Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey
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electrek.co
Isn't moving humanity to mars the ultimate in cautious, long-term thinking while burning your personal and company brand value the ultimate in reckless short term thinking?
The apparent rationality and irrationality blows my mind.
Musk's edge has come from tackling hard, technical problems, and doing so successfully, for long enough, on enticing enough problems, that people started to buy the dream.
Contrast, leftist flamebait is just Musk being impolitic on Twitter, and an increasingly-hostile anti-left Musk is just what you get when the left runs campaigns specifically attacking him. It's not a smart business move because it's not a business move, merely a reflection of the increasing polarization of America.
In my opinion the one thing he is truly good at is sales and marketing. Selling the dream, and a very good design team, is what made Tesla what it is.
I have no comment on whether technical solutions requiring the coordination of hundreds and thousands of people can be credited to one non-technical person, nor the political stuff.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Musk has some software engineering experience from zip2 and from fan boy Ashlee Vances book he was really bad. His Twitter shenanigans further demonstrated his poor CS skills.
He has no background in aerospace at all. Yet he appointed himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX on day 1. He also published neuralink white paper with himself as the sole author in what is a rip off of a Duke professors lab work. He was solo author of hyperloop white paper which is laughed at by the physics community.
In short, he pretends to be a world expert in
1. Software engineering
2. Aerospace engineering
3. Neuro physical bionic research
4. Underground tunnel boring, way way ahead of (10X) the most cutting edge current technology
5. Vacuum tunnel transport
6. AI, beyond just self driving- including AGI paraphrasing-"Zuckerberg and LeCunn don't understand AI".
To top it off, he has a generic BA in 1997 from UPenn and no STEM degree. His PhD admit to Stanford physics in 1995 has to be his most bald faced lie. He desperately wants to be seen as a scientist/engineer, which he is not. All of his classmates recall him from his econ classes, not physics. Though I did find some unverified quora story about a professor recalling Musk scoring a B grade in a physics class.
If you look at his history his only major success was scaling the production of a car someone else designed and built to millions per year. He is more of a business exec than an engineer in any sense.
He definitely has an above average IQ, hampered by an extreme case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. All of his shenanigans can be explained by the search of Narcissistic supply and deeply internalized feelings of inadequacy.
Their stuff is pretty, sure.
However, that is only half of good industrial design. Their products frequently have severe issues with usability, manufacturability, etc.
What hard technical problems has he ever successfully tackled? Serious question.
His two successes, Tesla and SpaceX, are companies he purchased. He hired people to tackle hard problems, yes, but what has he done personally?
Not a fan of Musk (or marketers generally), but it doesn’t seem fair to be dismissing strong leaders who understand how to market their products effectively.
Life doesn’t usually work out like Field of Dreams. It doesn’t matter how good you build it, they won’t come if they don’t know about it.
Musk himself founded SpaceX, rocket engineer Tom Mueller was his first employee. He did not "purchase" SpaceX from anybody.
Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. In early 2004, they brought Musk on as an investor, who provided such a large share of the early investment (Series A onwards), he soon owned the majority of the company. Eberhard and Tarpenning would continue as CEO and CFO until they had a falling-out with Musk around 2007/2008, and Musk used his majority ownership to fire them. Under the terms of 2009 lawsuit settlement, Eberhard, Tarpenning, Musk, Ian Wright and J. B. Straubel agreed among themselves that all five can be described as "co-founders" of Tesla. If someone pitches a startup to a venture capitalist–which is the role Musk was playing at the beginning of his involvement in Tesla–who through providing the bulk of the Series A funding (and subsequent funding rounds), ends up with majority control, is that accurately described as a "purchase"? For anyone other Elon Musk, I doubt people would use that word.
> He hired people to tackle hard problems, yes, but what has he done personally?
Doesn't that describe many founders? For a founder/CEO, a very big chunk of their work, is making sure they pick the right leaders beneath them, and making the right picks vs the wrong ones can be the difference between a runaway success and bankruptcy.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/15/peter-thi...
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
No where in it did he advocate for abolishing democracy.
His argument, simplified, is that it isn't possible to maximize freedom in a democracy. The simplified reason is because everyone can vote themselves bread and circuses until other people's money runs out.
He doesn't propose a better solution, instead he seems to be in the camp of "democracy is the worst form of government... Except for everything else" and thinks that freedom is maximized by living in frontiers (cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading).
I'm hard pressed to find anything particularly controversial about what he wrote in that article.
It's really strange how much people like to demonize those who aren't in their tribe...
Did you actually read about his 2022 behavior? He busily supported election deniers.
Thiel says, “We’re close to a Toto moment, a little dog pulling aside the curtain on the holy of holies only to find there’s nobody there”. And “We always think of democracy as a good thing. But … where do you shift from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? When does it become a mob, a racket, a totalitarian lie?”
His position is that democracy is illegitimate and when he is king everything will be better:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/05/peter-thi...
By the way, the founders were skeptical about democracy too, and weren't sure whether it would work.
They tried to mitigate the obvious problems with it (as Thiel points out) by creating a Constitutional Republic instead, dampening the threat of the tyranny of the majority.
It's been reasonably successful so far, and has lasted longer than some of them thought it would.
Perhaps they should be scorned as well?
It's not that I've made my mind up, it's that Thiel has made up his.
> Perhaps they should be scorned as well?
Dumb ideas will always be scorned. That is the correct result.
So the founders had dumb ideas?
Or is it the idea of a Constitutional Republic that's dumb? Because it was designed specifically to reduce the threats posed by raw democracy.
It was only about 100 years ago that Senate elections were changed to a popular vote (17th amendment). Prior to that they were assigned by the state legislature.
Discussing the weaknesses of Democracy is dumb?
You must be much smarter than most philosophers, political science scholars and the founders themselves then.
There's only one here ignoring evidence.
An opinion piece in the Washington Post?
There have been wild claims made in this thread, like Thiel wants to abolish democracy, and that he wants to be a king, etc...
Yet I haven't seen any evidence of him saying anything like that.
If he has, then be all means, I'd like to see it.
But so far the only thing I've seen is partisan cheap shots without any substance.
Or in a less abstract sense, if my neighbors don't want me to do something and vote against me doing it, then I no longer have the freedom to do it. So I guess the question is, how exactly is democracy compatible with individual freedom?
The question is how much say do you have? In an authoritarian regime you have none. In a democracy you have some. Some is better than none.
All people like Thiel are arguing for is a state of affairs where they make the rules and the rules don't apply to them. It's boring pattern repeated throughout all of human history.
I read a fascinating article several years ago comparing the experience of setting up a hot dog stand in New York City vs communist china.
In China, after bribing the right people, the author was in business after a day or two.
As of the time of the article, the author had been trying for six months to get the necessary permits in New York and still hadn't succeeded.
Obviously China isn't the poster child for individual liberty, but it's also a mistake to ignore the flaws in democratic systems.
I think that Thiel makes some thought provoking points, but all I've seen in this thread is a lot of name-calling.
It's a shame.
In your example, one vendor has to engage in likely illegal, but sanctioned behavior (bribery), while the other has to wait for permits to be approved, which apparently takes some time. How long? Not sure. What I can tell you is that I've been to NYC several times, and I can confirm that there are hotdog vendors all over the place, so, apparently they do get around to those permits eventually, even if it isn't quick enough to avoid being used as an anecdote about how we should forgo democracy.
Another example: We aren't currently "repressing" a vast number of Uyghur Muslims for the crime of existing / beliefs.
Yet another example: When Covid hit China literally nailed people shut inside their houses. The US govt and state govts set up some guidelines and did things like mandate masks (not that you'd get arrested).
Pretty sure I know which brand of freedom I, and well, pretty much everyone else I know would choose.
So, which one is it for you?
Another statement from Thiel, "fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism." Gee, I wonder who he thinks that person should be? Clearly himself. (Also, "makes the world safe for capitalism."?! What planet does he live on?)
Thiel is just another fairly intelligent person who was in the right place at the right time, leading to generational wealth, leading to a bunch of sycophants bumping up his ego so much that he thinks he should be the person deciding how everyone lives their lives.
Hard pass from me, Petey.
In reality, any degradation in freedom we've witnessed in democracy has to do with forces aligned against giving the voters power. We should focus on fixing those issues, not throwing democracy away so that a single narcissist can decide what is best for all of us.
The US has done no small number of utterly terrible things in its history (I was going to make a list, but do I really need to?) – and, arguably for some of them, it still hasn't stopped – despite being a "democracy" all that time. I am not saying the US regime is currently as bad as that of the Chinese Communist Party – but maybe that's not saying that much. It seems at least plausible that some dictatorships may have contributed less evil to human history than American democracy has. Other famous "democracies" – such as the "Mother of Parliaments" herself – also have a rather sullied historical record, and the same may well be true of them.
(I'm also not saying Thiel, or anyone he might pick, would make a "good" dictator – I don't know how that would turn out, but I certainly don't recommend that anyone perform that experiment.)
He doesn't. It's the same boring ground that's been trod for 2,500 years. There isn't an original thought in anything Thiel has said.
> all I've seen in this thread is a lot of name-calling.
There is none.
James Scott's book Seeing Like a State is an oft-cited critical analysis of the phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
> In a democracy you have some.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." -- Frank Wilhoit
This is a pretty myopic view. History is absolutely resplendent with examples of Kings deposed and overthrown, either by rival aristocracy with popular blessing, or by straight up popular revolution.
Authority has always been backed up by popular power, in one way or another. Democracy is a (poor) attempt to codify it, but it's always been there.
Nobless Oblige existed primarily because rulers knew that fucking over the people of their kingdom would mean their head.
It would be nice if we lived in a polity in which legislators were personally responsible for their own mistakes. Instead, we're treated to a smorgasbord of moral hazard on the part of those who pretend to represent us.
I'd take a King or Queen in fear of their life over the status quo any day.
So.. everything's cool because we always have bribery, corruption, revolution, and war to fall back on?
Why not just run things better in the first place? Like.. some kind of way to devolve power to the people. Like a kind of people power.
I feel like I'm close to a breakthrough idea here. If only there was some word to succinctly describe it.
> I'd take a King or Queen in fear of their life over the status quo any day.
You want people, any people, cowering in fear of you? That's pretty messed up.
The point is that everything is incompatible with Individual Freedom, even Individual Freedom. So saying Democracy is incompatible with Individual Freedom is meaningless. Authoritarianism is incompatible with Individual Freedom. Communism in incompatible with Individual Freedom. Libertarianism is incompatible with Individual Freedom. In fact Individual Freedom can only be possible if there is exactly one Individual - and this should give you a clue to why narcissists make claims about Individual Freedom: they aren't talking about your Individual Freedom, they're talking about theirs and no one else's.
I don't know if you're trolling or genuinely ignorant. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The issue with the Individual Freedom schtick is that everybody has a different definition for what shouldn't be allowed while still saying their definition is "Individual Freedom".
Rich Libertarian's have property, so they say that Individual Freedom should include property ownership, and there should be a government who enforces these recognized deeds of ownership and evicts poor communists.
Poor communists don't have property, and so they say that property is theft, and that Individual Freedom should include the right to shelter, and there should be a government that takes property from Rich Libertarians.
Individual Freedom can have only one indisputable definition, and it's in the name: Individual Freedom means I can do anything I want. Unfortunately, that is paradoxical unless there is exactly one person.
As soon as we hedge, and say "well, individual freedoms means you can do anything that doesn't harm other people", then we open the floodgates to any and all rationalizations for anything. You can't drive a truck to work because it is causing climate change. You can't own this 50 acres in this scenic area because thats enough room for 250 houses. You can't be here at all because all this land is owned by Native Americans and you stole it. You can't preach that I'm going to hell because that harms me. You can't stop me from preaching that you're going to hell because that harms me.
etc. Meaningless.
I have no interest in convincing you to become an anarchist or a libertarian or whatever, I was just correcting this false notion that the two can be compatible long term. They are oil and water, over time the separation between them grows.
No, that is not what lowbloodsugar said. You have not understood what has been said to you.
So.. you're saying you want to limit his individual freedoms with like laws and rules and red tape and shit? You freedom hating bastard.
I'd really recommend you learn your history. Your efforts at reinventing the legal system and government are not new ideas. People have thought about this before.
You're talking in circles. You say you want a rules based society and you believe that society is going to work by some form of magic. That is naive. The real world doesn't work by magic.
I'll say it again: you need to learn your history.
> And we're seeing democracies being destabilized around the world now, even in the US.
Yes, deliberately undermined by, among other things, election deniers funded by Thiel.
> But the question was "is democracy compatible with freedom", and by definition it is not.
This is related to laissez faire and right-wing libertarianism.
I think it started happening when he realized there was no next big-idea which his companies could actually solve. After Tesla made electric cars trendy and influenced the market (actual accomplishments), his next idea was self-driving. Maybe he didn't know enough at the time or thought he could make it happen quickly, he promised big and failed but can't admit it. So he tried to pull the next shiny thing out of the hat, Cybertruck, semi, solar-roof, roadster, smart-summon, boring-tunnels, Hyperloop etc. They also kept failing or are coming soon TM. For some time SpaceX delivered, but right now they also don't have anything new shiny to show.
He's trying to desperately stay relevant, but all his ideas are staring to crumble or are a lot harder to solve than he cares to admit. He started to become edgy, and it spiraled from there. Him being forced to buy Twitter because he couldn't get out of the joke he made, is probably his worst nightmare. His 'coming soon'-excuse isn't working on Twitter, and it's a very public humiliation should he fail. I actually think he is very similar in this regard to Trump. A big sense of self-importance and a need for affirmation which can't handle rejection is what I personally thought his presence at Chappell stand-up showed. I also think that is the reason he is appeasing the right so much. They give him a lot of attention and don't criticize him.
But I have to take issue with some of your selections too. It seems like the semi is in fact shipping, and I don't know if it's actually useful, but perhaps it has some niche in the transport industry. I'm not sure what's up with the Cybertruck, but it doesn't seem infeasible like self-driving might be. And the SpaceX Starship has been making pretty solid incremental progress over the last few years and really does have some potential to further upend the economics of getting tons of material into orbit.
But he's clearly been consumed by ego whatever the cause.
The problem is that the idea is not "scalable". There are high capital costs, high per-project cost basis (low profit margin), and needs incremental refinement to get it right. It's not the kind of thing that works well when shotgunned nation wide and subbed out to contractors to manage the specifics of actual projects.
Would love to see him pull a Herbert-Hoover-in-WWI and use his engineering mindset to genuinely help people. People are focusing on the short-term (7000 people laid off at twitter! lame anti-woke jokes! what a jerk!), and missing the bigger picture.
Algorithm-driven content is eating the world's attention. It's misaligned by ad dollars (twitter, fb) and race-to-the-bottom viral stickiness (tiktok). Some lucky people have resilient real-life social networks, but a lot of people are stuck at the bottom of a soulless lonely well. Online feeds are a poor substitute for community. Everyone you see is better than their real-world counterparts (can't look away!) and unattainably distant.
Untying twitter from the next-quarter ad spend mindset is a great chance to reengineer it towards connection and away from broad dissemination.
Doubling down on a consumer segment that tends to listen closely to influential figures and do things not their self interest may be effective.
I could see this break two ways:
1. Investors start handing companies their asses for throwing away potential customers.
2. There's just enough extra margin available in segmenting their customers that politically flaired brands end up being successful. Obviously that gets toxic fast if it works, but will it actually pan out? I can see brands trying to be "big fish in a small pond" by being the "anti-woke" (or "woke") choice, but will people really pay a premium for it? I could see choosing Lyft over Uber, or ordering a mainboard from B&H instead of Amazon, when the price is more or less the same, but I'm not sure I can justify paying 20% more.
Conservatism, and right-reactionary thought, often exists as a critique or skepticism of the ideology and programs that progressives and leftists wish to enact. Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and this skepticism is an important part of civil discourse. Inevitably however, sometimes progressive causes will win and overcome their detractors. If you tied your brand to a critique of gay marriage, the Civil Rights Movement, or women's suffrage, your brand would face far more damage than being critical of rightist causes.
At one point both parties had conservative and progressive wings.
So now, by lumping everyone against progress into one party, they're firmly consolidated as the regressive lost-causers, and everyone who aligns with them ends up getting that label.
The Republican party has hitched themselves to the conservative stances from 30+ years ago. They aren't seeking preservation of the status quo, but rather the disruption of it. This is decidedly not conservative, and it's unfortunate that people continue to use 'Republican' and 'conservative' as synonyms when they are not.
It's a similar mistaken framework to the complaints that large companies have embraced "progressive causes". Rather, those causes were progressive decades ago, but have since become accepted by and part of mainstream society. Which is exactly why large profit-maximizing companies use them for their marketing.
Perhaps this past-shifted perspective ties in to the general contemporary homogenization of what used to be historical periods of pop culture.
Implicitly supporting the status quo is also a signal.
The dude has successfully run some companies. Yes.
He’s also a gigantic narcissist. Womanizer. Workaholic. Liar. Edgelord from hell. Blah blah
But he does xyz things that I like and/or I wish I was rich!!
sighs
Musk seems determined to become more cost than benefit.
Or just make a compelling product. Most of the things we use and buy on the daily aren’t partisan, they’re just good.
We really, really, need to do something about this political polarization. I put it up there above climate change as an existential problem for the US.
It still is a pity that everything has to be about politics. Tesla paved the way for the electric cars and was a net positive for society.
I hope the stockholders see that Musk is more of a liability now, and kick him out.
Musk a "sociopathic cult leader?"
He gets this label apparently because he believes in the marketplace of ideas.
That's now equivalent to sociopathic tendencies?
And because a lot of people agree with that freedom of expression (sort of the reason the U.S. was founded, and the thing that a lot of people have fought and died for) he's a cult leader?
Roughly half or more of folks in this country tend to agree with him on a lot of things. That's a cult? They are all just dumb or something? From Locke to Sewell, they are brainwashed cultists too?
Or is it maybe possible that reasonable people can disagree?
I think that it is you that is trying to make this political. I referred to two specific people, one of which is supposed to be "not left, nor right". So why are you trying to paint it political?
If anything I explicitly said in the post you replied that I find it sad that people are all about politics these days.
Since you support freedom of ideas I ask you to respect my opinion about Musk, which has nothing to do with his claim of "marketplace of ideas" but a lot to do with all the other opinions he posts online.
I would go into detail what are the things that he says that make him appear like a "sociopathic cult leader" to me, if you want. But by your message it sounded like you are sure that I don't like Musk because I don't support free speech. So, not sure it's worth continuing the discussion.
I'll just leave this here for reference: https://www.psychmechanics.com/characteristics-of-cult-leade...
And yet somehow, you're redirecting to accuse me of making your very clearly biased post political.
This is what I mean by how our ideology colors our thinking.
Socrates is a human.
Hence all humans are philosophers?
Can you explain why do you keep insisting that me calling Musk a sociopathic cult leader has anything to do with politics?
Musk wanted bros and rednecks and meat-eating red-blooded Americans all alike to think a Tesla is cool. Actual environmentalists would follow suit regardless as a captive market - waste no effort on them.
And I think he sees Twitter the same way. Twitter's core demographic is a captive group of left-leaning educated users. If he can successfully flip a switch to appeal to everyone else in America, and hold on to enough captive current users in the process, he will have successfully grown the pie.
I don't actually know if this is Musk's blatant strategy or if he is "crazy like a fox". But Musk has engaged in conservative-leaning flame wars for several years at this point. However, he just recently admitted to casting his first vote for a Republican this election cycle.
That means during all of those years he was saying flamboyant things and meeting with Trump etc, he was largely saying one thing and doing another.
So I'm leaning towards the idea that he is a bit more coy than he lets on and sees political drama as a sort of business asset.
There's no reason to think that Musk isn't as single minded about his own goals as those parties are about winning. This is the best case for his behavior.
Unless hydrogen takes off and captures the environmentalists, they have nowhere to go but EVs. Watch him pivot back fast if that does happen, and push further into the 'rolling coal' crowd until then.
I still wish him success but I no longer like him. I doubt he cares.
The change will be radical but we need mixed use areas where we can live, work, shop and play all together and not commute all over the damn place.
To me, i don't think that would work.
I just think it's tax motivated => profits. Sometimes the simple answers are the correct ones.
Fyi, take into consideration he just severely overpaid for Twitter...
No formalized business training, no PR teams, no market analysis. They just had super brash (and often foolhardy) visions of what consumers would buy, took huge risks in bringing them to market, and brought in investors by charisma alone.
And I think you have to be born with the exact level of EQ to be smart enough to know what's possible and what customers would want, but be dumb enough to still throw yourself into the problem and ignore every reason previous attempts had been unsuccessful.
What do you mean about 'religion'?