Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

Can we know for sure? Probably not. Here are my guesses.

Tesla

1) $TSLA was overvalued based on unrealistic assumptions about competitors and Tesla's ability to stay on top.

2) $TSLA was sort of a meme-stock that has just run out of comedy runway.

3) $TSLA is now a meme-stock and ordinary investors don't generally want to hold meme-stocks.

4) Investors are genuinely concerned about the behavior of the Twitter CEO, who as we all know is the Tesla CEO. Is it really surprising that making bad decisions in one arena will affect outcomes in another?

I have no idea which if any of these are true, but they all seem somewhat plausible. Really, each of these plus more are probably contributory factors for different investors.

Meta

1) Social media as a profitable enterprise has not especially proven durable over the long term. Plenty of entrenched incumbents in all sorts of industries fail after decades or centuries even. Meta is running out of good ideas. (Again, just my guess.)

Also Facebook completely blew its original "what are my friends doing?" market. Very few people use it for that anymore.

It still has some value - Groups and Marketplace are pretty popular, and a decent number of businesses use it as their website. But it doesn't really have the "all my friends use Facebook" moat anymore. That's moved to Whatsapp (at least in the UK).

(And yeah Meta own's Whatsapp too, but Whatsapp is not really monetised at all.)

Well it’s not entirely accurate to say few people use it for that anymore. It has 2.9 billion monthly active users on the platform, so even a fraction there for “what are my friends doing” is more than the population of most countries. I think it’s just limited to demographics not overall represented on HN, for instance

WhatsApp monetization comes through the business offerings. Increasingly, you can use that to interact with companies, small and large

> WhatsApp monetization comes through the business offerings. Increasingly, you can use that to interact with companies, small and large

Yeah I know that's their plan (basically trying to copy WeChat) but does anyone actually use it? I haven't heard of a single business in the UK using it yet.

I’ve interacted with a few businesses in the UK already, and way more in Asia/Middle East. Forgot to add there’s also WhatsApp Pay which, while limited to only India and Brazil, is still a sizable population. It’s monetized through the fixed fee charged to the business that you pay.

>4) Investors are genuinely concerned about the behavior of the Twitter CEO, who as we all know is the Tesla CEO. Is it really surprising that making bad decisions in one arena will affect outcomes in another?

Is he even doing any work as the Tesla CEO? He seems to be busy tweeting 24/7

I'm not a Tesla investor, but when the CEO tweeted that ,,Tesla can take care of itself'', that sounded scary.

He made a $44B deal in Twitter, and he can't accept the repricing in the market that makes it worth significantly less.

He owns 13% of Tesla, which is worth $50B. For him these two companies look like equal importance, while for investors Tesla is the important company.

I think this perspective is born of ignorance. A mature company doesn't rely on interactions of the ceo in day to day operations. If the right people are in place those will take care of themselves. The ceo value comes in from the strategic and big picture elements.

Twitter will eventually get to this place too. The risk to both Tesla a d SpaceX is where Musk as as much as lead engineer as CEO. Distracting him from that side is where there is likely to be an impact.

Normally, yes, but for an iconoclast like Musk, in addition to having to handle helicopter CEO-ing that takes careful management by specialized teams at both SpaceX and Tesla, there's also the unknown amount of Tesla and SpaceX engineering time that's been spent on Twitter instead. Depending on your opinions of FSD though it might be a good thing.

With the rest of the auto industry finally getting into EVs, I'm sure there are strategic and big picture elements that are going unnoticed by the absentee CEO.

Sounds like an argument for making CEO a part time position. If Musk can be CEO of 3 companies at once and still tweet 24/7, the role of CEO seems pretty light.

Like, if my day-to-day duties are so light that I can take a similar full time job at 2 other companies, and everyone gets on fine while I’m gone doing those other jobs, maybe that’s an indication I’m not really doing anything important in the first place.

A lot is going to depend on how much they can delegate. If Musk trusts other people to do the work at Tesla and SpaceX he can focus his attention elsewhere.

Imagine if it were acceptable for me to delegate my job to my underlings, and then use the freed time to draw a salary at another company. How come only CEOs get to do that?

this is like saying why does rich people get to have their own maids and butlers so they never have to do any housework, and effectively double their time in a day.

at the end of the day, everyone has a boss and Elon's is the general public. his stock is tanking. while you can say it's not the same as being fired as a regular employee (and it's not), he doesn't 'get to do that'

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