It seems very much to me as if Musk doesn't know what he is doing. If this is feliberate it looks like he is trying to reduce costs to make Tesla's stock price go up again.
Teslas are ever more in demand, with wait times extending to a year. They are the highest selling EVs in the world by a large margin and they make the highest margin on EVs they sell, while others are losing money and stopping production (latest of which is Ford Mache E).
He knows what he's doing.
He took direct control of a company when it was going straight to shit and now its by far the largest EV company on the planned and they are still growing like a startup.
The public perception that everything Musk does it to optimize short term stock price seems to me totally and completly wrong.
I think far more accurate assesment would be that he focus on long term planning off the core limitation his companies are facing. And that will be positive for long term.
And so far this has proven out very successful. I can give many exapmles.
And in that he pays sometimes for not doing as well on the sideshows. Aguable that is the only way you can even consider running multible comapanies like that.
Tons of cars from other manufacturers often have similar issues from the factory, eg The Stellantis (Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram) family supposedly has one lemon every 100k cars produced[0] and that's only if the issue isn't fixed within 3 visits to the dealership's auto repair shop.
Wtf are you on? At most 1 in ten million people who buy Tesla will experience this? So, considering that Tesla has sold significantly less that that, do you think all those reports have secretly just been from one person?
> the main concern is reducing the metric of “next available appointment,”
Later on the article talks about how short sellers have been using that metric to gauge service levels, which Tesla wants to undermine. So it looks like the company is explicitly targeting a vanity metric as a knee jerk response to short sellers. Not the best long term strategy...
At some point it may catch up to them & they'll have to do something about it, but by then it may be too late to avoid major damage to the company. The fact that it hasn't hurt them yet might make it even worse: it may mean leadership stays in denial over the problem even longer past the point of keeping it manageable.
Didn't he put like, a whole car, into orbit around the Sun?
They needed a known weight to test the rocket and orbital flight mechanics. Instead of putting any random thing, he put his car and the world went gaga over the stunt. It brought Tesla and SpaceX tremendous amount of press.
As a founder, he made full use of an opportunity.
But seriously, that stunt has nothing to do with production Teslas. Tesla is still a very new player we are now seeing more and more growing pains, especially on the customer side, which is too bad but honestly should have been expected.
We are the first adopters to discover what kind of shelf life a Tesla car has, what it works like after 5, 10 and 15 years. Personally, I'm not optimistic about it. It seems to break down quite easily for a lot of people - add a decade of wear and tear on top of that, and it's not a great picture.
The base electronic, motors and batteries seem to be pretty reliable for most people. They had very few major issues with those things compared to most companies much smaller EV efforts.
I do suspect we will have a base on the Moon and maybe a little space tourism long before we do anything more than a small not-to-stay trip to Mars. The rocket is only a small part of the tech tree to settle a planet 6mos journey away. The moon is only about three days and there is a daily launch window.
That being said I’m also well aware that Gwynne Shotwell and numerous others are at least as responsible. He gets some but by no means all credit.
I also give Tesla immense credit for helping tip EVs, though I am less bullish on them by far than SpaceX. They seem to be very different companies.
But he evidently can't.
Getting back would be much harder challanges.
But his goal is for many people to go there.
And then 5 years later people are angry he didnt deliver.
I really dont understand why people keep brining this up.
And as for Mars, nobody can deny that what Musk is doing with SpaceX is getting us closer to that then we have ever been. I dont think any fan of space flight would disagree.
I dont know of any. Are you calling Geely or BYD new? And and they are not that much larger kn scale.
So please, show me the sources.
Beyond that, there is also XPeng and NIO, which aren't as large in scale ad Tesla, but are scaling significantly faster than Tesla did and are much much younger and definitely qualify as "at scale".
So, clearly, scaling a new car company isn't something Tesla was the only one to do in its era.
Tesla revenue: 53,823
BYD revenue: 32’173
And XPeng and NIO started way later when much of the groundwork for EV was already laid and the government in China had a gigantic push to establish EV in the country.
So yeah, the only company that is comparable, BYD is one of the most amazing companies of China and Tesla has done better on global scale.
I disagree that Tesla has done better on a global scale. Tesla requires 10x more subsidies per vehicle, doesn't own their battery supply chain, took longer to be profitable, made significant amounts of money from reservations they are yet to fulfill, etc...
For all the talk of gigantic governmental pushes, the US still supports Tesla far more than China supports BYD simply by offering 5-7x more in subsidies per vehicle.
I think, on the global scale, that BYD has done better and is doing better, as far as scale - they make almost as many cars as Tesla but also make far more than cars, such as buses, trucks, industrial equipment, various electronics - markets that Tesla has been unsuccessful in. The fact that they do so on lower revenue is a sign to me that they can simply produce more efficiently, ie, better at scaling.
Simply not true.
> For all the talk of gigantic governmental pushes, the US still supports Tesla far more than China supports BYD
That is just false. China has throwing gigantic support behind the whole push to EV. Not to mention that BYD profited massively from the protection of the government from IP theft. China literally threw lots of money at the whole supply-chain that BYD is building on.
And China had a large number of inventive programs for EVs as well, but Tesla profited from those 2.
> doesn't own their battery supply chain
BYD makes batteries but they certainty don't own their whole supply-chain. Tesla has started to make batteries and they are going deep into the supply-chain making their own materials and so on.
> made significant amounts of money from reservations they are yet to fulfill
Its not as much as you seem to think and it wouldn't change the overall picture.
> I think, on the global scale, that BYD has done better and is doing better, as far as scale
So how much does BYD sell in Europe and the US, its far less then Telsa does. BYD cars are mostly sold in China. They do sell buses and such outside of China. But in terms of Cars they massively profiting from targeting their local market first.
> such as buses, trucks, industrial equipment, various electronics - markets that Tesla has been unsuccessful in. The fact that they do so on lower revenue is a sign to me that they can simply produce more efficiently, ie, better at scaling.
Tesla makes revenue and more profit ...
The fact remains:
> here have been dozens of new car companies in China operating a far greater scale than Tesla
This is false, and I corrected it.
I hope EV startups succeed! I am just pointing out how hard it is to do it from scratch and that anyone who even gets close should be recognized.
(This is a play on Tesla never defining "delivered").