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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

In my eyes, Larry Ellison on the Tesla BoD just damaged the brand of Tesla by an order of magnitude.

My thoughts exactly. I've lusted over the Model S for years, and the minute that they become available in my country I'll be the first in line.

But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a company that uses its products. They are extremely abusive.

For the first time in Tesla's history, with all its obstacles and negative press, I now fear for the brand reputation.

Tesla is not “owned” by Larry Ellison. He is just one among many directors in the board, who have a limited set of responsibility to advocate for shareholders and provide corporate governance. They don’t really play major role in execution let alone ownership. Tesla is a public company and is owned by shareholders.

Yes, that was a mistake. Replace "owned" with "partially controlled".

How does Oracle treat their clients badly? Honestly curious, never worked with them.

They're absolute assholes during license audits and negotiations. They're one of only two companies to earn a spot on my "Never voluntarily do business with" list.

And the other?

The other is Verisign, but I am far less passionate and communicative about that one as it was a result of a singular (albeit terrifically bungled) incident, not an on-going and top-down strategy to be a dickish company.

A tad late to the party. You find tons of information about Oracle's business model, which essentially is suing customers.

This report is a good starting point (PDF) [1]

Edited to add : Check the appendix at the end (Appendix – Anecdotal Feedback). It may cure you from the idea of ever wanting to license any Oracle products if you have any say.

[1] http://www.itassetmanagement.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/...

Lol. Grow up! Not buying a car because of one of the company's board members?

Larry's first day with the board: "Let's introduce audits to catch drivers tuning their cars!"

Larry's second day:let's introduce a pricing model that confuses customers, nickels and dimes them constantly and requires enormously expensive upgrades to do things the current car and all our competitors already do for free.

Larry's third day on the job: Let's buy all our competitors and raise prices 5x and get rid of independent car repair shops and make Bluetooth and anything besides AM radio an ad on for the car stereo that's $5000 extra and licensed per unique phone you pair with it. You also can no longer plug in your car at home without an annual license fee and priced per watt of charger output and how many different cars will use it. You also have to pay an extra charge per pound of passenger and luggage in the car over 50. The car won't start if it detects you're overweight.

Seconded. Watch for the fine print in your Tesla service agreement.

Most people (and most of prospective Tesla buyers) have no idea who he is. Doubt the reputation gets tainted at all by this.

Can you elaborate why?

Edit: reading others’ posts about him in this thread. Okay, wow. Not sure how accurate this information is though.

Well, one thing that got me about him was his acquisition of Sun Microsystems to acquire the patents on Java to sue Google for Android.

Which Sun didn't have any issue with Google about the use of Java for Android. But Larry did. He saw $$$.

Maybe I am wrong about the above but that is my impression of what I have read. Open to corrections.

Sun had the hardware that Larry wanted for his engineered systems. Prior to that there was an announced partnership with HP for that.

The Google lawsuit came later. Remember the purchase was in 2009, when Android was still in its early days in terms of adoption and market share.

Thanks, so it was more of a "oh, look at what we have here" type of thing it sounds like.

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