> CEO John Foley apologized for not cooperating with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sooner.
What an absolutely baffling strategy for them to have originally pursued in response.
What an absolutely baffling strategy for them to have originally pursued in response.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders#Johnso...
And it pays off to fight with them. Look at Elon Musk and his companies.
n=1 ... and you may be right in general.
Someone else here mentioned Tylenol, which is a good counter example. Aggressive and transparent moves in the direction of consumer safety can both save a company in a PR crisis, and actually turn it into a boon for brand good will and loyalty.
Tesla promised workers that they could stay home if they didn't feel comfortable breaking the law. Workers who stayed home then received termination notices.
Hundreds of people who returned to work at Tesla were then sickened by the disease.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...
Fighting with the NTSB has a bad look. Throwing shade on people who died using your product, is also a bad look.
2 people received notices. 10,000 people work at the plant.
This might be the single most shockingly and blatantly manipulative article I've read in a long time. Let me list the number of ways that The Post tried to obfuscate the truth.
1. They publish an article in June 2020 titled "Tesla gave workers permission to stay home rather than risk getting covid-19. Then it sent termination notices." The title is entirely disconnected from the body of the article - in the body they specify they are talking about 2 out of 10,000 people, but the title doesn't reflect that even in the slightest.
2. In March 2020, they publish another negative article about Tesla, in which they once again use a more outrageous and misleading language, citing their previous article but not linking to it so that nobody can actually catch the fact that we're talking about 2 out of 10,000 people.
Let me remind you that The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is a sworn enemy of Elon Musk. And then the media complains that there's so much push back on their reporting?
- Elon's father claims in the mid-80s he bought a partial stake in an emerald mine in Zambia. There is no paper trail of this ownership, so we are taking his dad at his word here.
- Zambia was already independent at the time and in no way an apartheid state. The ruling party was ideologically socialist and African nationalist.
- This partial ownership of the mine obviously did not make Elon a super wealthy kid, as he moved to Canada for university, gradudated with $100K in student debt, and according to roommates and friends at the time, he was notoriously frugal.
So it seems like even if Elon's father is telling the truth here and the mine even existed, that wealth didn't seem to be significant enough to give Elon a huge boost when he came to North America.
There are definitely a ton of things to criticize Elon for, but I am not sure the emeralds is one of them.
Furthermore, Musk fled South Africa in order to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid SA army.
He’s a person with rough edges, but tieing him in with apartheid is a bit much.
“ On the eve of independence in 1964, 2 percent of Zambia’s 3.5 million people were white, but they controlled everything in a system resembling apartheid.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/black-white-zamb...
I’m saying Musk has a lineage of abusive behavior and was raised by those same people. It explains his exploitative and abusive behavior for workers.
I’m descended from an ethnic group that has done some bad things. Am I now a bad person?
For instance, are all Germans Nazis to you?
Let us not forget the Zambians, themselves foreign Bantu invaders who genocided the native Khoison population (but perhaps the Khoisons genocided who was there before them).
In fact, the Xhosa tribe (a Bantu tribe famous for the clicks in their language, and for producing Nelson Mandela) got those clicks from the Khoisan tribes (the original clickers) by committing a massive genocide and taking all their land. The linguist John McWhorter gives an explanation of how this happens in his Great Courses series.
You are not a bad person, and I never said Elon is a bad person
It's not apples to apples to compare those, and it implies a slippery slope
I’ve personally experienced this line of “ethnic expectations.” All it does is to put the target in a box marked “probably racist” for no other reason than the conditions of their birth.
Why do people think this? Because Elon Musk can tweets dumb memes? The size and scope of regulatory agencies has vastly increased over the years. And fines paid out are gigantic. Take banks for instance:
> Financial institutions have been hit with $10.4 billion in global fines and penalties related to anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), data privacy, and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) regulations in 2020, bringing the total to $46.4 billion for those types of breaches since 2008.
https://www.complianceweek.com/surveys-and-benchmarking/repo...
For the size and scope of regulatory agencies to increase, their budgets would have to increase faster than inflation of wages in their relevant markets. We don't see that in finance (SEC) nor in technology (FCC). The regulators are paid comparative peanuts.
Here's a source that suggests SEC budget has increased 82% over 10 years
https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reform...
A 82% budget increase from 2008-2018. But only a 31% increase in employees since 2004. Markets have gotten much larger with many more trades over the same time period. Certainly technology helps handle the increase but there is an orders of magnitude difference between a 2004 market and a 2021 market.
Crypto is a good example. It didn't used to exist. SEC is the only US regulatory body for it.
I don't know what you mean by this. I googled SEC spending over time and found this well sourced article about spending. I understand that Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank but why does citing something from there mean I'm not arguing in good faith? I'm missing something....
> A 82% budget increase from 2008-2018. But only a 31% increase in employees since 2004. Markets have gotten much larger with many more trades over the same time period. Certainly technology helps handle the increase but there is an orders of magnitude difference between a 2004 market and a 2021 market.
Your original claim was that they're underpaid or underfunded, which is just wrong. Their budgets have increased by more than the inflation rate. And you still don't provide any data to back up any of your other claims, instead you attack me for arguing in bad faith and claim it's not a big enough increase because you think it should be bigger because you know, crypto.
- These fines are dimes on the dollar compared to profits gained
- Regulators are comparatively underpaid, with the comparison point being workers in the regulated sector.
Goldman Sachs is a single firm that made $9.5B in profit in 2020 who has to pay a $2.9B fine over $1.6B in bribes paid with $2.7B of "misappropriated funds". A single firm paid nearly the entire SEC's budget ($1.75B 2020) just in bribes to foreign officials.
But sure, since the SEC's budget has increased by 82% since the housing market failed, they have all of the funds they need. Clearly we have a value difference here. The issue is not the facts at hand, it is our opinions on what they mean.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/goldman-sachs-charged-foreign...
What benefit has Musk or Tesla received from fighting with regulators? Whether it is spats over securities, unions, or safety it doesn't appear that any punishments handed to Musk or Tesla are lenient when compared with what others have received in similar circumstances. Meanwhile these fights have been a consistent drag on his and Tesla's public reputations. Like with most things Tesla, odds are the company would have been better off if Musk knew when to keep his mouth shut.
Same as Peloton.
Let's say there are two kinds of people. People who open Robinhood and buy shares at ask, and everyone else. As long as there are more of the former than the latter, and as long as those Robinhood users like spats, then obviously giant company CEOs will keep getting into them.
Buying at ask is as direct as it gets! You don't need this some complicated socioeconomic mechanical theory. It's so frustrating to hear about these indirect effects - how the news might cause an analyst to write something negative months later, that maybe some institution may trade on one month, that goes through a big committee... If many Robinhood users read Elon Musk tweets, open Robinhood, buy at ask, price goes up!
Like this is the same energy that got a lot of politicians elected these last few elections. The same energy that's making TikTok personalities real celebrities. VIPs have their hands almost directly on the levers of popularity contests nowadays, through social media and direct to consumer finance, e-commerce and subscription apps.
If your theory about regulation and capitalism and economics or whatever does not incorporate "more guys buy at ask than guys sell in spread," nowadays, it might not be wrong, but it's mediocre.
What are the alternatives? Limit orders set close to the current range or selling near-the-money puts over and over until you're eventually assigned.
Are you just saying that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" and that anytime Musk is in the news is good for the stock price? Because the original point from justapassenger was that "it pays off to fight with [regulators]" and not "it pays off to commit securities fraud".
The direct answer to your question is, since Robinhood users like those n-th order fights, he still got a benefit through the rising Tesla prices those Robinhood users caused.
But you're doing the thing where you're trying to make a model or a theory that starts stepping away from the direct mechanisms of action these people have now to affect stock prices.
I'm saying that a tweet from the Peloton CEO that just said "regulators are big doodoo heads" - if there are more Robinhood users who buy Peloton at ask than everyone else, and they like this tweet, the price will rise because that's how prices rise.
That's why you don't need a lawyer, you don't need the professional advice or the experts, if you're Elon Musk and your goal is to make stock prices rise.
What you're really trying to ask is, "When do smart people decide to stop being intellectually honest?" The answer is, as long as the intellectually honest text is longer than a short, simpler, stock-raising tweet with verisimilitude, people will choose short and high in verisimilitude over longer but true.
I give him enough credit and respect that I suspect he knows when, but just doesn't know how.
The SEC is the only financial regulatory body that is a real public institution. Isn't everything else just private corporations who only give the impression that they're public regulatory bodies?
Given Wall Street's lobbying power, the regulatory bodies for Wall Street has always been weak. I don't foresee this changing for the same reason.
The CPSC can issue a mandatory recall, but that's subject to challenge in court. They rarely do that. But if they do, it looks really bad for the seller. For one thing, it means the recall notice comes from the U.S. Government, not the seller, which looks really bad.
[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Statement%20of%20Acting%20C...