Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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> At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy.

I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at?

He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills.

Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck.

That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions."

So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...

[2] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-boring-company-leaves-local-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-mu...

[4] https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

I am not an Elon fan or anything, but I don't think you can say the jury is out on Tesla. Tesla is the first successful new car company manufacturing in the US in more than fifty years. It changed people's perception of electric cars and changed the car market. Even if it has a ton of troubles going forward it will be a very valuable company. I think you have to give him his due for that.

You absolutely can say that the jury is still out. The required proof otherwise would be Musk stepping down and Tesla not immediately collapsing.

It is perfectly possible that Tesla will be marginal or out of business within a decade.

Tesla did a good job hyping electric cars and selling them to an early-adopter market when they had no real competition. But now that the market is proven and the discussion has shifted, every major car company and a bunch of other players, possibly including Apple, are going after the much bigger mainstream market. If you look now at Consumer Reports and their recommended BEV cars, Tesla only has 1 of the 5 models listed, and its score is a middling 78, behind the 91 for the Kia EV6 and the 84 for the Genesis GV60. Once the rest of the competition has a few years to iterate, the picture could be significantly worse for them.

It's possible that Tesla could be the Google of electric cars, where first-mover advantage leads to decades of dominance. But it's also possible that they could be a Groupon or a Pebble: companies that were initially leaders and darlings, but that couldn't keep up over the long term.

> Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal

Technically, no, he got fired as CEO from X.com twice, once before it had PayPal as a product, once after it bought Confinity which had PayPal as a product. X.com became PayPal right after the second time he was fired, so he never actually got fired from (or worked for) PayPal.

He was also fired from Zip2, which was a separate company. You are technically correct that PayPal at the time was called X.com, but it's still the same company.

It really feels like he used to have advisors who would push back on his more outlandish ideas and that provided a good hype / pr vehicle for Tesla and SpaceX. That seems gone now.

He seemed to go steadily off the rails since the Thailand rescue debacle but that might have just been the first gaffe that I noticed as being an obvious misstep.

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