Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures
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He was annoyed at seeing his line stopped, during a crisis, who wouldn't be? He tried to convince them to start it again, but they didn't. If he then overruled them and actually started the line and actually put anyone in danger that would have been a bad thing. But he didn't, and there's no story here. Just an anecdote of an emotional moment.
No one believed they could actually pull it off. No one believed they could sell the Model 3 at that price point, at those quantities, in that time span. If they didn't, they were in big trouble. They pulled it together and they actually delivered, maybe a bit later, maybe a bit costlier, but it's running like a train now.
I'm nowhere close to that factory, and in no position to judge. But sitting here comfortably on my couch on the other side of the ocean of this factory it seemed to me they pulled off an absolute miracle. I was bearish on Tesla together with almost the entire world (except the crazy people that kept buying the stock despite all the bad news).
I'm not surprised some people got yelled at, or some managers and executive staff were laid off. Am I supposed to feel pity for mr Field for being sidelined on the Model 3 line? Surely he was paid handsomely for his work on the Model S? Musk judged him to be unfit for the situation, and whether it was thanks to him, or despite him, the 30,000 Tesla employees kept their jobs and the factory became a success.
I'd love to read a book on what happened in the trenches in that factory, but if it's constantly on the edge of drama questioning Musk's every move like this advertorial, I don't really see the use of it.
The anecdotes seem to have no end.
I just finished watching this really very interesting interview with Elon as he walks around the spacex stuff https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw
He got vocally and visibly annoyed with the beeping noises that the machines were making. It was a useless cacophony of beeps and you could just see in his head he was thinking "How the hell do I make this better and quieter"
Instead, he pushed to try to get rid of them, but ultimately listened to people who had more expertise than him. This is a good thing for a CEO to do - ask hard, big picture questions about the way things are being done, but ultimately accept the answers of the experts you've hired.
For example, the book says Elon wanted to be Apple's CEO post Tesla acquisition on a phone call. But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management.
Edit: Also Tim Cook mentioned in an interview that he never spoke with Elon Musk.
1) Author fabricates "facts" for his book
2) Tabloids copy those "facts" and add filler to fabricate outrage
3) Twitter outrage specialists pick these "facts" up and retweet
4) Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)
For me, he puts rockets in space, but also spreads a lot of misinformation or lies for self gain. I also don't think just because he's influential that his missteps should be labeled as eccentric versus selfish
Unless you know him personally, this statement reads like a naive teen idolising a politician that will 'fix' all issues. You dont know what he is like, what he wants out of the life. All you know is a public person he and his PR team puts out.
Whats your opinion on dalai lama? Read up on how he is behind the closed door. Kind, humble, head bowing monk or a leader of exiled country and religion under attack by china?
> Jumping down his throat for bad jokes seems like it actively hinders human kind's progress.
Judging Musk by his actions not promises nor PR speeches, he is at least an asshole. Whatever he is IRL one thing is sure, he is not a saviour nor a tech jesus just a businessman.
He has no pr team. He has done tons of one on one interviews where he puts forth his viewpoint in long form podcasts. Sure he says some ambitious stuff but it is backed up by his actions.
> Whats your opinion on dalai lama? Read up on how he is behind the closed door. Kind, humble, head bowing monk or a leader of exiled country and religion under attack by china?
Seems slightly off topic. I haven't formed a coherent opinion.
> Judging Musk by his actions not promises nor PR speeches, he is at least an asshole. Whatever he is IRL one thing is sure, he is not a saviour nor a tech jesus just a businessman
I don't dispute that he can be an asshole. If he is able to complete the current projects he had in flight he will have had the largest positive impact on climate change than any other person on earth. He is not some business man adding no value. Take a look at the new booster that was rolled out yesterday, humans are going to the friggin moon again and then Mars. Tesla has single handedly made electric cars cool and started the process of getting out of combustion engines. He launched a $100m x prize for carbon capture. He is actually getting shit done and is not some politician. Yes, he is a businessman. To achieve his goals he needs to do that or become a super villain and take over the resources of a good chunk of the world.
See for example:
Everyday Astronaut recent Musk interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
Munro interview with Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg
There are also other examples where Musk talks about things it's hard to imagine of him even being aware of if he's not building anything.
1) Be infamous
2) Have a Twitter account
3) Lie
Not just opinion but mental disease diagnoses.
Predictable. I've known for the better part of a year, that certain groupthink crowds would start to go after Elon Musk. The groupthink crowds eventually go after anyone who thinks for themselves and refuses to bend the knee.
Instead of facts, they use circular references and guilt by association. Also: The phenomenon I just described is independent of point on the political spectrum.
I'm always thrown when public figures who have an obvious incentive to lie are taken at their word in public statements. It happens all the time with politicians and CEOs.
If you look at where Musk seems to add value, it's 100% in the management zone. Well, that and the other CEO duties of representing the company to the public.
But it appears you have made up your mind as it seems to be the simplest answer.
If I thought my boss was technically clueless and needed to say something nice about him, I would probably phrase it the same way: "He's obviously a pretty incredible person in many ways. I'm still trying to really map out his superpowers. He has incredibly well developed intuition in many aspects where he makes the right judgement calls in what I perceive to be a lack of information. Because he's not in detail about all the things but his judgement is extremely good. I still haven't fully understood how that happens."
I've seen him say quite negative things about Tesla, and quite positive things about Tesla's competitors. Examples: He stated that the Ford Mach-E battery case is a structural component. He's also touted injection molding as a means of achieving some of the same things that Tesla is doing with aluminum casting. He praised some aspects of the ID4 motor housing design as superior to Tesla.
Can you give me an example of something Sandy Munro has said which IS NOT something good about a Tesla product, where he has clearly sacrificed engineering concerns? As to his statements about Tesla products, everything he's said makes sense to me, and it's my sense that almost all people who call him a Tesla shill simply don't like what he has to say.
What I've seen from him, he always shows a clear bias towards Tesla.
> Can you give me an example of something Sandy Munro has said which IS NOT something good about a Tesla product, where he has clearly sacrificed engineering concerns?
When I say he's a Tesla shill, it's specifically because of the positive things he says about Tesla.
For example, here [1] he claims that the FSD Beta is currently at level 4 and "full self-driving" is just around the corner. Do you agree with that?
[1] https://twitter.com/alex_avoigt/status/1388838246705152001
- Numbers of fasteners in subsystems
- Total length of cooling hoses
- Total weight of coolant
- Weight of the body in white
- Efficiency vs. total energy of pack
- Part counts
It looks like Sandy Munroe is doing a fair comparison based on sound engineering principles. On the other hand, I think you just don't like what he has to say with regards to Tesla.
Right. Checks out. There's certainly solid engineering logic and reasoning there!
So, if that's your best example, are you tacitly admitting you can't think of any mechanical engineering examples?
2) His mechanical engineering content comprises about 99% of what he says about Tesla.
Given these two factors, your (seemingly only) supportable observation seems awfully weak.
But it's very common to have people involved in the engineering process e.g. Business Analysts, Project Managers, Testers who have a deep understanding of how things work. And by all accounts have excellent technical capability.
That doesn't mean they have the ability to design or build the thing though.
But yet he is still the CEO of Tesla.
Just because someone says they want to do something doesn't mean they will.
But plenty of evidence that it has a lot of negative consequences.
This is rubbish and actually offensive.
Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, Brian Chesky etc. are not abusive. And in fact if you look at all of the fastest growing companies the pattern is for them to be moved out if they are abusive or have troubling behaviour.
Stop perpetuating this myth that the industry tolerates behaviours that other companies don't because by doing so it actually encourages it.
A lot of bad behaviour was tolerated in previous decades across many industries. That doesn’t mean that it is today or will be in the future.
>A lot of bad behaviour was tolerated in previous decades across many industries.
IS tolerated. Petty, irrational bosses are reality in many sectors not just low level services. You sound like you never worked blue collar job and only heard about it or observed it from afar.
Truth is, tech is historically more tolerant of extremely eccentric personalities that can be borderline (or obviously) toxic more so than some other industries. Doesn't mean it's anywhere near as bad as Steve Jobs was. Nor that it's as bad as it is in finance (MDs screaming at interns tended to be quite the pasttime for a long time at bulge bracket banks).
> But it’s a difficult and exhausting book. Jobs was a world-class asshole. He was a selfish, self-centered man who heaped abuse on everyone around him. After a few hours, the catalog of tantrums, tirades and put-downs wears thin. You may have huge admiration for Jobs’s accomplishments, but it can be hard to hear in detail how the sausage was made.
> He was brutal about it. At one point, he decided to lay off most of the staff that worked on the Lisa, the unsuccessful precursor to the Macintosh:
> “You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at the Lisa team. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”
> Most people are socialized to be nice to others, to value friendship or feelings over the interests of the corporation. Jobs turned those priorities on their head. When asked why he was so nasty, he said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality,” he told BusinessWeek. “Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
https://www.cultofmac.com/126245/steve-jobs-the-world-class-...
There are entirely valid critiques of Steve Jobs. His overly restrictive and proprietary technology being a major one. But the myth that he was some kind of social monster is ahistorical.
Steve Jobs was very opinionated, honest, and unafraid to tell people what he thought. At times he was overly harsh, no doubt, and sometimes a bit of an asshole. He was "world-class" but not a "world-class asshole" by any reasonable measure. At best, he was a very minor league asshole.
The world-class assholes in business are the people pouring pollutants into rivers/air or selling cigarettes/alcohol/opioids.
Anyone who thinks Steve Jobs was a terrible person has no perspective whatsoever. They're evaluating his agreeableness against the typical bullshitting-manager at Google or Microsoft. People promoted specifically because they're mediocre people-pleasers.
The proof that Steve Jobs was not a "world-class asshole" is that he had many friends. And many people that consider their time working with him to be the height of their career, even if it was also very intense.
There are a grand total of 3 stories about mistakes he made (and eventually made up for) in his entire life, all of which he made in his early 20s or earlier. As much as people try to tear him down, he lived a better, fuller, and more positively impactful life than all but a handful of people in history.
He was superficially obnoxious to many, but fundamentally kind person. He hurt no one and provided incredible value to billions.
He accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant at age 23, freaked out about her keeping the baby, acted like a petulant child about it, and then shortly afterwards realized his mistake and took responsibility in every way possible. His daughter became an intimate part of his new family, for decades, and was there when he died.
As far as we know, this is the worst thing he ever did in his entire life. He made this mistake at 23 years old and spent the rest of his life trying his best to make up for it. What more could anyone ask?
Jobs was unhinged.
perhaps it happened this way and jobs was overly caustic, but zooming out from that emotionality, the designated outcome was not necessarily a bad one. it's in fact the basis of creative destruction. when a team fails (and for setbacks in general), disbanding and allowing new teams to form can be net positive.
You walk down the street and someone you know in passing tells you:
"Hey, you gain a lot of weight. You look fat and ugly. Nobody will love you so loose weight."
don't get offended they are just trying to help you. Humans are emotional creatures, treating them as if they are robots is reserved for psychopaths.
Besides if you are the boss and team fails to deliver, guess who is to blame first. Its the fucking boss who failed to access the task and oversee the progress.
If I had to summarize the internet in one feeling, that would be jealousy
Tesla is worth 600 billion dollars. Means the world is very impatient to buy their cars actually.
Also, you don't get to decide how people behave and treat each other. The social equilibrium is such that you only get to decide on your behaviors.
Not how I would have handled it, but actually correct. Tesla at that point was just starting mass production and was trading at a VC valuation multiple. Elon was absolutely correct to focus on ramping production and selling as many cars as possible. Would have been a waste of time to focus on financial metrics like gross margin in the near term. Oh, and those investors who sold after the call? TSLA stock is up ~20x since then.
He seems to not have a surgically precise thinking at all times like some smart people do, but he is always right in the stochastic sense if you will, over longer periods of time, he tends to be exactly right.
(And I agree that he can be despicable at times. To me the "pedo" thing is unforgivable.)
Like he was with the faster tunnel digging, or rockets instead of planes, or hyperloop, or the tunnel thing that is not a subway because its different.
All of his successful businesses were already established tech, he gathered the experts and funding to build a company. Its great and congratulation for being successful business builder. But he failed at every 'future' tech ideas.
And as another user put it, it can be both - they achieved great results, and they're assholes.
Edit: Hell, would you be OK with being berated and asked to work in an unsafe environment?
Edit 2: Just four days ago you posted about how much you dislike the way that Bezos and Amazon treat(ed) Amazon employees. I am having trouble squaring away that sentiment with the sentiment in your post today.
Just because you act like Steve Jobs doesn't mean that you are Steve Jobs. You can ask Adam Neumann about that.
https://ir.tesla.com/_flysystem/s3/sec/000095017021000524/ts...
Their Q1 earnings recorded only about 100m in profits from Bitcoin.
Do some math.
Hate on him all you like but at least report on facts.
You can look at that, look at their prospects, and then make your own valuation. Take the 5B in losses historically, take their growth rate, take their expected margins, take their competition, and make your decision.
- 5B loss over company history - 1B profit the last quarter - 50% growth historically - increasing margins - sold out car and energy products - potential increased competition
Raging at subordinates is not "passion", it's immaturity and abuse
That said, who knows if he ever did/said any of that
Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him the future is as real as the present, and has a clear pathway for it. He is going to make mistakes and some pathways are impossible to transit, but the goal remains the same and he will find a new way to go there. No matter if it takes five years and it is not possible now, but he will do it.
Field is a different kind of person. Things are the way they are, if nobody has done something before, it is impossible. For him not being able to automate things at first is a proof that he is right and Musk is wrong and things are impossible to automate further, forever.
Obviously both personalities are going to clash, only one can prevail. It happens in every single company out there. If two co founders have different values and ideas of what the company should do, there is a clash.
Being the most shorted company in Human history, there has always been a huge economic interest in portraying Musk badly and making shares go down.
If what the article says is the most serious thing they could find, I don't see the problems.
I have worked in the industry as an engineer in Europe and we had way more serious problems every single week.
Granted, he is rushing the SuperHeavy orbital build with reckless abandon, and a bad weld or connection somewhere means a multi-kiloton bomb blowing up on the launch pad (See Russian N1 launch), but you have to admire how fast SpaceX does things compared to ULA.
I mean, how many decades were people promising satellite internet? Iridium? Bill Gates Teledesic? OneWeb? etc. Starlink has put up satellites at a record pace compared to those projects. Again, with problems no one considered 10 years ago, like fucking up ground based astronomy.
Blue Origin hasn't even made it to orbit yet, but SpaceX has landed boosters 100 times, created the Falcon Heavy, the Crew Dragon, etc How many times has Starliner failed and been delayed? It's not even as capable as the Crew Dragon either.
I'm just saying, Musk has a "move fast and break things" iteration approach, the opposite of waterfall. He develops cars and rockets almost like people slap together websites. And it seems to be working, despite being a dickhead to employees, he's created a huge EV car company, and a huge world leading aerospace company.
Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.
Every launch failure that SpaceX has had in the past few years? That's Musk, gallivanting in at the last minute and interrupting the processes Shotwell set up to ensure successful launches to satisfy some silly little last-minute whim.
All of Musk's "successes" at SpaceX are literally just him waltzing in and stealing the credit for the work she's actually doing.
Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by getting rid of testing steps? She is more of a Tim Cook than a Steve Jobs.
Look at this 1 hour q&A at Starbase, time index 13:30, there's no way this five stages of engineering comes from Shotwell. It's not her personality, but Musk's instincts here are absolutely correct.
And it's the number one reason why SpaceX made it to orbit, and Blue Origin didn't, and why Starliner is taking forever. Musk doesn't care about blowing up 29 raptors and blowing $50 million on a test that will most likely result in a RUD. Shotwell would never have authorized that, she is much more concerned with keeping SpaceX's finances in order and the contracts flowing, and Starship simply doesn't have many launch customers who need 100t in orbit, and where launching on Falcon 9, or Electron's is good enough.
> Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.
Really? Based on what? The reason why they could pull that off is because Elon forced a shitload of SpaceX employees to be relocated from other parts of SpaceX to meet an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline. You think Shotwell would have ordered 24/7 round the clock booster assembly?
Keep in mind that it is Musk who insists on production automation, because his #1 priority is $/kg thrust, and so Raptor engines are pointless if you can't mass manufacture them. There is currently no economic reason for SpaceX, as a business, to mass manufacture these engines which have never been to orbit, even on a prototype demonstrator. Again, this had to have been Musk pushing for this, not a seasoned CEO/businesswoman looking to keep the company on track.
The entire Starbase is like a Google X, or Xerox PARC, it's a CEO running a big profitable company smoothly, so it can fund the crazy R&D ambitions of something else. That part Shotwell is responsible for, but there's no evidence of her involvement at all @ Starbase. She's never even been recorded being there AFAIK.
The reason that they did install 29 Raptor engines overnight was because Musk was a whiny little s$$$ and forced the employees to do it on threat of termination. But the reason they could do it was because Shotwell had the company running smoothly enough (and the labor force happy enough with her leadership) to make it possible.
And it's borderline fraud to give Musk engineering credit for the "5 stages of engineering," since Musk had literally nothing to do with any of that except take credit for the work of his engineering staff. Musk came up with "first principles" but first principles count for literally nothing in engineering. The hard part is the execution, not the base idea. See, e.g., Boring Co, HyperLoop, DC vs Marvel, etc.)
Musk didn't care about blowing up 29 raptors on a test because it's not his money that he's playing with; it's the taxpayer that's funding his whims of fancy. But Blue Origin is heavily funded by Bezos out of pocket, and since it's his own money he's more cautious about how it's used. That being said: once again this 29 raptor installation owes everything to Shotwell making it possible: having 29 raptors/parts thereof available, having an installation site available, having staff available to sacrifice their night for no good reason, and most importantly, having an inkling ahead of time that her idiot boss would demand something stupid like this and having everything ready to go when King Musk waltzed in with his latest silly demand.
Unlike you, I know a number of people at SpaceX and those involved with Starbase. Shotwell is heavily involved, but unlike Musk, she's an actual leader and trusts her employees. She doesn't micromanage so she doesn't need to be onsite constantly breathing down her employees' necks.
And this has nothing to do with gender. Steve Jobs got all of the accolades for everything amazing that Apple did. He stole credit from Steve Wozniak, and from all of the other brilliant designers and engineers at Apple, but people mostly gave him a pass. But to deny Steve as the driving force for many of decisions, even if Steve had nothing to do with Apple's amazing supply chain management, or semiconductor team, is also distorting history. No Steve Jobs, no iPhone, no Mac. No Musk, no Starship. It's just that simple, Musk isn't an executive to set out to make a rocket company to make money launching satellites, he set out to make humans multiplanetary, and everything flows from that vision. His obsession with that dream is the core driver behind everything else.
Musk creates the 'urgency' at SpaceX. Blue Origin isn't doing jack because they are careful with money, Blue Origin is wasting money. They've spent $1 billion a year! They're not doing anything because they're running a traditional waterfall model of development and they have no urgency, becausefor Bezos this is a hobby. They're OldSpace dressed up in NewSpace clothing.
What you're doing is trying to remove the person who controls the purse springs, who is pushing his company to engage in risky, unsafe, but potentially revolutionary vision, from the story. Put a traditional CEO in Musk's chair and you'll get a guy managing a 5% YoY improvement in their existing Falcon 9 business lines every year. They'll rest on their butt milking the Falcon 9 with tweaks, and they'll be stuck in the innovators dilemma for fear of killing the golden goose, or risking the company.
And it's for that reason, since the 1960s, the basic formula for aerospace companies hasn't changed.
Also to be clear, I'm a big fan of Shotwell. But you can be a fan of both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, of the visionary risk taker with the obsessive personality, and the person responsible for executing it. With the ADHD and the OCD founders. You need both kinds of people.
I suspect there's something really dark with him that originates in his childhood (suffered through horrific bullying and a hellishly awful father).
I don't really follow Musk, so pretty much everything I hear about him comes from whatever antics bubbles up to a tech-y press (such as Ars Technica or posts here). As a result, the mental image of him that I have is that he's an arrogant, egotistical smartass with a selfish streak that sometimes can be seen as altruistic. Which is basically the kind of behavior that this article seems to confirm.
... so what is in his public persona that is in stark contrast to this constant portrayal in the news? What am I missing?
When in actuality, all of these stories seem to indicate that he's incompetent at it. People were willing to put up with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (other egotistical jackasses) because they made good engineering decisions.
But Elon Musk's decisions are "Lets have an automated factory line, and I'm planning the factory will only have 30,000 workers". Then suddenly 40,000 need to be hired instead (because there's no automation technology to do the things he wanted), and now his financials are a mess and he has to build a Tent in the parking lot to house all of the extra production lines. And now people wonder why their Model 3 / Model Y have paint issues or other quality-control defects (Wompy Wheels)
Is he just astronomically lucky? Or such an incredible bully that he bends the very fabric of reality to his will? It's one (valid) thing to criticize his persona[lity], but his results seem rather more difficult to argue with.
He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla. He's grabbed multiple Billions for SpaceX. Its a totally different skill than his persona identifies with. No one else I know of in the modern market has successfully grabbed as much money from people as he has.
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Pretty much every time I've seen him go back to the market (be it 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...) to ask for more money, he convinces the banks, the stock traders, everyone to give him more money over-and-over-and-over again. Not just a little bit of money either: the amount keeps growing bigger and bigger.
Which btw: happens to be the skill Edison had over Tesla. But Edison made a lasting company (General Electric) for over a century, while Tesla died dirt poor with only his patents in his name. So once again: the Edison model of raising money and hyping up your inventions win again (even if your underlings made the inventions. But you can always buy more underlings with the money you raise)
Making a $Billion mistake really isn't a big deal when you can raise something like $3 or $4 Billion per year from stock market deals and hype.
Many others try to do what Elon Musk does. But they all fail. Elon Musk is the king of raising money.
This seems really questionable to me. I see a fair amount of investment in these fields, but nobody else--even companies of comparable vintage, with comparable money on tap--has come close to the success of Musk's companies. And at the beginning of the time range you're talking about, essentially the last 5 years, both companies had arguably already achieved--if not yet the relatively dominant positions they enjoy now--at least the momentum that got them here. Compared to the vaporous field of EV and space launch startups, they seem like obvious targets for investment.
No. You're the one saying that.
What I said was what I said in my above post. Elon Musk is incredibly good at raising money, and leverages this skill to the max in his companies. No one else in the world seems to compare against Elon Musk at generating hype and extracting money from bonds, secondary offerings, and other maneuvers in the modern stock market.
Feel free to disagree with me on this issue, but I have the numbers. The amount that public companies raise from bonds and/or stock offerings is public. I don't feel like digging them up right now, but I'm confident that I can procure the numbers if you push me on that subject.
I disagree.
Your first claim was that Musk is a bad engineer whose poor technical leadership verges on self-sabotage. I asked why, then, are his companies so successful? To which you responded that he is good at raising money, implying that his companies have succeeded primarily because he raised a lot of money for them. Since you previously criticized his technical leadership, the implication is that his companies succeed on the back of this money-raising ability despite his technical leadership.
Can you please explain how else I am supposed to reconcile your claims about Musk's strengths and weaknesses as a leader wrt. his companies' singular success per my first comment in this subthread?
Did you read the article that this thread is under? All I said earlier was just a summary of the points made in the article.
If you think the article is factually wrong, we can start with that if you like. What part of the article is incorrect in your opinion? (Alternatively: If you think I made a bad summary, we can work off of that as well. I am prone to oversimplifying things and maybe writing in a misleading fashion by accident. In case I made an error in my summary, I apologize in advance)
EDIT: A lot of my example came from these two paragraphs from the original article:
> Adding additional assembly lines, especially unautomated ones, would require many more workers on the car than originally planned. In meetings, Musk lost track of the numbers. He kept talking about having around 30,000 employees, when in fact the head count with outside contracts had grown to more than 40,000. (Musk’s attention was said to sometimes wander after the start of budget presentations.) Deepak Ahuja, the returned CFO, finally had to gently confront Musk with the fact that the company now had many more people.
> Musk didn’t take it well. It was the kind of detail that he latched on to, as if it crystallized a bigger issue, namely that Tesla’s cost structure wasn’t working. The plan had been for Tesla to break even on a rate of 2,500 Model 3s a week. But the added manual labor was jacking up the cost. Ahuja’s new calculations that spring didn’t have the company breaking even at 5,000 a week. Musk began to freeze spending, including a halt to plans to dramatically increase the size of service and delivery centers across North America. Musk wanted to slash jobs as quickly as they could.
IMO, it was certainly not clear in your initial comment that "Musk is an incompetent engineer" (here paraphrased) was meant to be a paraphrasing of other sources and not your own stated opinion.
Fair. But I assure you it was made with respect to the information in the article.
I do admit that I happen to have heard this story before, years ago when it was first reported. But reading this long-form story here reminded me of that opinion of mine, and I do believe the proof is in this article as it stands. The additional details in this article (and maybe the book its trying to sell) don't give me much confidence in Elon's engineering skill at all.
I would never want to work for him, but that's not quite the same question.
At least, it was all just fun internet drama until last year when Elon's COVID19 denials went on 100% full display so that he could keep his Fremont factory open. That pissed me off significantly, so I admit to being angrier today than normal. When I saw him use his "hype" to pretend that he was going to build ventilators for hospitals (with 100% confidence that he was bullshitting everyone again), that just made me angrier. Its no longer just him running a quirky company, he's actively stepping into dangerous territory and explicitly spreading COVID19 conspiracy theories among his fans now to push political ideologies that are convenient for him.
He's playing both sides: COVID19 denials when it keeps his factory open... COVID19 production ("ventilators", which happened to be worthless CPAP machines) to boost his own ego afterwards and help negate the damage. Its pretty annoying. (It is a donation of medical equipment, but it didn't help the COVID19 cause at all)
So that crossed a line for me. I do try to keep things in the "fun XBox vs PS3" kind of debate as much as possible, but I have to admit that the past year has really bothered me with regards to Elon.
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Even now, this year, he's suggesting that people don't get the second jab: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1370524129212964867
So while he's not quite anti-vax, he's spreading the paranoia about the vaccines (and was certainly spreading COVID19 denialism last year 100%, likely in support of his preferred factory politics)
And there are a myriad of long-term issues being put out on display here. Such as the FSD not working (promised "Coast-to-Coast" Full self driving back in 2017). Or the huge uptick in Model3 / Model Y quality complaints (coinciding with these stories about how rushed and impromptu the assembly lines were, such as what is discussed in the article).
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That's the thing. Every year, Elon comes back to the market with a story for why the stock is worth even more money than before (he needs to keep doing this to get another $5 Billion from a secondary offering). Its so predictable.
Elon says "this is the last raise I need". He creates some kind of "Hype Day", be it the battery-swap day, or solar tiles day, or some other promise he has no intent on actually delivering (or at a minimum: has no plans to actually deploy. Ex: Neither Cybertruck nor Tesla-Semi seem to have any concrete plans).
He uses that hype to generate real money for the company. The hype results in real money getting raised (ex: Cybertruck reservations). He uses the Cybertruck reservations to go to the stock market and extract more money from investors (Look at all of these reservations, we'll all be rich), so investors give him money too.
Then 5 years later, everyone has collective amnesia and forgets that Elon promised battery swaps, self-inserting "snake chargers", or full-self-driving to actually drive coast-to-coast, or "solar tiles'. Just in time for the new hype project and everyone hands money to Elon Musk again.
SpaceX and Tesla were mostly funded by him because he couldn't find investors. Literally nobody wanted to touch electric cars or rockets. Pretty strange for a guy who is supposedly some mastermind investor whisperer.
They had massive amounts of funding issues and went almost bankrupt because there were so few people willing to invest.
> He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla.
Tesla went threw multiple founding rounds and they have like $17 billion in cash on hand and have retired almost all debt.
So what exactly is your problem? Their automotive margin and operating margin are industry leading and the company has positive cashflow.
Go and compare Tesla funding with other EV companies like Lucid or Rivian. Tesla actually research starved, not over-funded.
> Pretty much every time I've seen him go back to the market (be it 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...) to ask for more money, he convinces the banks, the stock traders, everyone to give him more money over-and-over-and-over again.
They literally grew a manufacturing company from nothing to a serious global player. Look at their growth rate in deliveries over the years you mentioned.
And the later rounds were popular, guess what, because the company successfully executed with the last investment and fulfilled what investors wanted. That is literally exactly what the whole point of investing is.
Look at the growth of his companies. Claiming its all because of raising money is just so incredibly idiotic. Its the other way around, he can raise money because his company show growth rate and they use the invest money well. There were competitors companies who raised far more, many of them are now gone.
Literally ask anybody who has invested in SpaceX or Tesla in the last 10 years (other then traders) if they think their investment was worth it.
> Which btw: happens to be the skill Edison had over Tesla. But Edison made a lasting company (General Electric) for over a century, while Tesla died dirt poor with only his patents in his name.
Edison was a better business men but he was also a smart guy. This idiotic binary thinking of Tesla smart <-> Edison evil business men is overplayed nonsense. Tesla died poor mostly because his visionary ideas didn't actually work in practice and his attempts at independent business failed because of his technical misunderstandings.
Yes, Tesla invented some brilliant things, but he also had ideas that didn't make any sense at all.
> Many others try to do what Elon Musk does. But they all fail. Elon Musk is the king of raising money.
Yes, they fail because they can raise money and then don't execute, and that's why people wont give them more money.
SpaceX managed to build the first orbital rocket at comparable budget to companies that did it 10 years later (and most have not even flown), when the political and technological environment for doing so was much easier.
Virgin Orbit raised 500M for a much smaller rocket. RocketLab also raised 100M but built a much smaller rocket. Relativity has raised almost 1 billion before they even launched their first rocket. Firefly aerospace had 100M+ and went bankrupt and has since been revived and has raised another few 100M, and they only now are about to launch for the first time.
And all of these companies faces a much, much friendly investor base and much friendly government.
Do the same and compare how much money Tesla raised to get to 100000 cars, and then compare it to how much EV companies now have raised before even delivered a single car. You can even go back and compare it to all other automotive startups in the US history, go ahead and honestly evaluate it. Fact is, Tesla was capital efficient and still are.
The story that his companies constantly make mistakes and fail to execute and this is simply papered over with more money raising is simply factually incorrect. It simply doesn't hold up.
To make the argument that SpaceX was successful because they raised so much more money then the competition is the height of idiocy. If you look at how much access to capital the competition had, SpaceX was basically made fun of for a decade because nobody thought such a small and insignificantly funded company they could build a rocket that could compete internationally and on complex military contracts. If it was about money, and how much you can raise the competition would have crushed them.
After Musk provided the initial funding, Tesla and SpaceX got more because they executed well. Investors were right and as a result got handsome profits. Isn't that how it should be?
Total nonsense. Multiple engineers from inside and outside his companies have talked highly of him as an engineer.
> But Elon Musk's decisions are "Lets have an automated factory line, and I'm planning the factory will only have 30,000 workers".
Yes. He made a mistake. How horrible, he should be executed.
He addmited the mistake and has analyzed why it happened and is now trying to avoid that mistake.
If you don't risk things and don't try to push the boundaries then you want achieve anything.
> and now his financials are a mess and he has to build a Tent in the parking lot to house all of the extra production lines. And now people wonder why their Model 3 / Model Y have paint issues or other quality-control defects (Wompy Wheels)
Are you a time-traveler from 2017 or something? Like literally is everything you know a few news articles from 2017 and that has formed your total opinion?
Tesla has done extensive renovation on the paint shops in Fremont, those were older paint shops. Paint quality was an issue and is now very good. Paint quality from China are excellent. Austin and Berlin will both have newest generation paint shops that should be excellent as well.
Overall the drive train, electronics and suspension of Tesla have been very reliable and have a good reputation.
What do you mean? He called a person a pedo in public.
There's a time and a place for it. If you're in the NFL, on the field. If you're in the NFL of car making, on the factory floor.
Tom Brady isn't so polite for 60 minutes on Sundays.
Never once in my life have I met a world class performer who doesn't have some "field" where anger and profanity are permitted. If you want to be the best you can be I don't see how you can hit that without utilizing one of your core emotions.
Were there specific differences that made Musk and Jobs successful compared to Holmes in spite of their flaws, or is it just random dice outcomes that explain why the former managed to turn the impossible into possible and the latter didn't?
The left him wealthy enough to fund something else as a sort of Angel Investor, and it was at this point that "his choice of what to fund" was a significant act of cleverness. He looked at the world and asked "what are some things that are technically totally viable, but have been completely stagnant because of political problems in getting funding to try them, rather than any technical problems with them actually working? He spent a few years(!) crunching the numbers on them, and doing some research, and concluded that two things PROBABLY fit that bill: electric cars, and reusable rockets.
What he was ideally looking for is something where an industry had a blind spot - where the industry had "tried it, failed, and decided it's a dead idea nobody should bother trying again". But where they'd done this for a really bad reason.
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These were two things that just needed some billionaire to finally take them seriously - they weren't something some "rogue scientist" could just do in their garage; you genuinely needed major capital investment for said rogue scientists to be able to build test versions and refine their ideas into something that worked.
Electric cars were wide open because all the basic tech was there, but the existing car companies weren't even interested in trying due to cultural reasons. The biggest thing is most of the critical advances in batteries had already been driven by hundreds of billions of R&D dollars in the consumer electronics and computer industry - they'd been desperately pushing battery tech forward, and it'd become orders of magnitude better than it was when the auto industry made a consensus decision that electric cars weren't viable (back in the 80s). In the 80s they had a range of maybe 15 miles, and struggled to get up hills. Auto execs just didn't understand HOW much better batteries had gotten in a mere 10 years (in fact they probably assumed batteries weren't even really improving, and had reached their physical/scientific limits).
Reusable rockets had been scrapped because of the space shuttle's failure; it'd been intended to be completely reusable, and they couldn't pull it off because ... reasons. The consensus was that those "devil in the details" issues would always come up. On closer investigation, though - most of what went wrong is the same procurement malpractice we're currently having with stuff like the F-35 fighter jets, and not something that had any real bearing on the actual engineered work itself.
Similar thing with Jobs - computer GUIs existed, but the only companies that had developed them had been sitting on them and refusing to deploy them as a mass-market product.
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The key difference with Holmes is the fundamental tech keystone (doing medical tests via micro-samples of blood) just wasn't viable. Some biotech researchers tried to sound the alarm about that, but once they were too far into the process of running the company, everyone had already laid down their financial bets and was afraid to pull out.
What happened to them is very similar to what would have happened to SpaceX if it turned out that they were wrong about reusable rockets (for example, if SpaceX had tried to be a company in 1995, before modern computing was able to do all the differential-equation wizardry that lets their rockets land). Or if Tesla had tried to make an electric car company in 1988, and bitterly realized "oh shit, there's no humanly possible way we can make a vehicle with more than 30 miles of range."
You have to take a bet that everyone else is betting against ... and then also be RIGHT about that wild, contrarian bet.
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Choosing that bet was the smart thing Musk did. It's possible to make wickedly smart bets like that, and still be a mediocre manager, but win because the bet itself was just such a bullseye.
One reason for this is that sufficiently good bets can often attract great managers; both Tim Cook, and Gwynne Shotwell, especially, may be great examples of people who've come in under the auspices of a "big idea guy", but have been able to make their companies excel because they replace the poor managerial skills of the idea guy with their own.
But yeah; a guy like Musk's time is best spent not micromanaging their companies, but is best spent strategizing on big picture stuff (like doing the number-crunching to reveal that SpaceX could enable Starlink).
Well-placed anger can get a point across efficiently and can be quite effective but is also easy to overuse/abuse.
Being treated unrespectful by your boss because of the power imbalance is not something that should be tolerated.
Why does ego play a role? Couldn't one be mad because of what they believe is wrong is being done?
It's not right to be angry at someone that didn't know any better but there are individuals that I've worked with that aren't aligned with the company well, are lazy and do selfish things. Why am I not allowed to be angry at a person like that?
Sometimes, like if you’re angry at an opposing tribesman for attacking your village, it can be helpful. Other times, it can lead to acting out in ways that hurt you (like being so angry you don’t pay attention to your surroundings and get ambushed while trying to counter attack said enemy).
There are many possible scenarios - anger at the threat to his stock valuations, or anger at the threat to his public image, or anger at the threat to the illusion he personally held that everything was going ok, or anger and frustration at his inability to get control of the situation in a productive way, which is a threat to many of these things.
Most abuse is when a person is unable to properly manage and avoid painful emotions (such as anger), and projects fault and bad intent onto others - to scapegoat for instance as a maladaptive behavior they haven’t learned an alternative to, among other reasons.
What is being described in the article is classic abusive behavior, no matter the venue. It is not ok, in any environment, and it causes destruction and missed opportunities anywhere it is deployed.
The reason I think you don’t see that in his public persona because he knows it isn’t ok - but can’t control it sometimes, or even worse, thinks it’s a good thing when he can do it in ‘private’. He ‘knows how to treat his woman so he gets dinner on time’, as it were, and she’d better put her makeup on better so he doesn’t look bad in front of his friends
I expect there are many internal witch hunts ongoing for leakers after this, and have been for other leaks too. Since after all, in his eyes it is not the behavior that is wrong, it’s being embarrassed in public that is.
But I think the American culture is quite different from what I'm used to so maybe I sound weird in this context. :)
That "field" should never be in front of, or directed at, subordinates. The best people have peers (or walls, or chairs) to vent their frustration at.
That is a reality distortion field. The Tesla CEO is good at that and it reflects on the deceptive advertisement of FSD and the actual reality of it being unfinished and still unsafe and it puts the lives of many drivers at risk on the roads.
1) Tesla FSD actually is L5 full self driving
2) Tesla FSD is just driver assist and everyone knows it
3) People are dying in Tesla crashes at a massive rate
I doubt that it's 1 and I know it's not 3 because this would have been noticed immediately by the agencies that track this sort of thing and would be a huge news story. So it has to be 2. Nobody is actually stupid enough to be fooled by the name.
Most people I've talked to cannot accurately articulate the boundary of its operational capability, and there is a growing number of injured and dead "FSD" drivers that seem to have very muddied expecations of what "full self-driving" means.
So "FSD" doesn't actually mean "Full Self Driving" then? So this is not deceptive advertising then by Tesla Inc.? I'm assuming that you also have known that FSD was also advertised as 'Full Level 5 Autonomy' by Tesla Inc. as well which was due for completion in 2020 or early 2021? [0]
Where are the 'robotaxis' that was advertised and due for 2020 then? [0] So you are admitting that Tesla Inc. deliberately mislead its customers then?
[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...
Maybe that 'driver' shouldn't be behind the wheel in the first place given that he was drunk? You have to knowingly get inside of the car and start it up all manually to use it.
Does being drunk give a pass to everyone behind the wheel to do the same thing? You are still putting other drivers at risk regardless of the car that is driven, even especially what you are using is beta software.
I wouldn't want to use such software that confuses the moon with a traffic light [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...
That particular driver, no. What about a medical condition?
The moon thing is funny but was that unsafe? There's also the truck that was carrying traffic lights.
Edge cases. Humans make even worse decisions daily, nobody cares but people still die.
Yes, we deny people licenses for some of those, too. We test visual acuity. We test depth perception. We test actual driving ability, and we do it more frequently at ages when people are more likely to lose required facilities. We make laws against driving temporarily impaired for a variety of reasons which we can't test for in advance. And we take people's licenses away when they fail to drive correctly sufficiently, too.
People absolutely do care about poor decisions and failures of capacity without a poor decision by humans.
Elon Musk made the wrong call on "alien dreadnaught". Elon did not understand automation, and fired the man who did. Then complained about having 10,000+ more workers than originally planned (because his original plans were terrible).
The article doesn't say anything about "hard worker". Its about Elon making the wrong call, and then angrily firing the executives who tried to make it work. When there wasn't enough space, Elon set up the "tent" outside to expand manual assembly (since the factory was never designed to house this many workers).
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But that's fine. Elon can run his company however he likes under normal circumstances. The thing that pisses me off is his flaunting of COVID19 lockdowns last year. This internal politics thing is just that: internal politics that happen everywhere.
But its no longer internal when it comes to disease. We have to work together, and Elon Musk spreading COVID19 lies and disinformation so that he can keep his Fremont factory open really made me angry.
Are you a psychopath for driving your car for a holiday trip, even though there's people dying in 49 degrees heat in Greece? It's really not that different from Jeff Bezos flying his spacecraft.
Not that I'm saying it's ok, obviously Bezos's company is operating in real scummy ways. I'm just saying it's not a sure sign of psychopathy. Frankly, I don't think being a psychopath is compatible with their achievements, but I'm no psychologist.
Also, they're not that powerful. People keep saying this as if they're somehow super powerful because there's a big number next to their name on the Forbes list. 90% of their assets are tied up in stocks that they're not gonna sell soon. Bill Gates couldn't eradicate polio because some broke warlords in Afghanistan started propaganda against him. It took Jeff Bezos 20 years before his spacecraft did anything semi useful, and he still can't land a deal with NASA. If he really is a psycho, why was Zuckerberg so nervous at his senate hearing?
It is weird that this billionaire excuse flex didn't exist 5 or so years ago. Someone started pushing this meme really hard. And MacKenzie Scott's ability to liquidate $4B in a year shows that they really can do something with all those zeros if they want to and it won't single handedly crash the NYSE.
It seems like it’s in the interest of everyone to be financially literate in how the ultra-rich operate in order to form better thought out policy positions.
How is that at all relevant? Name one thing any of them cannot buy just because the vast majority of their wealth is invested. Bezos was putting a billion a quarter into Blue Origin - yes that's a small percentage of his wealth but there's no reason to assume more money would have gone faster.
And that's buying it for yourself. I think we can easily see the history of rich people buying presidents if not the presidency.
I don't think this analogy is reasonable. Let's evaluate what is observable and controllable in both scenarios.
Scenario A: I don't observe anyone dying as I drive. I have no control over people dying in Greece.
Scenario B: Jeff Bezos was frequently reminded of more down-to-earth problems (before and after his space trip). As Amazon CEO and richest man in the world, he's had a lot of control and influence over the wellbeing of others.
Equating stuff you would have to sacrifice your work and support network and forgo your livelihood to help as a normal person vs literally no effect on your day to day is pretty absurd.
If you think the life of a billionaire is so difficult, why don't they just give it all up and live a normal life? Clearly one is preferable to the other.
Also, literally none of this even touches upon being two-faced, abusive, and compulsively lying for profit, which was the context.
>Bill Gates couldn't eradicate polio >Jeff Bezos 20 years before his spacecraft >Zuckerberg so nervous at his senate hearing
Totally not super powerful people.
Also, there are lots of tax free ways to get to your money without selling stocks.
If they’re under so much stress and disconnected from the average person, it’s time to stop crowning kings.
None of us have to believe in extreme ownership, and enabling stressed people, as it just leads to abuse.
Not just abuse of individual employees, but society, our personal agency, and environment.
Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise.
Humans are complex and deep. And sometimes awful. There are more dimensions to a person than a good/bad guy or psycho/normal.
And with asperger - neurological diversity expands this space in ways it makes it very hard for neurotypicals to intuitively tell what the hell is going on.
Nobody is excused for bad manners. But not having any would not make person a psychopath.
Personally, I do care how I am percieved. I want to be a legitimately good person. However, we sometimes do things that make it look like we don't care what others think of us because it doesn't always occur to us that what we are doing isn't normal. Even when beforehand we think of what a normal and appropriate thing to do might be we could totally miss the mark and do something weird that gives the impression that we don't care.
I know very closely several diagnozed asperger spectrum persons - I should have written their behaviour may seem non-caring when in fact they may try their hardest to behave as neurotypical would and to act in the best manners they understand. But human interactions are really complex and difficult.
Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum.
I dated a woman on the Autism spectrum. This has been discussed in many books about Aspergers: People on the spectrum can resemble sociopaths and psychopaths on the surface. They are not. However, the appearance of insensitivity can often look like it to laypeople.
> asperger spectrum
This is no longer recognized in the DSM-5.
Asperger/autism - it's still a spectrum that's affected with neurological function.
So we are talking about neurologically distinct persons who may have been called in some instances as "being on the asperger spectrum".
What is the current accepted terminology for this neurological profile?
(I have close family diagnozed by neurologists 'on this spectrum' - and it is very much a specific neurological profile whatever we may call it).
DSM-5 replaced everything with autism spectrum disorder.
The way you put it sounded like the thing didn't even exist. Whereas, it was just a name change. If that wasn't deliberately misleading, it might as well have been. Someone who isn't familiar with these issues might have looked things up briefly, then concluded that someone was lying.
In my view, intellectual honesty demands taking care not to create such misleading situations, even at the cost of strongly "scoring a point." Especially at that cost!
Easier to get to the top - and stay there - if you don't care about anything (or anyone) else. Even better if you can do so while projecting a different image.
This may not be true for all CEOs. If you choose only the billionaires as examples, there could be some selection bias at play.
I, and many scholars, would argue that traits for a successful CEO are about the same as a criminal.
Great many are not often good men.
For more context, there's this famous story: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/peop...
[1] https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2021/01/leadership-styles-a...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/bill-ga...
Also add Jobs and many successful surgeons (or so I am told) to the list.
Indeed, one type of commenting on HN is to dig the past comments and come up with an observation. And one immediately was startled by the past behavior of the commentators.
Sure, are these behaviour bad? Yes of course, but does the article gives the full pictures? Likely not... Without contexts, the assessment of behavior is just meaningless.
I'm so tired of this. The article making that claim about CEOs being psychopaths has been latched into in pop culture so hard and yet it's roundly thought of as, at best, an incredible overstep of applied psychiatry.
Just because someone doesn't care about you doesn't mean they're incapable, they could just be a dick.
A reputable professional wouldn't diagnose from a distance and everyone else is covered by HIPAA.
This is what's known as a strawman.
The OP article might be a response to investor lawsuits filed against Blizzard and/or the Google lawsuit for the Andy Rubin and David Drummond cases. Abusing your employees it not just bad for them but can also be a violation of fiduciary duty. Musk is pretty transparent about his disdain for the SEC among other things.. .. If more people finally come foreword about Musk, he’ll never change his behavior, but at least everyone else will pay less for it.
When someone is yo ur job, you adapt your personality.
I am certainly not my authentic self at work and that is to facilitate my work.
They do, and that's fine. Politicians and people like him do it more frequently than, say, Larry Ellison.
What we shouldn't do is take a carefully-curated public persona, and try to extrapolate too hard about how <that person> 'really' behaves.
Isn't that just... human?
Do you "act" like shit in public? Don't most of us put on a show in public (social media, etc)?
https://twitter.com/timkhiggins/status/1421156081041088512?s...
As actually relayed in the book, the point of the story is not that Musk actually wanted to become CEO of Apple-Tesla (the author notes that the story is implausible), but that Musk felt the need to burnish his image by making up such a story in the first place.
The contention is that Musk told a tall, entertaining tale that was untrue. Fair.
But also that the tale indicates something dark about Musk's character? That seems a stretch.
> Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk
Why do people keep thinking Elon founded Tesla? Pretty sure he wasn't one of the founders, so I don't get why people think so.
I've been a big fan but this series of videos is tempering my understanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8
The label “founder” is definitely not misplaced. But I suppose it’s a matter of semantics.
After Eberhard left he sued Tesla for trying to rewrite history. Then he settled with agreement that Musk and two others (Straubel and Wright) were added to the list of founders. Money solves these things. Now Musk is now officially a Founder.
I got a business to run! I gotta kick asses sometimes to make it run right!
Regardless of whether Elon Musk has been sufficiently sensitive to the emotional needs of the people around him, his accomplishments (across a wide range of business and engineer problems) speak for themselves. If feelings get hurt in the process, whatever.
Nobody knew who Elon musk was. Literally nobody. But people in the EV enthusiast community came to know everything about Elon musk in 2008+ because he was the person in charge of the only company in the entire world that seemed to have the ability and intention of filling that vacuum. I watched every single interview, read every article and every quote. And back then he wasn’t famous so there wasn’t a bunch of noise around his name. And for about a decade I did this. And all I can tell you is what I saw with my own eyes. He is a real engineer, that’s not a scam. He has the sensibility and knowledge of an engineer. That was very clear over the years. He did in fact make Tesla what it is today, it’s not some kind of scam. 90% of the times that people said he wouldn’t/couldn’t do something that he said he would do, he did it. People sometimes forget that this has been going on for a long time now, and the first time people said he could never ever make something work was the model s. And people really meant that.
Why are some people Tesla fans? Don’t they know Elon musk is an asshole? Consider this: an EV enthusiast starts out in 2008. Tesla, which is really just a proxy for musk, delivers the best EV maybe ever. Then he says he’s going to build the model s. Then everyone says he can’t do that and then he delivers the model s anyway, certainly the best Ev ever. Then repeat that one two three four five times and throw in basically the worlds charging infrastructure. People are fans because Elon musk delivers what they want, he fills those difficult vacuums that only exist because of the complacency of others. It’s no different than Steve Jobs really.
So you can say he’s an asshole and a psychopath… that’s not going to change anything because the fanboys aren’t as stupid as you think. They judge a person based on their verified history of behavior and Elon musk has a verified history of delivering. Nobody cares if he yelled at someone.
And for all the people who want to cancel him, shame on you. All you’ll be doing is replacing him with someone who’s probably more psychopathic, yells at more employees and doesn’t deliver anything in the end. If you don’t like him, don’t work for him.
You will now see "psychiatrists", "judges", "moral priests", condemning Elon's behavior. They are mostly driven by envy and greed.
Elon is a driven person that can be temperamental when things don't get done. If that's not your style you don't have to work with him. He didn't cross any lines and at the end his company has been extremely successful to everybody's benefit.