Musk has done great things but these days I think he’s at his lowest point.
/I’ve said this about three times now in threads like these.
Unfortunately for civil discourse, it’s more effective to create controversial messaging that resonates with your followers, than sanitized messaging that is generally inoffensive. Controversial messaging makes your supporters increasingly loyal and attentive, as the noise from vocal ‘haters’ just keeps feeding your base. It’s perverse, it’s toxic, it’s exhausting but it works.
Look at the price earnings ratio of Tesla. What else is it but the world’s largest meme stock? His messaging vibes very strongly with Wall Street Journal readers and the Reddit trading community.
His followers show up to the annual meeting like a pack of cult members.
None of this is to say he's a bad guy, he seems like a good guy. But he's a marketing genius too. No vitriol spewing required.
Those aren't the options. You can - and many do, as a matter of course - create effective, powerful messaging that is not 'sanitized' or offensive. You can see it all the time on HN.
Musk has been more unhinged in his online activities than ever in the past six months or so, coinciding with a 45% slide in TSLA share price. Hypothesizing that his social media addiction is central to his 'success' would be pretty easy to test by simply comparing TSLA's performance to another auto manufacturer, e.g. Ford or GM. Doing that, TSLA is not showing any advantage - all three have suffered about the same amount of share price decrease.
So just looking at the numbers, it's clear Musk could just focus entirely on productive work, skip the 'influencing' and wanton reputational damage to the businesses he manages, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. TSLA and the others would arguably be in the same place if the average person had no idea who Elon Musk was.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lashing-out-recess...
If anything, Musk should focus entirely on the influencing and stop making decisions about product (see [1]) -- that is what he is good at!
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15347233/musk-attributes-...
What does SpaceX do again? Uh Oh.
The journalists decided to publish the article anyway.
He’s lying and turning his fan base into hating the democrats who have nothing to do with the article.
That’s who he is, that’s what he does.
He’s lying and turning his fan base into hating the democrats who have nothing to do with the article.
That’s who he is, that’s what he does.
That's a defensive projection from both Musk and Republicans to incite his "new side" to arms and protect him implicitly from any criticism whether it's about labour rights or sexual harassment.
Maybe it's 4D chess to get the Cybertruck to be popular with the right wing.
But for most of us who are progressive and environmental, we have been pushing back against his ego and authoritarianism for years - worried that he is sabotaging his stated cause more than he is helping it.
For me the last straw was The Boring Company. I was still All In on Musk as a real-life Tony Stark who would make humanity interplanetary and solve the computer-brain barrier all the way up to Neuralink. Even Hyperloop seemed compelling if he could execute on it and seemed like it might be a clever hack to work around American resistance to high-speed rail.
The Boring Company revealed to me the self-aggrandizing fraud that he is.
I say as I type into a seperate social network. It's hard to escape, honestly...
1 - make it uncool (no more james bond smoking in cinemas, packaging that reminds of diseases)
2 - make it expensive (tax the hell out of it)
3 - make it a hassle (no smoking in closed spaces, airplanes, universities etc)
The thing is, both weed and social networks became popular right about when smoking stopped being popular. So maybe there is an extra step, a perverse one:
4 - provide a substitute addiction.
It is a slippery slope.
What's next?
No more cup cakes because sugar gives you diabetes?
How about no more hip hop music because it largely celebrates violence and influences kids to join violent gangs?
No more cars because AOC might whine with another 24 tweet wall of bar-stool wisdom?
Internalizing externalities is one of the primary functions of government. I’m incredibly happy I rarely have to smell cigarette smoke.
Personally, the thing that got me to quit smoking weed was getting really into brazilian jiu-jitsu.
It may be possible to generalize this.
Besides that, I really like your post, the 1st 3 points are solid. ^_^
Yes, but could mean a lot to the talent pool discussed in the open letter, in the face of growing competition to SpaceX and Tesla, which ultimately will impact the product, revenues and value. Seems shortsighted or almost as if he’s done working on hard problems.
Umm no. Just no. Ignore media hype and look at the numbers - SpaceX is arguably closer to monopoly in all areas of its business than ever before.
Social media is the effect, not cause, of his bad behavior.
He was known to be an impulsive bully long before he ranted on Twitter.
What are Elon Musks accomplishments? His ability to get financing? Hiring the right people to push the success of SpaceX and Tesla? His ability to inflate the stock price of his company (above that of a historic bull market).
This isn't a cynical comment, I'm honestly trying to understand his actual accomplishments other then the ancillary praise one gets in America just for getting rich(er).
Fisker Automotive and Better Place are two electric car startups that were founded after Tesla that you've probably not heard of, even though between them, they raised close to a billion dollars.
The reason why he gets so much praise is because he tends to do quite well—better than other smart folks that are similarly resourced (i.e. access to VC capital)—in industries notorious for high rates of failure or where it is hard to break even.
Probably this. Its not easy to do.
I think there is also something to be said about the singularity of vision Musk brought to these companies. Its easy to dismiss (and I haven't been a fan of him much since the whole Thailand incident) but its one of those annoying aspects that eludes the desire of developers' (i.e. the average reader of this site) desire to quantify everything.
It makes me think of the story of Steve Jobs after his return to Apple, where he called a meeting of team leads, made a quadrant on a white board with the edges labeled "desktop" and "portable" on the vertical, "consumer" and "professional" on the horizontal, and demanded the company only produce 1 product to fill each of the four squares, eliminating the rest.
I'm obviously not a fan but I agree he likely deserves a lot of credit for this. But at the same time, don't a lot of people participate in hiring decisions throughout a company? The board? Other executives?
It irks me that Musk should get all the credit of what is undeniably a team effort.
If you're actually curious there is a good book on SpaceX early days.
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff
If you read the book I think you'll agree, desperate is the correct word in the title of that book and Elon did plenty.
I still can't believe they're landing rockets backwards. When I took control systems it was the canonical example of an unstable system. Guess those books need updating. :)
Regarding the landing rockets issue, I've found BPS Space's youtube series on trying to land a model rocket in a similar matter very enlightening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMT44LFUjs
The word we use to describe people-managing at this high level is "leadership".
Musk is none of those things.
Not his entire career, his later decline became famous due to the scope of wealth and influence that allowed him to indulge in some truly eccentric behavior, but he didn't build said wealth & influence peeing in jars.
> never built anything important (although had a shitload of failures, like the wooden airplane)
Never built anything? How about Las Vegas? Or the several companies he founded and ran successfully across wildly divergent fields? The man designed, built and flew an aircraft that broke world speed records at the time.
> inherited a lot of his initial money and revenue streams
Seriously? Do you not know Musk's family background?
Actually the more I think about it the more I think mint2's comparison was apt, Musk really is a Hughes-like figure, quite brilliant in ways, but with a powerful thirst for publicity and corresponding need to control his image. I could see his paranoid tendencies tending to dominate in the years to come, especially if his halo fully disintegrates
Musk far more helpful gift was the fact that his mother was Canadian.
His father didnt want him to be in the Canada/US and didnt pay for most of it.
Musk certainly has no inhereted wealth, his father is alive.
What a brain-buster!
Musk hasn't inherited hardly any money at all (a couple thousand when he left SA and a bit more later when he started his first company). I think you're the one who doesn't know Musk's background.
"After Maye and Errol divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna."[0]
He has had a charmed existence his entire life.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/04/10/2014-rocket-man-the-o...
I didn’t say he is Howard 2.0 Hugh’s, I said he’s teetering on the edge of it. If in a few years he goes full Hughes would anyone actually be surprised?
Elon Musk is literally the child of an apartheid emerald mine owner.
"After Maye and Errol divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a Cessna"[0]
"Errol returned to South Africa with a half-share in a Zambian emerald mine, which would help to fund his family's lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers." [2]
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/04/10/2014-rocket-man-the-o...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/world/africa/elon-musk-so...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20211122143742/https://www.busin...
And at one point his father made a small investment in a mine. And even that is grounded on shaky evidence.
This mine investment might have been profitable (we dont know) but the idea that his family had some waste emrald mines is nonsense and that investment certainly didnt make the family rich.
And given their bad relationship, Elon lost support from his father when he came to US/Canada.
Tesla is about to explode in production with their "biggest building in the world factory" in texas, berlin and china.
SpaceX is about to achieve the holy grail of the space industry (an affordable and reusable rocket) not to mention Starlink.
Also, "reusable" doesn't matter as much as "affordable" for rockets. I am waiting for one of the smaller companies with a dirt cheap rocket to eat SpaceX's lunch.
This is the typical sleight-of-hand that comes at Musk companies. The atoms in the fuel are cheap, but the process of turning those atoms into usable fuel is very expensive. This is the case for almost all rockets.
The Soyuz is partly cheap to launch because it doesn't need a lot of special fuel handling.
The idea somehow that Soyuz is cheaper than Falcon-9 is laughable.
Are you being obtuse on purpose? The atoms of the fuel, really? Where can I buy fuel by the atom?
If you want rocket fuel from those chemicals, you are going to have to pressurize them and cool them or warm them, and you need a lot of energy and equipment to do it. That is the expensive part. Often, rocket fuels are heavily pressurized orsupercooled, and supercooling a gas is expensive. That allows you to store more energy in a given volume.
Everyone can see his tweets, public statements and interviews. Musk is doing a great job embarrassing himself without the help of “the media”.
I'd like to know though, what statement do you think is "embarrassing"?
There are plenty of billionaires with unpopular politics. Only a few are in the news. That is by choice.
Combined with the risks from their autopilot system and their mistreatment of workers and their CEO being a right wing edgelord? There's plenty of reasons to think Tesla might not be on a good path.
Other than tire rotation, cabin air filter change, and wiper fluid refill, our cars have required no maintenance.
But arguing from anecdote doesn't really help.
Many people like the things Tesla does well enough to not be bothered by the things it does poorly so are satisfied.
Tesla seems to have the best EV drivetrain in the business (I'm counting the battery as part of the drivetrain) and the best charging network, but seem to be worse in most other aspects.
My guess is that the other car companies will catch up on EV drivetrains faster than Tesla can catch up on the rest of a car.
An electric car, competently built, will wow most folks. Remember that the satisfaction numbers are comparing apples to oranges, given the limited competition Tesla has at the moment.
This depends a lot on the factory / year of production. E.g. the 2021/2022 from Giga Shanghai have great quality. Of course, consistency is the key, Tesla has to achieve it across all of the factories.
And I have no idea what 'risks' are you talking about regarding autopilot.
Have you ever been outside?
Hell, even CNN is backpeddling with the current Democratic party's agenda: https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/15378570794105774...
I just listened to a Vox Conversation where the guest said fat phobia wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for black people or slavery. It was insane and I felt like I lost IQ listening to it; but it would be naive to think the other ends of the political spectrum isn’t also crazy. That’d be like saying Alex Jones represents the Republican Party.
Elon describes himself as a moderate, the closer to the center you are the easier it is to go back and forth over the party line. Don’t read too much into it.