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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

> 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'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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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