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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?

Not that this is at all significant, but these past few months of Twitter charades have erased any appetite for one day buying a Tesla, or any other Musk owned products. Luckily almost every automaker is coming out with their own EVs in the next couple years, so the market should be pretty competitive(in some ways it already is).

Same here. I'll never buy a Tesla now, whereas before I might have.

Same. I would have had a hard time imagining a way he could behave that would affect my feelings about a Tesla, but he found it. Seeing a CEO act so childish and cruel and emotionally unstable and antagonistic and conspiratorial in a purposefully public way makes me not only feel uncomfortable in the idea of buying his products, it even makes me feel worried about how that insanity might materially affect the product.

> I would have had a hard time imagining a way he could behave that would affect my feelings about a Tesla

It was the blatant market manipulation for me. This is a nice dose of karma.

Yes. If Twitter still exists in the future he could tweet "The Model 3 is stupid and ugly and I hate it and we're not supporting it anymore" and there go all the replacement parts. He'd burn $44B just to try to prove a point (what point? I'm not sure) so it's very possible he'd hand Tesla owners out to dry out of spite.

The common refrain from Tesla owners is they love the car, but wish Elon would shut up so they'd have to stop defending their choice.

Pretty much every model Tesla has grown on me over time, even the X. At the end of the day people will and should vote with their dollar though. Musk had a pretty big leapfrog on the competition for EVs but now that other makers are rapidly catching up, I am not sure what Tesla's competitive advantage will be in the future(production methods, better batteries maybe...it sure doesn't look like it will be management).

Seems petty, but I don't think it would be an uncommon response. A Tesla-owning friend has said a couple of times, "Elon Musk is the worst part of owning a Tesla."

I don't see why it would be petty to have concerns. Buying a Tesla makes one very dependant on the company for repairs, maintenance, software updates, etc. Given the new information I have learned recently about how Elon runs a business, that kind of dependancy is horrifying to me.

A former coworker in my FB feed sold his Tesla at a steep discount because he was mad at Elon Musk. This way of thinking about the world is incredible to me. But here we are.

Sounds like someone made off with a great deal! At the end of the day Tesla has some incredible minds working on the product, it is quite unfortunate that the face of that work has to get muddled with whatever Musk's latest circus venture is.

Same. The car is good, but I now wish I hadn't bought it.

I got mine in April. So all this is probably my fault.

May your door gaps never be in alignment! Haha just kidding, at least you have a nice car now :)

No creaks, no groans, no gaps. Srs.

I was all set to buy a Tesla until the pedo-guy thing.

This is the one which sticks with me too. It's infantile bullying to make an accusation like that to tens of millions of people just because his pride got hurt. Then he even defended it in court.

I've never been at a caryard and made my decision based in what an employee of the company I've never met says to someone else I also don't know.

But you do you I guess.

Is this in solidarity because you don't like him or because it reduces your faith in his other companies?

More towards the latter because Musk seems to have some pretty crazy and awesome ideas for the future but now we seem to be going a bit off the rails, especially in a time where economic uncertainty might lend to a more conservative approach. Up until now I can see the vertical integration of Musk's ventures, being able to share tech between Tesla/Spacex/Starlink/Boring Company/etc...but the behavior at Twitter is really in left field, almost like he is going crazy.

There are a lot of people I like to whom I would not hand over $50k+ for a nice product. For that kind of expenditure I want some certainty that the future outlook and mission of a company is on solid ground.

I once wanted a Tesla Powerwall. If I do get anything like that for the house, it's not going to be a Tesla product. Though, to be fair, I made that decision before he set Twitter alight.

I wouldn't have anything like that in my house any more than I'd store 100 gallons of gasoline in my house. Maybe in a shed, 50 ft or more away.

Oh, yeah, not in. On.

Not a whole lot.

Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span.

At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.

> He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.

This strikes me as a very apt description. Still though, he basically has free rein at those companies and there is always a chance he decides to get more involved. Maybe Tesla or SpaceX hits a rough patch next year and he decides to get more hands on and "fix" the situation. That fear is probably a lot more relevent in potential customer's minds these days.

Depends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative.

I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.

Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.

I mean, he may be finding himself a good reason to repay the Saudis their 44 billion dollars after mismanaging their investment that terribly or he may find himself having an "accident".

This is no threat, just a very real concern that I have for him. That is not the kind of money you blow.

My understanding was the Twitter financing was $27B cash from Musk, ~$5B from his pals, and $13B in bank loans. There was something like $500m in Twitter shares owned by a Saudi prince that were transferred to Musk as part of buying in, I think.

Where are you seeing $44B of Saudi money?

I believe this is correct. The Saudi's will lose a decent chunk of money on this deal, but hardly an earth shattering amount relative to their overall investments.

The $5B in pals included the Saudi and Qatari money -- Qatar put in $375M and the Saudis rolled over their stake which is closer to $2 billion (they're the largest shareholder after Elon).

https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/158597522656711065...

> Depends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative.

> I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore.

So Musk's best defense is that he decided to buy a company that couldn't be saved? Might be hard for him to get loans going forward.

I'm sure he'll be able to dump it for peanuts on a company like Oracle or Salesforce.

… or Tencent …

That is not how the Saudis work. Losing mere money is a cost of doing business. It's losing face that matters. That's why they murdered Kashoggi. They're probably already being handed the DMs of critical people who they are going to be able to quietly murder without any outrage.

they're going to have to rehabilitate him or make it clear he's not in operational paths

'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox

always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is

tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well

Who is "they"? Elon has controlling interest in SpaceX and all the largest other shareholders are largely his friends. At Tesla while he doesn't have controlling interest, he does have de-facto control because of 2/3 majority required on the board for certain actions that could remove him from control.

Short of some legal action forcibly removing him from the companies from breaking a law, he's not going anywhere.

sorry, 'they' meaning whatever PR firm he hires

Uh you’re not well informed about Musk and PR staff

would you mind explaining in more detail?

Elon is his PR team. And it's unlikely he'll ever hire a different one.

what leads you to believe this? does this imply that tesla, spacex, starlink don't have pr teams?

Elon doesn't hire/use PR firms.

It's counterintuitive but Tesla shareholders might want Twitter to fold quickly so Elon can fully focus on Tesla again.

And where is he supposed to pump Tesla stock?

I think that's probably a naive hope, if we carry on down the current path the only way that Musk can save face and avoid being washed out of twitter is to buy up the debt that he secured to buy Twitter. Ignoring the technical issues, the debt is the thing that really threatens twitter - if the business can't generate the revenue to service the debt the creditors might step in and take Musk's equity. So the logical move if you're all-in on fixing twitter (as Musk seems to be) would be to buy the debt, he can probably get it at 60 cents on the dollar, so that means he needs to come up with somewhere around $8Bn, and we all know where Musk will look for that kind of cash. That would be a very significant head wind for Tesla stock.

Dunno. The best for Tesla might be him being occupied by something else.

Well, as someone who hold about $10K in TSLA, I'd like to see Elon fired.

Musk dumping lots of Tesla shares to reimburse the loan may well crash Tesla price.

You’ve diagnosed failure after a month? How many puts have you bought at what price? This is the perfect moment to cement your reputation as a stock market expert.

Twitter isn’t on the stock market anymore...

I’m a complete idiot. Downvotes richly deserved

> about: Investor, husband, father. Those weird spelling and syntax errors are thanks to Siri. I try to preserve my arthritic hands for higher value targets than trolling hacker news.

And apparently news-illiterate! I sure got owned… by myself. ahem

I'm not sure if you were trolling, but you probably are also getting downvoted because the idea that you have to put money on a bet against something before you are allowed to voice criticism, even scathing criticism, is not a good take. You shouldn't be required to play stupid games in a volatile stock market where you are just a bit player against behemoths just to criticize something.

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