic energy towards helping under-served communities, I think he'd find that there's plenty to do, and very satisfying.

I have the suspicion as well that he isn't great at running a steady business. My point is really about his amazing visionary qualities being more useful elsewhere. Even if he was great at running things too, it's radical innovation where he is a once in a century person.

Edit: it would be a shame to waste that amazing innovation talent at what's now a close to regular car company (relative to his other ventures)

Tesla may be going bankrupt the Altman-z score of guru focus indicates that. Hopefully the source code will be open source. https://www.gurufocus.com/stock/TSLA

So the headline is that the CFO is resigning, yet there's a huge picture of the photogenic HR chief(?), who, as a side-story, is 'not returning'.

I feel manipulated. Also that this publication should be doing a bit more investigation and a bit less pontificating.

It's much less huge on the non-amp site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-07/tesla-chi... — I got a hunch that's what I'm seeing b/c that image was incredibly blurry. I have no idea why people link to the googlified versions of websites, they're often barely readable.

> yet there's a huge picture of the photogenic HR chief(?)

The photo was tiny in the original article. For some reason the AMP version has been posted, and it blows all the pictures up.

This is breaking news. You aren't going to get in-depth reporting on it for a while.

>I feel manipulated.

Is it that easy?

I love how someone from Jeffries is concerned with Tesla's use of marijuana. I know three analysts that work at Jeffries and they all microdose and/or use cocaine. It's par for the course.

IMO, they should fire musk, slow down their blue-sky research projects, rip autopilot out of the cars, and just build "boring" luxury electric cars with huge profit margins and rake in cash.

I don't think they should fire him, but he should most definately do the un-american thing: work a sane amount of hours and go on vacation every now and then.

I completely agree with this.

I feel him taking some time off and easing off would benefit everybody. He is known for his super focused and driven way of work, and as he himself said:

“If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing … you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

But he is only human, not a robot (to the best of my knowledge), and sleeping under the desk in the factory overworked will stress out everybody and the people in their close environment no matter how logical-thinking person you are. Building your company in a constant fight-or-flight mode is a disaster in the making.

Balance is important. For the sake of sanity, health and actual productivity.

Although this is completely anecdotal, I had a similar "100 hour never stop working" approach with my initial start-up ventures (obviously not of the scale of Tesla or SpaceX) which ended up me destroying my personal relationships and I cannot say my productivity was off the roof.

Then I slowly transitioned into having a proper balanced day, with exercise, meditation and PROPER time off. Also having healthy work habits inspired a lot by Learning How to Learn (popular MOOC on coursera) and work by Cal Newport ( Deep Work ) with a sprinkle of org-mode here and there.

I have to say that first time in my life, I feel happy, fulfilled and proud of my "weekly output"

I am definitely happier after listening to Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" and implementing some of the strategies. I get so much more done so then I don't feel as much pressure to keep working until late at night (even though I have an infinite amount of work to do).

He's said repeatedly that people seem to assume it's an option that he work this much, but it is not at all because if he doesn't the company risks insolvency.

I don't care how much he works, but he's gotta do something about his thin skin and incompetence with the media.

> I don't care how much he works, but he's gotta do something about his thin skin and incompetence with the media.

This sort of thing usually comes from a severe lack of sleep and recreation.

He just needs to stop doing PR.

On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of his media appearances have been widely popular. But something seems to have snapped in him recently, perhaps culminating with calling that cave rescuer a pedophile. The dude has serious problems that are probably exacerbated by stress and lack of sleep. He needs to take a break before something bad happens.

Not everyone expect an industry leader to fake a persona in public so as to appear like the media want them to.

Wall Street might want that but hey, who cares?

It's not about how the media wants him to look, or even what shareholders of his companies want, it's about how the perception of his broader endeavors. The defensive way he reacts to any kind of criticism undermines the personal image which he has worked so hard cultivate.

Why does the image thing take 80% of the headlines and conversations, while Tesla just surpassed Mercedes and BMW in sales?

Can you find one major newspaper / website who reported that info? I certainly can find dozens of articles about Musk smoking weed, and yet not a word about the fall in BMW/Mercedes sales being hit hard by the Model 3...

We wouldn't be commenting about Musk image if they media were actually talking about the 50K deliveries of Model 3. But hey, Musk prefers to cultivate (or ruin) his image I guess...

Apple should fire Steve Jobs and go back to selling colorful plastic computers that are more in the price range of their Japanese competitors. And give up on OSX already, Windows has clearly won.

Tesla's goal was to accelerate EV adoption. They either succeed or they die. I don't think they have any interest in being some niche luxury electric car manufacturer.

Here’s a reminder of what this company is about: https://www.tesla.com/about

Pretty sure all companies are about making money, no matter what they write on their webpage.

Of course. No one doubt that Tesla and SpaceX were primarily created to make money /s

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/please-sell-our-stock-...

It takes about a 90% vote to oust him due to how voting shares at Tesla are setup.

big part of TSLA price is musk name on it

This. A million times this. When a Tesla was $100,000 it was a status symbol. Seeing one on the road was cool and novel, like seeing a Maserati. Flooding the streets with Tesla is hurting that brand and causing the company to burn cash.

You’re in the SF bubble, my friend.

I don't live anywhere near SF although I do live on the North East Coast of USA so I suppose I am subject to the bias you are talking about.

Tesla mass producing their cars has been a massive headache for them. I think it would have benefited shareholders if they had stuck to the niche of luxury vehicles that they were demonstrating success in.

I think it's easy to overlook just how long it takes to establish a car business in the US, or assume it's different because this is the future. Hyundai started selling cars in America over 30 years ago, and they're still kind of an upstart. It took them almost 20 years to refocus on quality and overhaul their reputation for building junk. Tesla has only been around for a decade.

I have not clue how you get to that conclusion.

I simply don't get it. Elon is incredibly successful and he did many things nobody believed would happen and he keeped the business alive against all odds in situation way worse then things are now.

Rip out autopilot? What, why the fuck would the do that? The autopilot works well and 10000s of people (at least) are using it every day and it provides them the base of data to improve their capability in this vital future business.

The revolution devours it's own. What Tesla started is amazing, years ahead of competition initially, but there will be a very tough future ahead as electric cars become more and more the norm.

"Stock Plunges"?

If anything, TSLA seems to continue to ride high with only small relative deviations with news that would gut any other stock.

Not to say I am bullish on TSLA...quite the opposite. TSLA will inevitably crater but it is going to take most of the NASDAQ with it and probably wipe out the mobility 2.0 market segment and the EV and nascent AV markets.

Silicon Valley is way overdue for a serious garbage collection cycle....TSLA is going to trigger it eventually. Its not all bad: a big reset in SV would benefit the big players like Apple and Google who will suddenly have a much deeper and cheaper talent pool to access.

If you visit Tesla's management's page you can see only 3 names; Elon Musk, CFO Deepak Ahuja and CTO JB Straubel. No exec stays for a long period in Tesla. Who is going to resign next? CFO or CTO https://news.alphastreet.com/tesla-motors-cao-chief-accounti...

Seems like much of this is closely related to the 'going private' statements. I'm curious if Elon had it out for one of the many short selling firms exploiting TSLA stock, Citron Research, etc... There's more at work here than just Elon being overzealous with corporate ambitions. There are groups of people, venture capitalists, and banks hell bent on weaponizing margin trading to manipulate markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com