https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm
They also have over 100,000 employees. How much can Musk really be involved in?
Tesla is pretty much on full self driving now, it's basically blue chip and not going anywhere. Yes the trillion $ market cap is due in large part to him.
>Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris.
I couldn't disagree more. He's the richest person in the world, he's so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He's basically the world's first trillionaire. He has had how many doubters along the way and he's right every time?
I get why he's buying twitter and it's not about it being a hobby. Sure babylon bee was a catalyst but basically he sees the societal value of twitter. He sees the damage that twitter is doing through their political censorship. By fixing these problems it will provide tremendous value to twitter. He's going to benefit greatly with the purchase.
What?
That figure doesn't include spacex/starlink, boring company, etc.
Spacex has gross revenues in the billions, 12,000 employees. Not to mention... ISS basically is Russian or Spacex launches to get there and back. With Ukraine... that makes Spacex the only option? What's the intrinsic value there?
What valuation would you give SpaceX? Their only real competitor right now is Russia and people dislike them.
Lets say you're right. How did you come to a $80 billion valuation for spacex? The last valuation in 2021 was $100 billion. So spacex has lost value in your eyes? Starlink has happened since. Ukraine happened since.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
What he really did say is a bit more complicated:
> "The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch"
The irony is modern democracy with free speech, where the scale of your wealth directly transfers to the scale of your speech, makes the wealthy just as powerful as they would be in any standard oligarchy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler,_Lord_...
Is it the goal ? To be the richest ? Amazing perspective for our world ahead, let people amass cash, it's going to go _great_
>he's right every time
Except when he bets on camera only FSD, causes deaths, pushes the Hyperloop, does the Vegas Loop, calls people who reject him pedophiles, pushes Starship, pushes absolutely terrible working conditions for both factory workers and engineers, and an unending list of Elon bullshit. In the same way, is he "right" when Tesla only exists because of credits from the state (which he then complains about when the state asks him to respect the law), when SpaceX only exists because the US has kept it afloat, when he was kicked out of Paypal for being a dumbass, when he threatens our spacefaring possibilities with bullshit pride projects such as Starlink, when his stocks are propped up with his lies and just his personality ? Sure. Must be nice to live in the Musk Reality Distortion Field. Be real. He's not a hero.
No, Elon understands money unlike most people. Money is not a thing to anyone except the poor. Money is not a measurement of being able or not to do anything. In understanding that you generate wealth that is beyond money.
>Except when he bets on camera only FSD, causes deaths, pushes the Hyperloop, does the Vegas Loop, calls people who reject him pedophiles, pushes Starship, pushes absolutely terrible working conditions for both factory workers and engineers, and an unending list of Elon bullshit.
Controversial guy eh. Crazy how much society is rewarding him so much.
>n the same way, is he "right" when Tesla only exists because of credits from the state (which he then complains about when the state asks him to respect the law), when SpaceX only exists because the US has kept it afloat, when he was kicked out of Paypal for being a dumbass, when he threatens our spacefaring possibilities with bullshit pride projects such as Starlink, when his stocks are propped up with his lies and just his personality ? Sure. Must be nice to live in the Musk Reality Distortion Field. Be real. He's not a hero.
I agree, a certain political persuasion really dislikes him.
Ah. The red pill argument. I’m surprised I didn’t connect these dots more clearly until now.
You worship a false god.
They didn't "come off", they absolutely are. Don't really care about being downvoted.
Am I right to say that Elon is not going to dinner with you?
> He has had how many doubters along the way and he's right every time?
So the robo-taxis have released on time as promised at the end of 2020 then as he suggested.
I think this is hilarious.
"I can't run my company because a lawyer is meant to review my tweets so that I don't commit securities violations".
"I can't be involved with my company because the SEC is investigating my brother and I for insider trading".
This is horseshit. If this is the case, and I doubt it, it's entirely because he is trying to martyr himself, not because of any actuality of the "fight with the SEC". The SEC doesn't give two shits about the efficiency of his production lines, his plans to open a new battery production facility, or whatever. Let's stop the narrative that the evil bad SEC is stopping Musk from innovating to move humanity forward.
I think we're approaching a point in the lifespan of Tesla where is can stand on its own merit and no longer requires Musk to continue making a ridiculous amount of money. However, Musk is integral to the continued innovation and success, the same as Steve Jobs was to Apple. Under Tim Cook, Apple continued to thrive, albeit in a different way.
Regardless, no way will Musk run Twitter on a day-to-day basis, he'll remove the board, replace the CEO with someone he trusts, likely get Jack involved again, and a lot of developers will leave, leaving the company in a better position financially. Musk will likely just guide functionality and policy decisions from afar.
I don’t eat at McDonalds, but that doesn’t make me think they’re going to collapse. In fact they’re likely successful for precisely for the reasons I don’t eat there.
A guy who has managed to lead multiple startup companies to huge companies for literally decades threw multiple economic crisis. He is one of the longest running CEO in the auto industry.
Its just amazing to me how people focus so much on 'omg look at how he manages social media' compared to 'simple looking at the actual record of the companies he leads'.
People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company. And yet neither SpaceX nor Tesla have suffered.
That said, I'm against it too. I just think that the idea that this will collapse Tesla is not realistic.
And both failed.
Risky businesses are risky.
How has Boring Company failed? They've successfully opened the Vegas loop, have a pitch to open a similar project in (I believe) Miami? And now they're looking at building a Hyperloop 'in the coming years'.
Like who are you convincing with this nonsense?
It literally takes 5s of googling to show that you are totally full of shit.
Boring Company just raised 600$+ million $. And is hiring lots of new engineers. They have multiple projects in the pipeline.
So we have a company that is growing and has costumers in the pipeline. Their first costumer is so happy that they want to extend the system considerably.
But that I guess is not enough either?
What more do you want other then happy costumers, new costumers and the ability to raise money on the bases of those things?
This is a company that builds actual machines. They make their own tunnel boring equipment. That is a capital intensive businesses not a software startup. They need to raise money to expand production.
Yes, Tesla bought SolarCity, the rest is just a bunch of nonsense. One can argue that, this sale didn't work out as well expected.
But if that is really the worst think you can come of with, it pretty sad.
Musk got rich off of PayPal. But lets be clear, he "lead" it for less than four months before being fired as the CEO for gross incompetence.
He was fired because he wanted to keep it and had a very aggressive growth plan.
The other people just wanted to cash out.
He was not fired about incompetence, he was fired because of disagreements about strategy.
So maybe it was more about Elon.
And if you invest your money into Musk companies you would now be far, far, far, far richer then anything you would have invested into any of the other PayPal founders companies (or Ebay or PayPal).
Fundamentally, his beef with Twitter seems to be around their speech policies and maybe some missing site features. He doesn't need to be even close to full time to resolve those. He just has to find a tech CEO who agrees with his values and who can execute when given a clear mission. There are plenty of those kicking around the Bay Area.
Define "worst tendencies", because most people agree that "doxxing" and calls to violence are unacceptable but the left has just labeled all speech that they disagree with as "violence" or "misinformation" and just banned it all. I think musk has a good pulse on the dividing line that is most appropriate and that having the wrong opinion on the definition of a man, who won the last presidential election, and whether or not a vaccine is "safe or effective" have no business being censored by the cretins currently running twitter.
Literally what is this based on.
Tesla was going straight into the shitter, Musk took over and now its a trillion $ company. How do you explain that?
Revenue will continue to increase, but at a slowing rate.
Stock price correction != company collapse.
Because whenever Tesla has a huge accomplishment, people always come out of the woodwork and claim Elon is Not the founder and all he does is take credit for everyone else’s work.
I personally wouldn't give him credit for the great engineering done at tesla. It seems like he is good at hiring decent people, and when he gets out of their way, great things happen. When he gets involved (like with the absurd touchscreen console, no-LIDAR self-driving, and the "lights-off" factory idea) it goes wrong. Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work.
This is not really the case at all. Why are you just making stuff up?
Go look at between 2016 and 2018, by far the closest Tesla came to bankruptcy then at any time sine 2008.
So I'm looking at that data and there is no magical 200% stock price raise based on media.
What actually happened it Tesla managed to execute and bring a mass market vehicle market successfully.
> like with the absurd touchscreen console
Man somebody should have told the 1.5 million vehicles they will sell this year for 30% magin how stupid that is.
> no-LIDAR self-driving
That's why you can now anywhere in the US can jump on a self-driving LIDAR tax and buy a LIDAR self-driving car at your local dealer.
> and the "lights-off" factory idea
And now Tesla has some of the most advanced factories in the car industry where literally the CEO of VW said that VW was not able to produce vehicles as fast. What an idiot he is ...
> Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work.
That is literally the opposite impression you get when you actually investigate anything other then twitter opinion.
Pretty much everybody who got to spend any time at Tesla or SpaceX comes away with the opposite impression. Musk literally spends the waste majority of his time in detailed engineering review meetings.
Tesla had a gigantic amount of negative press, more then any other company I can think of. But Musk made the company successful with marketing?
What are you even talking about, what marketing? His twitter account and a TED interview or something every could of months? The viewer numbers on those things are far to low to explain Tesla value.
Source for that? And not the drone footage of one of Tesla's factories please.
>> Tesla had a gigantic amount of negative press
But this is still press, isn't it? And it is Musk that gets the negative press, not Tesla.
A lot of people are spouting short-seller crap from 2018. I suggest that they honestly look at where tesla is now, not when they last paid attention.
At the nearby Gruenheide factory outside of Berlin, Tesla is currently trucking along and set to achieve the goal of making an electric vehicle in under 10 hours. At this time, Volkswagen’s main Zwickau plant requires 30 hours per vehicle. Diess hopes to reduce that to 20 hours per vehicle by next year.
Conclusion: Neither Tesla nor VW are producing EVs in ten hours. And Zwickau is not a dedicated EV plant and needs rebuilding to become one. Interesting that we only get concrete numbers from VW, so. I have to admit, it is funny to see VW, which was the most marketing dependent car maker I know up until Tesla showed up, and Tesla to slug it out in a PR and marketing war!
EDIT: Zwickau wasn't a EV plant until 2020.
Tesla went from a company who had never manufactures anything in large quantity, 5 years later they are seriously comparing to VW a company that has been a globally dominate automaker for decades.
So look at Tesla in 2017 and say 'Musk is an idiot he thinks he can automate production' and then look at how Tesla produces cars in 2022 and tell me he is an idiot.
From publicly available footage, a Tesla factory looks not any more impressive, even less so from commentary that knows much about automotive manufacturing than I do, than state of the art factories from legacy coomoanues.
Tesla and SpaceX are impressive feats, I don't get the urge to pass Tesla and Musk as all encompassing geniusus that know everything better than encumbents.
You may want to true up your perceptions.
On Ford - "The Detroit automaker sold 1,905,955 vehicles in 2021, ending up behind new U.S. leader Toyota Motor Corp (7203. T) and rival General Motors Co (GM. N). Ford had sold 2,044,744 vehicles a year earlier.Jan 5, 2022"
VW (not including sub-brands, which are managed and mostly built separately): 4,896,900
It's worth noting both of those companies production is failing, while Tesla is increasing 50% YoY.
https://www.hotcars.com/largest-car-manufacturers/
Statista has similar numbers.
Edit: Turned out it was more like 2017 numbers... This source here has 9.5 million units for Toyota, 8.8 million for VW, both after steep drops in 2020. Ford is down to 3.9 million, I am honestly surprised by this. But then I undersetimated the drop in car deliveries in 2020.
https://www.factorywarrantylist.com/car-sales-by-manufacture...
We will have a few really large groups, VW, Toyota, Stellantis, Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi alliance. GM has also lost a gigantic amount of vehicle volume in the last 10 years. There will likely be even more consolidation.
In general volume is going down and because of supply issues its not going up as much as people thought this year.
> Because he gives a fuck about first pass yield and those things.
Do you mean he doesn't? Anyway whatever you are trying to say, fact is Tesla is producing a lot of vehicles, they are a major automaker, they are growing fast, and they have industry leading margins.
> Plus, Tesla is still almost a factor 10 away from production volumes of VW, Toyota and the like.
What an absurd argument is that? So do you think BMW, Daimler and co are also all shit at manufacturing? Because they don't make as many cars as VW either.
So in your mind, only if Tesla creates the largest car company in the world he can be considered good at manufacturing? You realize that is a totally absurd position right?
Tesla went from selling a few 100 vehicles 10 years ago to likely outproducing BMW and Geely in 2023. That means they had continues massive growth curve for 10+ years straight.
If you compare the output of individual plants, Tesla plant in Shanghai is easily one of the most productive car plants in the world and that is the first plant that Tesla ever even built.
> I don't get the urge to pass Tesla and Musk as all encompassing geniusus that know everything better than encumbents.
That not the argument anybody made. Tesla is not better at everything. But they are actually very good and anybody that still thinks of Tesla in 2017 is just stuck in time. In some important they are actually better, body structure, electronics, battery integration is just ahead of everybody else.
If you want to dislike Tesla and Musk that's fine, but your arguments about him being and idiot and Tesla being depended on marketing just don't have a bases in reality.
- 2016 - model 3 preorders with no backing except a drawing.
- 2018 - cybertruck, semi, and full-self-driving preorders with one single prototype of the vehicles.
- And after each one of these, there is a huge bump in stock price. 200% is hyperbole.
These are feats of marketing, not feats of engineering. A CEO spending a lot of time in detailed engineering reviews doesn't make you an engineer, it means you enjoy doing detailed engineering reviews.
It is undeniable that Tesla is successful in large part because of the cult of personality that Musk has built, largely on Twitter. That has bought his company the good grace to do preorders with ridiculous turnaround times and to lose money year over year on the stock market while keeping an astronomical valuation.
The rest of Tesla-the actual car making thing-is something that an organization of several thousand engineers could have certainly done without Elon Musk given the amount of cash they had, and probably could have done better without Elon Musk. They just needed Elon Musk to raise the cash.
He is exactly like Steve Jobs: a briliant marketer with a cult of personality, who people think of as an "inventor" because he likes to spend time doing that.
Its not hyperbool is literally just false.
The stock price in 2018 was essentially flat.
The stock price in 2016 is flat.
You made an argument about 200% and at best its like a few %, meaning your argument is total nonsense. Literally made up with nothing to back it up.
And even if the stock went up a bit based on announcement, that doesn't even remotely prove that that stock raised 'saved' the company.
> These are feats of marketing, not feats of engineering.
No what are actually feats of engineering, and actually had impact on the stock price is when Tesla from 2017 to 2018 made the first EV that was produced over 5000 times a weak and had significantly possessive margin. And when they turned a mud field in China in to a working factory in about a year.
That is when the stock ACTUALLY started to go up. When Tesla proved they could produce cars at very high volume and good margin.
So you are just flat out factually wrong on this and I don't know why you are trying to hold on to your take. The data is right their anybody can look up the data and instantly know that you are wrong about this.
> It is undeniable that Tesla is successful in large part because of the cult of personality that Musk has built, largely on Twitter.
That is just total nonsense. Tesla successful brought the first modern Li-Ion EV to market before Musk was famous. Even when the Model S came out Musk was not very well known. Actually releasing the Model S successfully and getting car of the year is part of why Musk did get more famous.
So Tesla already had like 5 years of growth before Musk got all that well known. Also, you vastly overrated, twitter, far fewer user, use it then you might think.
People were attacked to Tesla because they made actual real EV that you could buy, that had a charging network. Tesla had a message about EV saving the environment and that message reached 100x wider then Musk twitter. People don't spend 50k+ on items because of a guy on twitter.
> That has bought his company the good grace to do preorders with ridiculous turnaround times and to lose money year over year on the stock market while keeping an astronomical valuation.
Well turns out they very actually undervalued not overvalued. And they didn't actually lose that much money, and didn't raise that much money.
They showed they were profitable with the Model S and they were a sustainable company. Then they went into Model 3 and everybody knew this was capital intensive and they guided for loses for a few years.
Do yourself a favor and compare how much money Tesla raised and what their evaluation is compared to companies that are in this space now, Rivian, Lucid and so on.
Tesla actually operated handled their cash very well and did a lot with not that much money.
> The rest of Tesla-the actual car making thing-is something that an organization of several thousand engineers could have certainly done without Elon Musk given the amount of cash they had, and probably could have done better without Elon Musk. They just needed Elon Musk to raise the cash.
And who heirs the engineers? Who defines strategy? Who decides what people should have leadership positions and so on. Tesla was not a company with 1000s of engineers when Tesla became CEO, its was a company about to go bust who had not delivered a single car.
This is HN, building a company from tiny to gigantic is a huge achievement that doesn't just 'happen'.
There were Tesla competitors many had just as much or more cash then Tesla, but they failed. Why? I thought if company just had money they would magically start mass produce cars.
> He is exactly like Steve Jobs: a briliant marketer with a cult of personality, who people think of as an "inventor" because he likes to spend time doing that.
That you think they are the same just proves that you have not really been paying attention beyond surface level. They are very different in their approach. And with both its not actually marketing.
Being an "engineer at heart" is part of his marketing game, just like it was for Elizabeth Holmes and Steve Jobs. Also, being an engineer at heart doesn't make someone a good engineer. Tesla has accomplished incredible feats of engineering, but that doesn't mean that _Elon Musk_ has accomplished them. Also, the fact that Elon Musk is an incredible marketer shouldn't be taken as a dig: he is clearly the best marketer of his generation and Tesla undeniably would have failed without him. It's when he or his followers get fantasies about Elon Musk being brilliant at everything that I get upset.
As to credibility as an engineer, let's look at the other examples of Musk's engineering work (the ones we know _Elon Musk himself_ was responsible for):
* The hyperloop is a ridiculous concept that defies physics and engineering. Musk personally wrote the "white paper" for it. He wrote that white paper because the California legislature was proposing high speed rail from LA to SF (that would be a ridiculous waste of money), and he didn't like their proposal.
* The boring company makes tunnels. They are not particularly cheap or fast to dig, unless you compare their tunnels to tunnels several times the diameter (as Elon Musk does in his marketing material).
I have no problem with Tesla and I hope they become a successful car company. There is a good chance that my next car 3-5 years from now will be a Tesla if the company proves itself capable of surviving a bear market and the quality issues go away. Musk has been great for Tesla in the growth phase, but they may need a new CEO for the next stage of life.
This old sad meme again.
Do you mean he is not a technically certified engineer? Because a lot of people are not that but go into engineering, specially in software.
What would you suggest qualifies somebody as an engineer?
Musk studied physics and was was accepted as PhD student for material science at Standford. Many people from that path go into engineering fields. Musk didn't finish his work on ultracaps and instead created a software company where he was the main software engineer. He actually wrote the code and lead the team of coders at a company that sold for 20+ million. Does that not count as engineering?
And Elon did actually work on the actual Falcon 1 rocket. Both on design and on the actual hardware.
He is not the Chief Engineer in name only. He does what a Chief Engineer does. He is in every technical review meeting with senior engineering leaders and make top level decisions, he defines the strategy and direction of the engineering work. He fundamentally makes a the choice of material/manufacturing process and so on, and takes responsibility if it doesn't work out.
There are plenty of domain experts who have interacted with Elon who have talked about how he actually has the knowlage to talk with all the engineers about domain specific details in those peoples field. And those people were not working at Musk companies.
> * The hyperloop is a ridiculous concept that defies physics and engineering.
Funny then as it was validated by engineering teams of both Tesla and SpaceX with the best simulation tools available in the industry at the time. Please tell me what defies physics.
> * The boring company makes tunnels. They are not particularly cheap or fast to dig, unless you compare their tunnels to tunnels several times the diameter (as Elon Musk does in his marketing material).
Well the bought a commercial tunnel boring machine to start of at. So of course those are not faster. But the point of the company is to make it faster. Are you suggesting that they have made their next generation tunnel boring machines slower then currently commercially available designs?
Where do you get your knowlage about tunneling prices and speed? Do you have some sort of internal knowlage about cost from the boring company?
The Boring Company just raised 600M$ but so I guess at least some investors who look at the tech don't think its trash.
Musk's RDF in full effect here.
That quotation was about quality control - and Tesla's relatively abysmal QC compared to other production lines.
VW's CEO said that an average VW took nearly 30 hours to come off the line, versus approximately 10 for Tesla.
He also said that they're targetting 20 hours in the next decade. Huh. They're not even trying to beat Tesla, there. Wonder why? Maybe it's so they don't deliver cars with mismatched tires, leaking sunroofs, _missing brakepads_, and so on.
I think it's hilarious that people like you believe with a straight face that a $250B/year production line hasn't fired up a spreadsheet and done the numbers on costs of "implement another line, so we can spend more time on each car and push more out in parallel" (VAG manufactured 8.4M vehicles in 2021 versus 900K for TMC), than "hey, if we just cut some more corners, and deal with things after the fact, it'll be cheaper".
And the claim that you need 10h for quality control is utterly ridiculous. The reason they likely are not targeting a lower number is because their production centers are far more distrusted and they don't have full vertical integration from battery cells to cars in one building.
There are other possible explanation. You can't just assert whatever you want without any evidence at all.
If VW has a higher quality standard then Tesla (questionable) then that fine. That literally changes nothing about my argument about production argument.
And Tesla quality issues have been far less in Shanghai were they have faster production then in Fremont. We have yet to see if Berlin will have production issues.
And outside of VW or whatever. Its unquestionable that Tesla made major gains in manufcaturing that is a competitive advantage. So the claim that Musk is dumb because he wanted to increase automation or simply wrong.
The idea that they cut 20h of production by 'cutting corners' is just a delusional take. Sorry. If that was possible do you think GM would not have done that in the 2000s. Do you think Nissan wouldn't have done it?
Tesla first attempt at that automation was wrong, but they adjusted and actually did make real innovations. Denying that is just making you look silly and uninformed.