Is Elon Right?
refactoring.fm
refactoring.fm
Actually, when I was there Brin and Page had a reputation for being somewhat brutal, especially Larry. Not in a loud and brash way but in the sense that if they were doing a product review or whatever, and one of them thought your product sucked, they'd just say something like "This sucks, why have you been wasting your time on it?" and feelings be damned. They just didn't really care about cushioning criticism apparently. I actually recall them sort of sarcastically insulting random employees, VPs or even entire projects at TGIF if they were being dumb, overly entitled or underperforming, in the way you'd not really expect ... as if those people worked somewhere totally different.
I don't know anything about Nadella but it's worth noting that he didn't build the company, he's more like a steady pair of hands. Bill Gates on the other hand had a similar reputation to Page and Brin, especially when doing product reviews. If he didn't like something he'd let you know in the bluntest way possible.
So it's not really clear to me to what extent Musk's recent behavior is genuinely abnormal. It may be simply that at the moment relatively few big tech firms are run by founder types. Actually, maybe only Facebook is right now? Others are across the board being run by 'calm' types chosen, one might suspect, for their ability to effectively execute on the foundations laid down by their predecessors.
IMO, Elon's narcissism blocks him from taking any kind of such "corrections" because his priority is on building his own narrative of being a genius entrepreneur and engineer. (This explains that "code review" farce pretty well...) If he corrects his path, then it will be publicly portrayed as his defeat so he just can't.
This worked pretty well for him until now since he was able to equate Tesla/SpaceX as himself in public perception. If he can build the genius narrative, then it will be a significant advantage for those businesses as well unless there are undeniable public failures. He is a competent businessmen so he managed most of the smaller gradual risks pretty well. But something big like Twitter is probably out of his ability, or not. We'll see.
It's worth stressing that I don't think either of them were bad people or even mean. Being very direct with feedback seems to be a common trait of successful founders and CEOs. I guess when you review as many products as they do, and have built at great expense a place a lot of people want to work, and decisions matter a whole lot, being indirect and super-polite seems like a poor use of time. Also people don't like getting negative feedback, so unless it's ultra-clear it probably just doesn't sink in.
"Tesla has a real shot at being successful" is definitely true. "Tesla is unquestionably already a success" is not.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/19/musk-targeting-coast-to-co...
Would you say this promise has been fulfilled?
Other solutions rely on geo-fenced known areas, LIDAR sensors (which will never understand the whole picture e.g. coloured traffic lights), and non-generalised AI. What Tesla is shooting for is much more ambitious, and much more likely to succeed in my opinion.
Why be pedantic about forward-looking announcements, rather than celebrating the incredible things Tesla AI has acheived so far (and continues to acheive)? The cars can now navigate competently through city streets. That was sci-fi just a few years ago.
Also, it's not being pedantic when you point out that someone is over 5 years behind what they promised...
That they were arguably the main reason why every other carmaker is transitioning to electric cars is subjectively (to me) a far greater success. The transition is past the point of no return even if Tesla were to disappear tomorrow,
Then we can objectively compare it to the closest Tesla model to it.
That is if that car is even being manufactured at any scale at all...
I see you went to my profile to find something to say to me, but nothing to expand on your opinion so we can objectively compare better cars as you suggested originally.
And yes that's why I put that quote in my profile, people will go after the person when they don't want to defend their statements, like you did.
> A lot of cars released in the last 2 years have similar or better stats. reply
Please provide an example of one of the cars you are talking about.
It does have the objectively worst built cars at every price point they sell.
Zeekr, a Chinese brand goes 621 miles, or 1,000 kilometers, on a single charge. More than the models that now lead the U.S. market in battery range: the Lucid Air, with 520 miles, and the Tesla Model S, with 405 miles.
However, I strongly doubt they will succeed going forward. They are in the midst of a wave of competition from Porsche, Mercedes, GM, Ford, VW, Kia, etc; across all segments of the market. They have failed to deliver on self-driving, and have a 0% chance of success moving forward (as admitted by pulling their lidar sensors out). They still aren't particularly good at fit/finish/quality of their cars.
And finally, Tesla (imo) desperately needs a ceo who thinks about little more than threading the needle on the narrow success path moving forward. Instead, they have someone busy breaking Twitter.
So, is Tesla objectively successful? I'd say no, because I don't think it's clear they will be a live company in 10 years. I think a huge amount of their success came from being the only company that sold a non-shitty electric car, and now that competitive umbrella is gone, they're likely to fail.
Also, there's not a lot of assets that can be sold off to raise funds. Often LBO targets are seen as worth more in parts than whole, but that's not really the case here.
The PE selloff playbook works when the investor is ruthless enough to both (a) load the company with debt and (b) sell off assets that were previously (they believe) not fully valued into the company's share price, like buildings owned by stores.
While Twitter now has significant new debt, it's a small proportion of the purchase price, so there are still tens of billions of dollars that need to be recouped. And Twitter's ONE major asset is its goodwill/entrenchment ... which I'm sure is worth a lot, but which was already priced in to the share price.
Twitter users can be more tolerant of some amount of disruption because the service is basically 'cost-free banter among the community'. But if you are doing anything that people depend on, you will kill your business and reputation.
Look at Google. They didn't even 'move fast and break things'. They just 'deprecated' stuff on people's face when a product did not make billions fast enough.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
The result is a reputation that cannot be recovered from.