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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Very unlikely, but if necessary Tesla would go through a Chapter 11 reorg, not a 7 liquidation. The brand, charging network, and manufacturing capacity has too much value to throw away.

When Tesla was on the brink of insolvency years ago, he had a handshake deal with Larry Page (they jetpooled together) for Google to acquire Tesla and for Musk to continue to run day to day operations. Wasn’t necessary, but there are options.

Elon will be fine.

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If Tesla goes through Chapter 11, there's no way in hell Musk will be running it afterwards.

He gets away with all his shenanigans because he's a rain maker.

If his incredible run of success dries up, the narrative is going to shift hard.

> If his incredible run of success dries up, the narrative is going to shift hard.

I remember how Apple kicked out Jobs.

Any chance Tesla will suddenly find a competing company in EV market which it can buy with certain conditions?..

I know it's fashionable of late to lionize Jobs, but was it really him or was it just the "second-generation effect"?

Look at Microsoft under Ballmer, or Google after Page/Brin. All seem(ed) to be hollow shells of what once was.

Google has been anything but a hollow shell from a shareholder's perspective. They've gone from strength to strength.

Google was wildly successful under Eric Schmidt.

Yes Elon has a reality distortion field but that's allowed when pushing for real progress. A reality distortion field becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and it has the ability to change the fabric of our reality. I didn't expect the kind of naysayer here on HN.

I think it depends on why Tesla goes Chapter 11 and who acquires it.

If it's because he did something entirely insane you're probably right. If it's because market conditions shifted post Covid-19 I think he's been enough of a rainmaker that people would likely still leave him in charge.

If a friend of his who is willing to put up with his antics (e.g. Larry Page) managed to acquire it, it's probably more likely than if risk adverse/sensational personality adverse institutional investors acquired it.

Admittedly at this point I doubt Larry Page would be able to easily front the money any more... Tesla's assets have grown substantially in value since back then.

I hope Elon will be fine. The future depends on benevolent billionaires like himself to get us out of the financial mess the governments of the world have put us in. If we have any hope of tackling climate change, Tesla will be front and center in that battle.

Besides, he just had a child! What a wonderful gift to the world. I hope his child grows up to be as wise and down-to-earth as his father. :)

With Google tightening its belt to appease Wall Street, I doubt investors would look kindly on Google acquiring a struggling business just because too friends shook hands on an airplane.

The people in charge in America only fail upwards, never down.

Is that statement tautological?

No. In a healthy society, when the people in charge fail, they are demoted or shunned depending on how badly they did. For example, should Judith Miller still have her job at the NYT after cheerleading the march to war in Iraq based on fake evidence? Obviously not. People that perform well and are correct should have the top seats.

It helps to compare the harsh treatment of the average worker to the soft humanized treatment reserved for the bosses and war criminals.

Either that, or Musk fails and brings down all the things propped up by his charisma and enthusiasm... and the world learns a lesson.

The lesson learned would be "don't do new things, and don't believe in anyone who suggests that you do new things." That's not a positive lesson.

The other lesson could be "maybe we shouldn't rely on one person's charisma to drive us to do new and interesting things," but that's not likely to be the lesson learned.

I'd think it's the second lesson that will be learned.

Musk has been on the verge of failure for years, and cracks are showing now more than ever before.

I'd hate for everyone to stop dreaming for tomorrow just because one guy couldn't pull off everything imaginable.

For all the good things Musk does, he also does a lot of bad things. Including but not limited to dreaming up absurd fantasies to "reinvent" industries he has literally zero experience in (aviation comes to mind, drilling tunnels, underwater rescue, etc) - and everyone fixates on that imaginary solution because he said it.

Not to mention taking credit for all the hard work the actual aerospace, mechanical and other engineers are doing under Musk. Very seldom do you hear Musk talk about how incredible the team is and how lucky he is to have them working on these problems. No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.

Look at Hyperloop. People are still wasting money, energy and resources on it, regardless that what we have in testing today are just Maglev trains in tubes... a far cry from what Musk originally dreamt up. Nevermind how impractical or prohibitively expensive and uneconomical it would be to build trains across the US, oceans, across the world all connected.

People want to dream. Fine. But trusting all of the future to just one guy... I'm not so sure.

He constantly praise or give credit to his teams, even full credit where it is due.

No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.

Yes? All the bucks stop with him. He makes engineering decisions, bad or good. It doesn't matter if he doesn't have the relevant degree or did the calculation on a particular project.

> But trusting all of the future to just one guy

Part of the problem is not trusting the future to one guy, but rather that there is hardly more than one guy to trust it to. Where are the other Elon Musks? We need more people like him, not less.

Oh yeah. I've been on about that for years. If extreme wealth or political power were a meritocracy most billionaires and high-ranking political officials would be similarly productive and competent and he'd be average for his socioeconomic class. There should be hundreds and hundreds of Elon Musks at least.

> There should be hundreds and hundreds of Elon Musks at least.

I'm not sure I agree.

I like Elon Musk (a whole lot more than most people) - but every Elon Musk consumes a lot of societies resources. He's spending 10s or 100s of billions of dollars worth of resource on (literal) moonshots. A hundred of him would raise that to trillions to 10s of trillions of dollars.

I think we can afford the former as a society (and that it benefits us). I'm not sure we an afford the latter. Worse, we become less efficient at is when there are more of him because we start running out of talented and driven engineers.

Maybe 10s would be a good order of magnitude.

I think you are underestimating how much we waste. The resources are consumed regardless.

Maybe it is the other way around; we can't afford _not_ to spend 10s of trillions on moonshots. Depends on how sustainable one thinks the status quo is, and the risk timeframe for potential consequenses.

It also depends on how much you think you increase the risk by disrupting the status quo, and how much you think extracting 10s of trillions would disrupt the status quo.

Theres a lot of B.S. in your post but I just wanted to point out that Elon constantly praises the Tesla and SpaceX teams on Twitter, Quarterly conference calls, Podcasts and in other investor presentations.

There is for sure a cult of personality like there was for Steve Jobs.

What cracks are showing more than ever before?

I honestly know a lot of scientists who get really upset because Elon shows you don't need a degree to do any of that.

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