Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team | Hacker News Reader

Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team

electrek.co

300 pointsTheAlchemist678 comments

It's hard to feel optimistic about Tesla these days. Musk is gutting the company while dangling bizarre and wildly unrealistic promises in front of shareholders (releasing Optimus robot, self driving taxis, licensing self driving tech, training AI models on all Tesla cars, launching unnamed cheaper product lines – all by the end of the year). This will get a short term stock price boost and probably get his $56 billion pay package approved, but when then? Who saves Tesla from reality after Musk gets his money and checks out?

> Musk made clear in a call with analysts earlier this month that he is focused on opportunities in artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous robotaxis.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/musk-d...

Presumably that was before Tesla needed to recall all the cybertrucks for stuck acceleration. AI says blame the floormats

> Optimus robot, self driving taxis, licensing self driving tech, training AI models

I think it might be worth saying that:

1) Tesla has already accomplished its stated mission of making EV cars mainstream. This was Musk's goal from the beginning, and (insofar it is true that he's interested in working on "world changing problems" and not in making money per se) the mission of Tesla as a driver of transformation is accomplished.

2) Musk might have decided since a while that Tesla has a desperate need to pivot, because being a mass producer of a mature technology in the West is not sustainable in the long run.

> Musk might have decided since a while that Tesla has a desperate need to pivot, because being a mass producer of a mature technology in the West is not sustainable in the long run.

I'm sorry just... what? Being in a position to sell products to a robust and demanding market is a bad thing? What in the Business Major brain are we saying here?

And frankly calling their products "mature technology" feels like a stretch given Tesla is regularly stubbing it's toe on pretty benign design problems that numerous other automakers have had nailed down for decades.

Yeah nothing about my Tesla is mature technology. Every update is a couple steps back. Every design revision is cost cutting and feature removal (in the name of simplicity of course). We still don’t have auto wipers that work.new still don’t have rear cross traffic alerts when backing up. The cars are laughably bad at parking themselves still. Tesla made a slightly polished MVP and stopped there.

My former boss who owns one once had to have their service person come up to Green Bay from Chicago (about 3 hours) because his stupid door handles wouldn't extend and he was stuck at a grocery store.

> Yeah nothing about my Tesla is mature technology

Do you honestly believe the battery, charging, inverter, motors and drive train are not mature tech?

The usual point is that to "justify" Tesla total valuation they can't just be an automaker.

Almost seems like the valuation is the problem then, not being in the business of selling cars.

I mean, both of Musk's endeavours after Paypal, that is, Tesla and SpaceX- were incredibly high-risk bets with the goal of opening entirely new markets where there was none (ev cars and private space launches). At the time Musk was justifying his choice of investments with the idea of doing something new and important for humanity (transitioning out of fossil fuels and colonise other planets)- but in any case it's clear that he wanted to work on something cool and that his choices were not driven primarily by a rational money-making strategy.

Fast-forward to 2024, while SpaceX is still delivering science fiction, Tesla is now an EV automaker among many- you can buy EV cars from any automaker and there is a deluge of cheap brands coming from China. Is Musk interested in owning and running a regular car company? I don't think so. I think he's desperate to find something else that is cool enough and incredibly high risk and high returns. Maybe using the capital and infrastructure from Tesla itself- and humanoid robotics seems a good candidate.

Well said. Tesla seems to struggle with things that other manufacturers find easy. The Model T had three floor pedals. The Cybertruck only has two.

EVs are mainstream now?

Try planning a trip from Seattle to Madison, WI and let me know how normal that feels for you.

Try driving from Mt Shasta to Sacramento in 115 degree heat and see how many fast chargers are working on I-5

I don’t think I would call EVs mainstream until your average renter has access to a home charger. It simply will never be mainstream if people have to worry about when they’ll be able to get their next charge.

Getting there? EV and hybrid were 16% of US 2023 sales.

All new apartment construction and shopping centers near us includes some EV chargers, so renters are slowly catching up. We're getting there. Until then it will be driven by homeowners and fleets.

As an apartment renter, unless they mandate or even completely subsidize existing apartment complexes of a certain size or larger (i.e 100+ residents or something along those lines) install EV charging it will remain an issue here.

The vast majority of apartments still have no EV chargers and simply aren't moving to get them installed at all.

I myself was in the market for an EV but would have trouble charging at my apartment. I messaged my apartment complex about installing EV support and whether they considered it and they basically sent a 1 sentence email which can be summarized as "lol no".

They're definitely a luxury good in areas where housing is expensive.

This is an accurate take. I own my house, so GM paid to install my charger. If I were s renter, they would have given me a bunch of charging credits instead. Every year, I'm seeing more chargers. It's rare for me to worry about charging the car.

As A renter, I wish more people thought like this. It is 100% the impediment for me going EV on my next vehicle purchase. I don't see apartment complexes like mine (built ca. 2000) retrofitting parking stalls for any level of charging without subsidy and lots of kicking and screaming.

Ok.

Seattle to Madison: https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=026855c9-03d6-408...

Mt Shasta to sac: https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=a5a84688-8fbc-412...

For some reason I have initial charge set to 40%, but even then there’s several chargers in range. At recharges are quick going to 60% which means if consumption is higher you could charge for a free more minutes and easily get to 80%.

Can you be more specific?

I have done the second drive a handful of times. The Anderson Rd and Airport Way Walmarts are your best bet for DCFC.

When temps are above 110, which is at least a month of normal summer weather, you will be lucky to have 2/5 chargers operating at those sites. And they will be throttled to 30kW which is a pitiful fraction of the advertised 350kW rate

EA didn’t install the transformers in the shade. They don’t work, period. This was my experience two summers in a row.

Imagine having kids and a dog in your car for a road trip and having to park for over an hour in direct sunlight at 3pm while you squeeze enough charge to limp through the wastelands of NorCal. And I-5 is still your best route.

I haven’t even tried the ride east through Idaho and Montana. In winter it will be much riskier and you have to put a lot more faith that the station is working as expected. The mountains and freezing temps will also add a huge variance to your estimated range.

We stayed at Leavenworth,WA in a cabin and there were exactly two EA fast chargers at a Safeway on the mountain. Woke up one morning in 20 degree cold with 25% charge and wasn’t sure I could even make it

By your definition garage doors aren’t mainstream because renters don't have ubiquitous access to them…

My definition of mainstream: nearly all major automotive companies offer EVs that are mass marketed.

Garage doors aren't mainstream by this definition because they aren't essential for owning a car. They're just a convenience.

EV charging is essential to owning an EV. Almost all EV manufacturers ask that you keep your EV plugged in practically as much as possible for battery health. In most apartment dwelling this is currently not a possibility and there isn't enough incentive for many existing complexes to install anything in much of the country.

At home charging isn't essential for owning an EV. They're just a convenience.

We can argue back and forth, about ubiquity vs mainstream, but ultimately the point I am making is that these definitions are merely opinions.

Who cares if evs are mainstream or not. If you can get at-home charging, speaking from my own experience, owning an EV is awesome. If you have to rely on public charging, it is not as convenient, and requires more effort.

If you are someone who goes to Costco, the PX, or Walmart to get gas, then using public charging is a wash. If you are like me, who uses the nearest gas station, public charging was a bigger pain than filling up a tank.

Here’s a more practical definition of mainstream:

CA has only 1 fast charging station per 5 gas stations, and they are by far the most kitted out state

And the biggest footprint of those is Tesla, which still is restricted to only Teslas

And a fill up with gas takes 5 minutes compared to up to 45 minutes at DCFC, assuming you aren’t waiting for one.

So yes “all major automotive companies offer EVs” but the mainstream experience that drivers expect is nowhere near there for an EV unless you own a home and have installed a charger.

If either of those were true Musk would sell Tesla and/or step down so he could have cash and time to do something else.

Something tells me there isn't a chance in hell of that happening.

This is unbelievable.

Insanely wealthy person is not interested in “making money per se”?

Nobody amasses this wealth without being financially obsessed. No amount of ‘effective altruism’-esque “I need more money so I can do more amazing things” justifies it, especially when you put so much on the line to…buy a social network and as a vanity project.

Elon Musk is not a God.

How many high net worth individuals do you know / have you met?

Most of the ones I know consider money as a tool that can be used towards something, not as a goal by itself.

> Most of the ones I know consider money as a tool that can be used towards something, not as a goal by itself.

And if you need a massive amount of money to achieve a goal, you obsess about money. Elon (ostensibly) isn't building soup kitchens and community gardens.

> How many high net worth individuals do you know / have you met?

If you don't think wealthy people obsess over money, I'd honestly wonder how many YOU have met. Not fretting over small amounts of money, or not being ridiculously frugal does not mean that wealthy people do not stress over money.

If they really used money towards that goal, wouldn't they cease to be HNWIs? The fact that they still holding large wealth kind of contradicts what they're saying.

It actually does seem to be correct, in that Musk doesn't exactly spend his money on homes or cars or yachts or other material possessions - it seems all his money goes to philanthropy and his businesses (hence the 'per se').

Philanthropy?

> especially when you put so much on the line to…buy a social network and as a vanity project

This is not what people who are obsessed with money do.

Tesla going forward with next level fSD and competition (Ford) is recalling 130k vehicles for hands free tech.

Optimistic about your equity you invested or the problems they are working on? I mean equity been overstated for awhile - but that's the Musk effect. However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition - I see more Teslas coming on the roads around here then any other EV (not as many cybertrucks though).

>I see more Teslas coming on the roads around here then any other EV (not as many cybertrucks though).

Because we can't buy vehicles from the Chinese competition.

>However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition

Are they?

Did anyone catch the recent All In Podcast? They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".

Pretty easy to believe Tesla is the leader when you don't know what's out there.

No I don't listen to All-in I can't stand listening to any of that self-indulgent nonsense.

FYI - because Chamath and Sacks haven't heard of Waymo operating robo taxis before (which is mind-blowing that they didn't know that considering a good portion of their job is an alternative take on the news) does not mean the rest of the world doesn't.

Tesla is indeed way ahead on self-driving.

In terms of Chinese EVs - that will certainly bring in a lot more competition but they aren't the same class of vehicles. It's like comparing fiat 500 and an audi a6.

In what metrics is Tesla ahead on self driving? Waymo has been operating (actual self driving) in SF for years without major incidents, and has been doing revenue service for nearly a year now. Tesla has shown nothing even remotely close to the level of self driving as Waymo, even in a controlled environment.

For actual self driving, Tesla is going to need a fully revamped sensor package on the car, as well as major updates to their core software. Id be shocked if they are operating revenue service within even a few years

I haven't seen Waymo videos for a few years, but can they do things on highways the way Teslas can? I've only seen a couple of around-town videos, so I don't know.

Apparently yes now: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/8/24029932/waymo-driverless-...

Interesting! I don't know loads about self driving cars, but my understanding was that Tesla's self driving has done a lot of freeway miles, and not just in a small simple area.

"Tesla miles" are also a misleading metric because they don't factor in all the times the driver has to take back control over the vehicle to ensure safe operation, it's just the sum of arbitrary stretches of self driving that don't represent true autonomous operation.

I agree it's not the same, but that's sort of my point. Tesla's gone for global usage, with automatic deactivation, whereas Waymo has done a very specific area of roads built in a similar style. It's broad vs deep, is what I mean.

> whereas Waymo has done a very specific area of roads built in a similar style

How are steep and hilly roads of San Francisco similar in style to flat, grid-like roads of Phoenix?

Well, for example if you drive in Europe you'll see much narrower roads, way more pedestrians and crossings; all sorts of things.

Right, so what you really mean is urban vs highway driving. In self driving, urban driving is considered much more challenging precisely because of the characteristics you listed. That's why you see Waymo only now dipping into highway driving because the primary taxi market is all inside busy cities.

> Right, so what you really mean is urban vs highway driving

No, I don't mean that.

Then I’m afraid you’re unclear because the cities Waymo operates in all have different characteristics and don’t have “similar style of roads”. Driving in SF is very different from driving in Phoenix.

Mercedes and BMW are offering driver assistance you can buy today that is more advanced than Tesla on the freeway. Tesla is in no way a leader in automated driving.

Sorry - I don't see how either of those sentences is relevant.

Waymo is currently doing a huge amount of testing on the freeway. But also, Waymo is fully autonomous in the entirety of San Francisco (and a few other cities). Its not just an assist program that you have to keep your eyes on, its a legit full self driving system, leagues above Tesla's.

> They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".

... Why on earth would anyone listen to this? I mean, based on this, it's people who don't know even the very basics of the market talking about it anyway.

(I'm still struggling with the idea of _Jason Calacanis_ being the voice of reason, in any context...)

Also Chamath the "SPAC king" who made his money on the transactions selling garbage companies to the masses as someone being quoted as a source on anything is right there with Calcanis.

Best selling cars in 2023 -- BYD isn't even top 3 right now. Tesla is back in China as luxury brand.

Model Y: 1.23 M Rav 4: 1.07 M Corolla: 1.01 M

https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2023-full-year-glob...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23738581/tesla-model-y-ev...

BYD have about 30 models, is the thing. Tesla have gone with a rather unusual product strategy for a car maker; four models, of which two have negligible sales. Realistically, any large manufacturer who went down this road could take that crown away from them, though it probably would not be a good idea for that manufacturer to do that.

Also their entire lineup of actual cars is now outdated.

The ark is almost Shakespearean. Pioneering renegade builds an empire, lets it go to his head, and leads two thirds of it to ruin. I just hope spacex escapes the same fate.

They have the best selling car on earth, how are they outdated?

Is this true? Care to share some numbers?

I thought it was total bs, but [0] shows it to be true.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/239229/most-sold-car-mod...

Yeah, but that's not a fair comparison. Toyota alone has 40 hybrid models. Tesla has like 4 ...

Here's some stats from 2022 and Tesla was 15. in total car sales. [0]

[0] https://www.carlogos.org/reviews/worlds-top-selling-automake...

Made the headlines last month. Tesla Y was the best selling car worldwide last year. That said, sales have dropped off a cliff going into this year.

Caveats aside - other manufacturers are a lot more segmented in terms of brands/models trying to cover more price points while Tesla has like 5 models - it is still pretty impressive. I wonder if it would perform as well without Chinese EVs being banned on the US (my guess is yes), but that's another story.

The fact that sales dropped off a cliff this year is also interesting. What meaningful happened in this period? More competition from other manufacturers in the EV space? Market saturation (the addressable market of people that would buy EVs was already covered)?

Yeah a lot of comments here reek of the comments you always see dancing over FB/Google/Whoever's grave.

Ok, Elon.

Why do you say the lineup is outdated? The 3 just had a refreshed version and the y is likely to get it soon.

The tech sucks. Lack of 360 cameras. Lack of RADAR. Lack of Ultrasonic sensors. Lack of Android Auto/Apple Carplay. Lack of integrated Rearview mirror camera. Lack of Heads-up Display (let alone augmented reality HUDs integrated into the GPS navigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8tl0KmqaqU)

That's just the standard tech everyone likes in cars in the year 2024. There's also the lack of physical windshield wiper controls, physical highbeams, or physical climate control buttons. (Everything is tablet-only for the ultimate cheapness / low-end experience).

----------

The funny thing is that we're in a situation where a 2016-era Model 3 has a better driving experience than the refresh. Well, you know, until they software-disabled the Ultrasonics and RADAR units to make the older model worse.

No HUD. Auto sensing wipers that never actually sense when it’s raining. Lack of physical buttons. No way to keep the sun out of the car making it feel like a greenhouse. Much less A/C vents than other cars. Plastic horrible interiors. No road noise isolation. You have to share the only screen with the passenger.

They actually continuously deployed that wiper breaking update. My car in 2019 had wipers that worked.

That and the phone key never working, especially when it was raining and I was holding a child and groceries… that was it for me. Traded it in for a gas car. I’m not pumped about oil changes but at least the company won’t be able to remotely deploy bugs to my working car features

> Auto sensing wipers that never actually sense when it’s raining

I've never had auto sensing wipers, and am curious. Do they actually make enough of a difference to be worth the added hardware?

The manual wipers with controls on one of the steering column stalks in my car are so little effort to use that I usually am not even aware of it. I see rain on the windshield and then I see the wipers deal with it and have to infer that I must have started them because that is much more likely than someone surreptitiously install an after-market automatic wiper system.

I’d say they are ok. But the problem with Tesla is that you either have the auto-sensing option or you have to go through the screen in the middle. The don’t have the stalk option.

They have a shortcut but still requires you to look at the screen in the middle. I don’t know how this car is considered safe

It's one of those things that's kind of nice, but also generally unnecessary and I could easily live without, for the exact reason you mention. Manual wipers on a stalk are just right there next to your hand anyways, hardly an inconvenience when you need to use them.

About the only time auto wipers are handy is when you're driving through an area where the precipitation is highly inconsistent, torrential downpour one minute, a light sprinkle the next.

Of course, Tesla doubled down on their automatic wipers by removing the stalk. -_- In my 2019 Model 3, I can't change wiper behavior on the stalk, though there is a button on the end that if I press, it forces a single wipe, or continuously wipes if I hold the button. It also causes the display to show the wiper speed adjustment UI, and allows me to tilt one of the steering wheel controls to change the setting, so I don't HAVE to use the touch screen. But tbh, I'd still rather just have a stalk with a knob that sets the setting.

> Do they actually make enough of a difference to be worth the added hardware?

The hardware is super simple. Probably costs $5.

This is all valid, but I would say that their actual EV tech, ie battery management, charging network and efficiency is still best in class.

Of course now they've gutted this team perhaps that won't be the case for long

I'm always fascinated to see a critique about a device (car in this case) that never once even mentions the core thing(s) the device is supposed to do.

You didn't even mention any of - fuel mileage, road noise, driver fatigue, comfort of seats, performance of HVAC, visibility, crash safety, passenger comfort and entertainment, storage volume, leg room. You know, transporting meat sacks safely, comfortably and cheaply.

I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important. Personally I think they're a distraction from the fact most cars today get the same horrible mileage they did 20 years ago.

If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

And that is what EVs are. So far they're mostly focusing on the core product and have not spent the time or money on the fluff.

I find this to be a weird perspective because EVs, and especially Tesla, seem to be focused entirely on fluff. That's one of the reasons they cost so damn much compared to ICE "economy" compacts.

Things like "pop out" door handles and steel body panels are fluff. A steering "yoke" is fluff. Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff. Constant (broken) FSD promises are fluff.

Features like a HUD or stalks on the steering wheel would make a driver's experience better and more comfortable. The former they never added, the latter they removed (probably to improve margin).

The last EV I drove was a Renault Zoe, as they're available for hire from the street with an app.

It is a normal, small, city car. Windscreen wipers on the usual stalks, knobs and buttons for climate control, etc. In part because it lacks some electronic safety features (lane-departure warning, automatic emergency braking) it has a very poor safety rating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Zoe

> Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff.

This one I actually think would have been somewhat useful, presuming it was cheap enough to actually use. I don't throw steel bearings at my car, but I would imagine that strength probably carries over to stuff falling out of trucks, rocks being flung by tires, etc.

It's not world-changing, but it would have been useful.

Good luck when you drive into a lake and can't break your way out like that dead billionaire

Do you regularly drive your car into lakes? I would legitimately be surprised if I ever know a person that this has happened to never mind if it ever happened to me.

There was a wealthy lady that was driving drunk I believe in the news who put her Tesla into her pond by accident and drowned b/c she couldn't get the windows down and the doors to open. Her biggest problem was the alcohol though.

Friends could not save her b/c they could not break the laminated glass. We have safety hammers in all of our cars for that reason.

I’ve never had nor heard of anyone having an issue with a foreign object breaking a side window. Is it common?

> Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff.

Quite the reverse, actually—it's an anti-safety feature.

This is a $40,000 to $60,000 vehicle.

I have expectations. If I just wanted to safely transport people from pointA to pointB reliably and efficiently, the answer is a Toyota Corolla Hybrid at nearly half the cost.

If you're competing against $40k vehicles, then I think its fair to compare to... I dunno, an Ioniq 6 or something? Full EV, faster charging, better tech, better road noise, etc. etc. etc.

Tesla's core product, the car, has worse safety, tech, and other features than any competitor. And with regards to the Highland update, it doesn't even add any of the recent innovations that are "fashionable" in today's day-and-age.

Its 2024. A freaking Corolla has some of the features I listed above, at again, nearly half the price of a typical Tesla. Tesla's tech stack is severely out of date even with the update.

> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

I think that's called a Ford Maverick. Ford Maverick ain't 70mpg, but its cheaper to drive than supercharger / fast chargers (where costs skyrocket for EVs to 30+ cents / kwhr).

> Personally I think they're a distraction from the fact most cars today get the same horrible mileage they did 20 years ago.

You can't fight physics. A gas-powered sedan weighed down by all the modern safety requirements can only get ~43mpg on the highway.

A hybrid boosts this to ~55mpg and also greatly improves city efficiency.

Above those numbers, you're looking at engines that are severely underpowered (1.0 liters) or is more EV than gas car.

> I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important.

Well, yes. To please the American consumerist mindset, you have to keep inventing new features even if the new feature is a complete gimmick or just a subscription, or taking out physical buttons (e.g. all strictly negatives).

> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

At that point why not just wish for a magic horse that flies or something. 70 MPG is an EV number. You'll never get a gas car that gets that mileage.

> 70 MPG is an EV number. You'll never get a gas car that gets that mileage.

My old 320d did those on the motorwaym and more sometimes. It wasn't the average, but given almost all my driving was motorway, it wasn't far off.

Diesel fuel contains more energy per gallon/Liter so that’s not a useful comparison.

Also if "motorway" implies Britain, Imperial gallons are 20% larger than US gallons.

It does! But then also I don't know what a gallon of electricity is.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/em-fuel-log.php?vehicleid=3158

https://ecomodder.com/forum/em-fuel-log.php?vehicleid=7982

> A gas-powered sedan weighed down by all the modern safety requirements can only get ~43mpg on the highway.

Meanwhile in 1988 (36 years ago!) one could buy a Honda CRX that got 49mpg on the highway.

Weight is indeed the enemy here. To cut energy consumption and emissions we need to rethink the madness of 4000lb+ cars. I want to buy a 1600lb car with mindblowing mpg numbers using modern engine technology.

Not 1600lb, but the lightest traditional ICE car I'm aware of is the Mitsubishi Mirage at 2106lbs.

The lotus elan is about 1500. The earlier honda insights are about 1850.

You can if the rest of the cars on the road were in the same weight class. Otherwise that's like going bowling with an egg.

I was driving a 2016 Ford Fiesta. Last year I decided it was too small for my family of three. I wanted an EV, and my needs focus on exactly the practical stuff you describe. I don't need a car that I can turn into a robotaxi or whatnot. I was incredibly disappointed by Tesla. I tried all the EVs at the DC auto show and it feels like all the legacy manufacturers have caught up with Tesla at every price point. I ended up buying a Bolt EUV. It's amazing how much comfort and capability I got per dollar spent. Much better than any Tesla.

Most of those examples aren't the cars being outdated really. They were intentional decisions to either cut costs or two stubbornly do it their own way. A tech refresh wont give you radar because Elon didn't want radar. They could have had it years ago but didn't. Same with carplay and android auto. They wanted their software stack.

> They could have had it years ago but didn't.

They did have it years ago. That's the insult.

Elon is specifically removing features and trying to sell a worse car to people. Here we are nearly a decade later and people are seriously asking "what's wrong with a Tesla??"

Well, have yall seen what the Highland Refresh has ___removed___? That's my point, its a worse car now.

The more distracted he is by those two, and the more Shotwell is running things, the more optimistic I am about SpaceX’s future.

I trust her, and think she’s a capable pair of hands.

She's 60 years old now.

So, more mature than Musk?

What’s the point of this statement?

Do you list the age of every person mentioned in online conversations?

> the more Shotwell is running things, the more optimistic I am about SpaceX’s future.

Her age is relevant when discussing the future of SpaceX, considering the median retirement age.

Sure, by future I meant immediate future, as in the next 0-5 years, not the long term 10+ year future for SpaceX.

I recall that she landed some clutch contracts for SpaceX >10 years ago, but I haven't heard much about her since. What has she done that makes you think she's up to running SpaceX?

She is the one in day-to-day control at SpaceX.

The fact that SpaceX isn't missing any steps despite its continued expansion in programs, i.e. Superheavy, Starship, Starlink, space refueling, Lunar landers, in the context of Musk's significant distractions.

SpaceX's path is also economically rational. No cyber space yachts. Just rapidly improving customer cadence, capability expansion, and margin bumps.

Tesla, on the other hand, could really use his creativeness, practical realism and will-to-succeed focus again.

You know, I have to hand it to Elon. We often hear about how successful companies turn "corporate" and stop being able to innovate because they need to preserve their successful product lines; e.g. Google's ad business. And the leadership in those companies often talk about how they want to "be a big company that acts like a startup" but it's usually just lip service. Well, this is what it actually looks like and it's not pretty; even the customers hate it let alone the employees.

I will always remember what one of my previous bosses told me.

I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales.

But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures.

And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity.

Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics.

The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc.

Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted.

I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.

One person’s maintaining is another person’s building. There are definitely many many very competent people with a “builder” mindset that would get a kick out of building a good maintenance / service experience.

It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.

Yes, maintainer deserve respect.

However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building.

If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.

> One person’s maintaining is another person’s building

IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.

Management is hard and ICs often underestimate the difficulty.

Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.

To be fair, I think everyone underestimates the difficulty—including managers, the people that hire them, and the people who org companies to "require" a large number of people with these scarce skills.

While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.

For the record I wasn’t disparaging the maintainers.

In Tesla’s situation, they need more people with a maintenance mindset to sustain their company.

SpaceX has a nice mix of both.

If you haven't seen it before, you may find this interesting: https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-f...

Thank you for sharing this! I read this a long time ago and promptly lost the link, despite me coming back to the principles often.

Wow, great read. I'm 100% a Settler. What should I be doing career-wise to maximize this? Joining startups?

Yeah I absolutely agree. The way it was told to me, there are 3 types of people: Commandos, soldiers and police. Commandos like cutting their own path through the jungle and going behind enemy lines to do something nobody thought possible. Soldiers work as a team to make a stable foothold. And after the area is secure, police keep the peace and deal with problems that come up.

The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.

I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.

Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.

Oh I love this analogy, thank you!

I have heard another version of this classification: people are either builders, or scalers, or optimizers, but rarely combine the traits. They are good for different stages of the company growth. Builders are good at the most risky and innovative stage from founding the company to getting first customers. Scalers know how to become big and profitable. Optimizers squeeze the juice and keep moats deep.

About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my CTO that amounted to this. He told me paraphrasing, "I'm a one trick pony. I take companies from this size to this size and when I'm done, I move on to the next. I'm very good at this and I'm happy doing it." Plus he made a lot of money doing so. I'd worked with him at two companies and it clicked that he had a playbook and he ran that playbook at each new company. He refined the art of going from this stage a to stage b.

I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.

Maintenance/optimization is an interesting stage: on one side, there you mostly need to execute by playbooks rather than be creative. Is it boring? On the other side, it is the stage where you need the most skill and expertise: you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories. There you stand on the shoulders of giants and establish connection between today and many centuries of others experience. You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.

> You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.

It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining.

It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.

See, perhaps, explorer/villagers/town planners: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2023/12/how-to-organise-yoursel...

Clearly this basic idea crops up in numerous forms. Part of the point of this specific scheme is that it is circular: once a given thing has reached the town planner stage, it has become some combination of pervasive and dependable and well-understood, ready to be used as one of the foundations for future exploration.

>you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories.

The way I see it is these companies need it, but it is impossible to satiate that need, so they must find the next best thing.

If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole. It is also impossible to staff all those positions with top talent at scale.

Raw talent and engineering is replaced with heuristics and policies and red tape.

It becomes like sailors operating a ship made with forgotten technology. They each have superstitions and operational knowledge about their little part, but nobody has the ship schematics.

Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.

>If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole.

It is impossible to know every detail, but it is certainly possible to understand and comprehend it. The ability to zoom out and zoom in is essential for senior leadership (even if some people appear unfit based on this criteria). Of course it works only if your organization is… ehm… organized and doesn’t look like a bunch of unicorns of all sorts and colors, so that you can extrapolate the methods of work of one team to another.

> Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.

This will be the downfall of modern society. When nobody remains who understands all the tech we rely on it's only a matter of time before the whole house of cards comes down.

You have multiple people that understand different bits of tech. It's been that way for a while.

What's fneascinating is that build -> scale -> maintain is a similar lifecycle to a human: create and pivot quickly with fluid intelligence and high energy at first, then settle into your lane and grow, and then use your accumulated domain-specific knowledge and wisdom that no one else has, at a slower pace.

But the progression is not necessarily the same time scale for the product and the person. Maybe it was in the past, before computing.

I've been a builder for a lot of my life but the last 10 years I've worked as an optimizer. The interesting thing about that is the work and playbook I used in the past is more of just a standard industry practice now. I used to do an audit and find a ton of low-hanging fruit and go from there. Nowadays, there's a lot less to correct and I have to think in different ways to provide true value.

The Jobs, the Wozs and the Cooks.

I think there are only 2 types of people: those who buy into schemas that divide people into between 3 and 16 groups with cool names and those who don't.

Personally I also require those groups to include at least one special character.

Your schema doesn’t account for companies that only have a management tack or an ic track with no opportunity for someone to sometimes lead teams and sometimes make technical decisions. I think you’ll find it’s better if you simply encompass the natural numbers.

According to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, there never exists a complete set of types of people, because there’s always one more type — people writing about those types.

I think this explains the trouble at my current company. We're a couple years into the scaling phase and it's become clear that our CEO is a builder and doesn't know how to scale.

I don't think he understands that and there's really not anything I can do about it but move on.

There was a show (if someone has the reference please add it) where these business guys were discovering chefs and working to turn their restaurants in to franchises.

There was a huge wake-up call as they kept working with this brilliant chef who all but refused to write down recipes, share processes, or do anything but run his restaurant the way he always had. He just couldn’t see that going from restaurant to franchise was an entirely different thing than running a great restaurant.

If I remember correctly, ultimately despite a bunch of different creative approaches, they had to back off.

I think about that a lot when businesses want to go from building to scaling.

That's Kent Beck's 3X: Explore Expand Extract (there is a good video on it about his time at FB)

Just found the talk on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazqgfsO_kY ). Thank you! It expanded on the basic idea of "cost of failure" very well. I've tried to argue his points with mixed success, but now I can point to a talk given by someone who cut his teeth at Facebook.

Heh. Kent Beck "cut his teeth" a little earlier than Facebook ...

(He wrote the Agile Manifesto and developed TDD while working at Sun in the 90s)

Absolutely. It's just that namedropping Meta / Facebook is more effective than Sun :(.

That is not good, because what Tesla needs is a much larger range of models. Minivans. Delivery trucks. A real pickup. Work trucks. The Semi.

What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.

Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.

Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.

The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.

> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.

It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.

I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.

> It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.

I wonder if they did a calculation to determine if this course of action will actually save more carbon emissions than it will cause in the form of road destruction and the need for refinishing them from the increased weight.

> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

It's not being mentioned because it's a dumpster fire.

It has delivery rates that today are 30% of their contractual obligations for 2017, seven years ago now.

Pepsi, Sysco, UPS and Walmart have or are all given up and gone to competitors.

Musk even implies that the outlook won't improve there. Blames battery availability, actually.

EV trucks should have a shoe-in for lot tenders, it works well with the recharge cycle, would work with drop in batteries, etc., but Musk wants his on the Interstate, regardless of feasibility.

He's also managed to convince the faithful that no-one else is doing or capable of doing commercial sized EVs, despite BYD having 60,000 electric buses operating, and others.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

> I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.

Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley

> Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company

This seems impossible. How is it doing rent-seeking?

My understanding is they were offering subscription services. I could have misremembered that. I know other makers were considering the same type of thing.

There are only two subscriptions that Tesla offers: FSD and Premium Connectivity.

And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking.

With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently.

Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.

There are more. In the US, there's Tesla Electric for home charging at a fixed rate. Then there is the Supercharger membership for non-Tesla owners for a reduced rate per kWh.

Subscription services aren't rent-seeking. Why would subscription services be bad in the way that rent-seeking is?

Look up "rent-seeking".

It is too bad we cannot come up with a better name, so people do not confuse it with everything else we call rent.

Anytime someone is trying to keep their hand in my pocket with continuous payments for something used to be a one time payment rather than offer the same but as a service is rent seeking to me. Am I confused on the definition?

The pejorative term, in the economic sense, tends to be reserved for rents obtained by gaming the system, rather than the usual kind that charges for use of property or capital.

Example: a utility company lobbies for a law requiring utilities to charge a junk fee.

Non-example: I charge someone to live in my spare bedroom.

Tesla is offering use of something they built (Superchargers, self-driving software, etc.) in exchange for a fee. They aren't gaming the system to force anyone to pay. You might not like the pricing model, but there's nothing economically wrong with it.

What would be an example of that? Most that I can think of involve a company (cough BMW cough) offering a feature they used to sell outright, for a monthly fee. The fee being much lower than the outright price of that feature. They're still offering something of value, in this case convenience and lower cost (if you don't want it all the time, buying it incrementally may well be cheaper than buying it outright; Tesla FSD comes to mind as a contemporary example).

I think the problem most people have with the BMW trick is that they include the feature physically, but disable it. That does almost smell like rent seeking, but I think it does not quite get there. Manufacturers routinely hold back a bit and don't deliver maximum capability. For reasons like emissions, or longevity, whatever. This isn't much different IMO, if you're not paying anything for it then the fact that they included it anyway is immaterial.

Probably the most common kind of rent everyone thinks of, property rental, is also not rent-seeking. There is value in what is being provided.

To go back to a car analogy, it would be like BMW engaging the brakes on your car and then charging you a fee release them so you could drive (even better, making it legally required to pay the fee in order to drive on public roads). They're not providing any value at all, and then demanding money for it.

Yes, that's not rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is basically collecting money without offering any service or product in return. It does not benefit the economy, in contrary to profit-seeking, which is what Tesla is doing.

This is the PAEI model which is from the 1970s.

People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator.

It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.

This is a very valuable observation ("builders" vs "maintainers") along with the comments below this.

> he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both.

What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.

Assuming that framework is true - which I’m not challenging at all -, why would you need to _fire_ the builders, instead of pivoting them to new greenfields projects - as I assume Tesla has many. Unless your CEO isn’t a maintainer/optimizer himself?

I used to be like this but I think it's more like...why build something if you don't reap some of the benefits?

I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.

This is 100% true in my experience.

Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.

At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.

I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.

A company like Tesla needs stability if they want me to buy an expensive product like a car - whether it be $25K or $50K. Right now I'm shopping used EVs. Won't pick a Tesla b/c I keep my cars for 15+ years and I can't be sure that a Tesla will be affordable to own during that ownership. They may not even exist in 15 years. I'm pretty sure most of the other mainstream brands will be.

Same.

In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them.

There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software.

Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.

The Innovators Dilemma.

Don't know for me Tesla Innovations look more like traditional corporate innovation which can continue no matter the cost as long as the correct person support it.

And in the context of this news I don't see much innovation just some cost-cutting to continue to prop up some moonshots to the detriment of the automaker portion of Tesla.

Would Optimus survive as its own startup ?

There is a place for maturity.

The answer is probably for big companies to let themselves get big but then start investing in the startup ecosystem. New things that aren't a good fit for BigCo should be done in actual startups.

I think trying to put everything under one umbrella is actively harmful. In its most extreme it gives you the Soviet politburo. I've speculated before that the real reason that capitalism seems to work better is because of this multiplicity of organizations allowing the system to route around dysfunction. When everything is all one big corporation (as it was in the USSR) dysfunction in any area becomes fatal and cannot be recovered from.

No, this is phase 2 of what every SV business[*] looks like these days. Once the initial growth period is over in whatever the business is actually good at, you need to pivot into some new nonsense (AI these days) because the business is chasing infinite growth. That leads to this kind of flailing around trying desperately to hit another bullseye, instead of focusing on what the business already does well.

[*] and more and more all the rest of them as well.

What are you talking about? Tesla has been SLOW to ship innovative products after they grew. Musk focused on SCALE not new product development. That's why a 2015 Tesla, now 8 years old practically looks the same as one today. Even the cyber-truck was slow to deliver (other manufactures got to EV trucks first).

Tesla is the perfect example of going corporate.

This is a good point. Innovation is when you put out press releases about an idea that came to you as you crawled out of a k-hole. Few large corporations have the smarts to promise a vehicle that can cross a small sea and deliver one that goes out of warranty if you take it through a car wash

It looks like they are a car company in the rise, taking on huge incumbents with a 100 year lead, are in spitting distance of becoming one of those multigenerational institutions and decided to blow their brains out on stage.

They aren’t at the point of disrupting themselves, this is like if Google terminated search in 2004. It’s idiotic, period.

Or in a matter of months they'll be back on track expanding charging infrastructure, nobody knows.

I mean, you fire all the people who know how to do the job and it’s gonna take years to get that skill set back. He could reverse it tomorrow and the damage is done. Utterly remarkable.

He's done this before and it ended in Tesla having increased head count, over double the output of vehicles, so I'm curious how this will turn out in the coming months. I am thinking a repeat of the last time.

This isn’t what “being a big company that acts like a startup” looks like. This is what being a company that has a scatterbrained dictator for a CEO looks like.

Tesla isn’t building a robot because a scrappy team in the company discovered an opportunity for innovation. They’re doing it because the CEO suddenly demanded it between doses of amphetamines.

Tesla would look like a big company with a startup mentality if they were pumping out new automotive products that made some level of sense.

Hyundai and Kia more closely resemble what this would look like in a large company. All their new cars have unique bespoke designs and a laser focus on giving customers a compelling offering in every category.

For a time GE referred to itself as a 124 year old startup and acted as such.

It didn’t end well.

I agree, this is how you continuously re-kindle the startup environment. It's kind of like reformatting your computer and installing your OS fresh. You have to do it, it's a pain in the ass, you don't want to do it, but when you're done you have a clean, speedy computer without all the built up logs, junk etc taking up the hard drive bogging things down. Tesla will rehire again shortly and we'll be seeing employee numbers rise back again. I'm seeing a lot of commentary that will be irrelevant in a month or less once the careers page reopens positions listings.

I'm sorry but you're bordering on delusional here. The Model Y has been the highest selling car in the world for several months over the last year. The Model 3 and S are also high up there. I will grant you that cybertruck was a colossal waste of time. It's selling but resources would have been better allocated to their low-cost car. Even Elon has admitted the same about CT and Y in hindsight.

But car sales are down across the entire market, this isn't exclusive to Tesla or EV's. Interest rates are just too high for your average consumers and discretionary spending continues to drop. It's myopic to think Tesla are doing something wrong without looking at the state of things.

> and probably get his $56 billion pay package approved

Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but how does him getting the $56B not crash TSLA stock and the ultimately the company? AFAIKT TSLA has only made about $32B in profit during it's entire existence as a company (and that could be an overestimate - I don't think it accounts for earlier losses which would take it closer to $27B). So why should Musk get almost 2X that? Why would any shareholder (other than Musk) vote for this kind of payout?

You are freely conflating profits and stock valuation, which aren't comparable.

The vote is basically on if the shareholders want to honor musks 2018-2022 comp package, which was recently thrown out.

The deal was that if Elon got the stock to 600 billion for shareholders, he got to keep 50 billion.

I mean the fact that the comp package got thrown out well after it being approved and him making the metrics is mind blowing. It is not honoring a deal but hey - someone has to pay the lawyers.

Yeah, I'm split on the issue. The court was right on the technicalities around disclosure, but it was also plain as day the board was musks buddies and the stockholders still approved it the first time.

Could the board have negotiated a better deal if they weren't buddies? Probably, but that's why board composition matters.

The judge said they thought Musk would have made the milestones without the comp because he already had skin in the game.

Ex-post facto recontacting is just icky overall.

This is just kind of an artifact of how our legal system works. Judges don't generally answer hypotheticals, you have to do it and then see how it pans out.

All that being said, I would be pretty surprised if this outcome wasn't mentioned as a risk to the board or Musk. They're talking about paying him ~10% of the company's _market cap_ as a bonus, and almost double the revenue the company has made in its entire existence. I'm not terribly surprised that a judge looked at that and immediately thought "breach of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders".

That brings up an awful lot of questions. Does it really take $50B to motivate him, given that his wealth is largely denominated in TSLA stock anyways (meaning he suffers if the stock price drops)? Is there really no one who would do it for cheaper? Firing Elon and hiring a $200M/year CEO would save the company like $50B; why is the board so confident that Elon is going to provide more value to the company than saving $50B on labor costs?

Perhaps paying Elon is the right move to make. I'm dubious, but I'm also not a shareholder, so my opinion does and should mean basically nothing. I do hope that if the shareholders vote to approve the bonus, they're allowed to pay it out. They're adults, they should be allowed to do what they believe is in their best interest.

The first time the compensation was approved, it was through shareholder vote with Elon abstaining.

The question raised later was not if the shareholders were adults allowed to approve it, but if the information they were given about the board negotiators had sufficient disclosure.

Inadequate disclosure on paper legally opened the door to questioning if the negotiator of Health fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

My personal opinion is that a different CEO then Elon could not have generated 500 billion dollars of irrational hype. Additionally, I think that if Elon left in 2018, there could have been substantial reputational damage to Tesla.

Negotiations between two parties who both stand to profit heavily are tough. They are tough because Leverage is based on who is more willing to self-destruct and walk away

It was about reaching a certain stock valuation only, not the the profits.

Public companies are strange creatures. You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.

> You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.

No, you'd expect it to be tied to the market's assessment of the company's total lifetime value. That will hopefully be informed by revenue and profit, but isn't limited to those, as disruptive companies might be round the corner about to wipe it out, or vice versa.

Yes and since no one can accurately predict that, its valuation is based more on speculation, rather than what could be extrapolated from the numbers alone.

Which is probably a bit counterintuitive for most people. At least for me it was.

All valuation is based on speculation. “The numbers” are always subject to change.

I guess I was thinking about how a more regular/predictable business would usually be sold by its owners for a multiple of its yearly revenue, for example.

Would the same apply to unicorns? Probably not, because they're special.

Both situations are still betting on future potential, either via earnings maintenance/growth, or via betting on being able to sell the equity at a higher price to a subsequent buyer.

Matt Levine has a great newsletter where he regularly delves into questions like this. He recently wondered, somewhat seriously, if the era of valuing stocks based on fundamentals was a fad that's now over.

Not to mention he took $17M from federal charging grants right before firing everyone. FTC should be investigating.

Lol, if he is planning on training on his cars Mercedes/Daimler had that idea back in 2018. I built the demo for the idea using nomad and a bunch of Jetson/Drive boards, and gave a quick presentation to the new CEO (of Daimler!). It’s also patented, for what that is worth.

> It’s also patented, for what that is worth.

You picked my curiosity here. What exactly is there to patent here? AI training is being done a computer and that computer happen to be physically located inside a car. How do you patent the location of a computer?

Patents are odd, is probably all I can say - https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230281046A1/en

On the contrary, it’s hard not to be impressed with Tesla. They moved more Model Y cars than any other car the world over. They unseated Toyota Corolla as the best selling car. That’s just incredible.

I was seriously considering getting a Tesla despite my visceral hatred of what Musk has done to Twitter, primarily because the price incentives are really amazing compared to other alternatives, but most of all the charging network.

So this is beyond bonkers for me - literally about to hand cash over while holding my nose, but then they kill one of the major reasons I was willing to overlook Musks behavior?

Seriously, WTF is this guy on, and more importantly, how much? Nobody sober and sane would do this.

Elon alreay explained it on Twitter. Better to follow him there rather than rely on second hand information on news or HN, which tend to mispresent what he actually says. He said that they'll focus on maintaining and expanding current Supercharger stations, and won't build new ones for now.

Yeah, better listen to the serial liar and bullshitter.

You don't do strategic shifts in direction on the spot, with the team finding out they were fired from news articles, a few days after investors call where you say nothing about this plan and babble about robotaxis instead.

Yo do throw bossy tantrums that way. I mean, he flat out wrote he made an example of the sacked team:

> “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard-core about headcount and cost reduction,” he wrote in the email seen by The Information, which also announced the end of the public policy team led by departed executive Rohan Patel. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”

But sure, it was a planned move by a genius CEO.

Meanwhile -actual- end stage FSD is nowhere in sight (this means northeastern winter nights with poor road conditions, not "it handles roundabouts so much better than the previous version!")...

The cheaper CT and whatever else he's promising will never see the light of day...

And he's delivered 36 of 100 Semis promised for 2017, and has basically implied there's little chance of that situation changing (blaming battery availability).

> and wildly unrealistic promises in front of shareholders

His signature move.

Elon is exceptional at one thing: driving hype.

Except Elon seems to have confused this with "driving innovation." The two __can__ correlate, but do not need to. Like I think it is fair to say that Tesla did push the other manufacturers to start pushing electric cars, but it is hard for me to argue that Tesla led the way through innovation. Not that they didn't do innovative stuff, but that the contribution here wasn't all that large.

In my opinion, this is all a massive gamble by Musk to pivot Tesla to an AI-first tech company. Except that Tesla cannot really do AI well and don't have the resources or talent the likes of Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. does to do novel research and push AI forward.

And he has to make this gamble because Tesla's fundamentals as a car company is going down the drain and its entire valuation hinges on the fact that they are not just a car company. That's why he's constantly announcing new products (robotaxis, humanoid robots) that are nowhere close to materializing, making visits to China to ink HD maps deal with Baidu for FSD and claiming to spend $10B on AI infrastructure this year.

He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.

Except that AI has not shown itself to be useful, at least not considering the staggering costs, anyway. Tens of billions of dollars to... fix people's grammar and generate tons of SEO spam? What PROBLEM are they solving here?

I think the parent poster stated it pretty clearly: the problem they're trying to solve is how to keep the stock price floating at a multiple of what the business's actual fundamentals suggest it should be.

The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.

FSD is currently using neural-network style AI, and it's frankly amazing to use and watch and is massively useful.

In what way is it useful? What value is being provided? In my experience it requires constant supervision and readiness to intervene at any moment. There are plenty of reports and photos of it running wheels into curbs with little time for the driver to react.

Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful.

I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.

Is that the thing that keeps crashing people into highway barriers?

That, and inadequate sensor diversity and coverage.

Any recent version of FSD (i.e. 12.3.x) is technology close to magic.

There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement.

But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/

FSD is cool as a great demo. But the optics and facts are that it’s got people killed. Multiple people over the years. Silly mistakes causing crashes.

It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic.

Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead.

I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!

I don’t think we will ever have any self driving tech that inter mingles with non self driving cars that will result in zero deaths.

While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.

FSD only drives in a subset of conditions humans drive in so the comparison is invalid.

> While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.

For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.

How the heck did you reach the conclusion that the current state of FSD is safer than a human driver. The Tesla Community FSD tracker has it at 157 city miles per disengagement at the moment. The people collecting this data are the Tesla enthusiasts as well.

It has a very long way to go before it is better than a human. We won’t know the true stats until it is allowed to operate without supervision.

Source: https://www.teslafsdtracker.com/Main

This notion is ridiculous to me everytime I hear it. How can we objectively measure that its safer? It feels way too easy to miss an externality and just chalk that up to teslas mile per mile being safer on a technicality

I subscribe to this thought. HN has really made a turn that anything Elon does is bad even when he has managed to pull off some unbelievable feats. He isn't binary in his accomplishments as most people are fairly complex.

It's a sad state of affairs - though I imagine its mostly cross-over of younger generations blending in their polarizing reddit politics over here. It is a dilutive process unfortunately.

"Any recent version", because "still recent, but not AS recent versions" were lucky to navigate a well marked roundabout in daylight without causing near misses.

FSD will be "close to magic" when it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, and it still gets you home.

If it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, then the safe behaviour is to wait it out and drive in the morning.

If FSD didn't work in those conditions, and this encouraged you to wait it out, then it might have just saved your life (or the lives of other road users).

I don't think they lead the pack on that, though. Everybody in the self-driving space is using AI to some degree.

E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something.

I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).

You have to remember a lot of those expenses are actually goosing the companies revenues side with low qual revenue. A good portion of investment dollars into OpenAI are with Microsoft credits -- which OpenAI then uses as opposed to real money.

Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.

It's good at wake word detection and industrial anomaly autocorrelation.

That's about it.

Yes, that seems correct from what I've seen. And if self driving can be improved enough, then it will pay off. However, I remain skeptical that he'll be able to improve it enough to compensate for other deficiencies in the product.

> And if self driving can be improved enough, then it will pay off.

Hasn't Uber been waiting for the same thing to save it?

Uber has been "out" of the self-driving game since end of 2020. The post T.K (Travis Kalanick) era has seen major divesting and shifting of the balance sheet away from longer term bets like self-driving in an attempt to reach profitability & shielding Uber from more risk. Here is a short history of self-driving @ Uber.

August '15: Uber announces its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in Pittsburgh, focusing on self-driving technology research and development.

May '16: Uber begins testing its self-driving Ford Fusion vehicles in Pittsburgh, marking its first public demonstration of autonomous vehicle technology.

August '16: Uber acquires Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineers. This ended up with a lawsuit over stolen IP that was a large setback from what I remember.

Sept. '16: Uber launches its first self-driving ride-hailing service in Pittsburgh, using a fleet of modified Ford Fusion's. Safety drivers are present in each car to take control if needed.

December '16: Uber starts testing its self-driving cars in San Francisco without obtaining the necessary permits from the CA DMV. The DMV revokes the registration of Uber's test vehicles, forcing the company to halt its operations in the city.

March '17: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Arizona, taking advantage of the state's friendly regulations for autonomous vehicle testing.

March '18: A fatal accident occurs in Tempe, Arizona, when an Uber self-driving vehicle strikes and kills a pedestrian. Uber suspends its self-driving testing program across all cities in the aftermath of the incident.

July '18: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Pittsburgh, with additional safety measures and limitations on the vehicles' operating conditions.

March '19: Uber receives a $1 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, Toyota, and DENSO for its self-driving unit, valuing the division at $7.25 billion.

June '19: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in San Francisco, having obtained the necessary permits from the California DMV.

Dec '20: Uber sells its ATG division to Aurora, a self-driving vehicle startup, in a deal valued at $4 billion. As part of the agreement, Uber invests $400 million in Aurora and retains a 26% stake in the combined company.

> He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.

A lot of companies seem to be gutting everything to the point where their only product is their stock.

This isn't new. Hp, IBM, GE, on and on

The TV series "Silicon Valley" does not disappoint.

I can’t wait to point and laugh when the correction comes due.

you won't be laughing when your and your parents' pensions are wiped out because they buy proportionally into the S&P500.

It won't be a big deal given 5 or 10 years.

If you're a top-tier AI researcher, why TF would you choose Tesla to work for? The shine has gone off Musk as a super-genius. All you'd be getting is an arbitrary, capricious boss and terrible work hours.

Tesla AI orgs can pay well above market for AI talent. Thats about the only reason anyone would join. If you are insensitive to work hours but want to get paid, its not the worst option.

Do they really outbid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, Apple, etc.? I totally believe they pay better than the average startup but those companies are spraying money around right now and their stock options have a lot more upside – Tesla’s P/E is wildly high so they’d need a phenomenal reversal in fortune to drive it enough higher for anyone to see a great return.

Its not uncommon for PhD hires from top schools to be paid upper 6figs (i.e 600k+) of real money, according to a few friends of mine doing PhDs at top schools. OpenAI is probably the only one thats truly "competitive."

I also (personally) know of several non-ML offers that were substantially higher than FAANG. Though even within FAANG only Meta and maybe Google (and Amazon at hogher levels) are very competitive. Meta and Google likely have better growth prospects though with better refreshers, bonuses, stock growth, etc. But up front Tesla AI offers are definitely very strong. Even then I'm not sure its worth the stress.

And even if you delivered something nice you could still get fired for something stupid. No thanks.

> That's why he's constantly announcing

Security fraud.

I've always considered the Supercharger network as their most valuable asset, besides arguably their mindshare, so I cannot see how losing the entire team could be a rational decision in the long term.

Also, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.

Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...

Agree 100%. The change in Musk’s public persona combined with his more recent business decisions are alarming. And you may say that his public persona shouldn’t matter, but when he willfully alienates a large portion of his traditional customer base, one wonders what he is even thinking.

This might ironically be the downside of being less money driven and more principle driven. I think he legitimately thinks “the woke mind virus” is a bigger short term threat to (western) civilization than failing to transition to sustainable energy (Tesla) or failing to become a multi planetary species (SpaceX). If he was primarily financially driven I think he would have kept quiet and just focused on the existing companies, like most people probably would even if they privately held similarly controversial opinions.

I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.

The thing is, he’s never been paid to stay quiet and focus on the money.

Musk’s value add is as the celebrity CEO; the Jobsian ideal taken to its natural conclusion. He’s supposed to be this forward-looking visionary and having him at the helm of your company is supposed to make it forward-looking by proxy.

This is all well and good until the celebrity CEO fries his brain with Special K and builds a bubble of yes-men around him. Then it becomes a massive liability.

A lot of it’s explained by drugs, incredible impulsivity, some magical thinking, and remarkably thin skin, plus (I think the rest are in plain evidence—this gets speculative) maybe some discontent over his personal life and especially his kids.

Tell that to the share holders who keep rewarding him even on a huge earnings miss.

TSLA down > 50% from the peak. The stock went up on earnings miss because things were not as bad as shareholders were expecting, but the shareholders are expecting things to be pretty bad.

But I think the point people have made (correctly!) is that TSLA's price is detached from any normal way we have for pricing a car company. Their market cap is 160% that of Toyota, despite selling 16% as many cars. How are they ever going to justify their current valuation? Kicking Elon out to get rational CEO behavior could result in a rational market assessment of Tesla's value, which would be bad from the shareholders' perspective!

Toyota issues bonds (ex. [1]) so their valuation should be less than the multiple on cars sold as tesla.

[1]: https://cbonds.com/bonds/1504323/

The only thing separating Tesla from a realistic multiple is Musk. For shareholders it's rational to want to keep him around. Otherwise they would have to face a much worse reversion to the mean.

Hmmm... Usually the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes implies the people around him went along with the fiction because they feared personal retribution from the Emperor... But what if nobles did it to prevent a drop in the "stock" of the empire itself?

that felt like a pump to me. Those shareholders are in deep, easier to pump a bad earnings up instead of pulling their entire tesla portfolio imo

I've honestly wondered whether or not he's going to end up as this generation's Howard Hughes. Makes fortune in other industry, parlays that into becoming a manufacturing/aerospace titan, slowly goes insane. He's 2 or 2.5 for 3 depending on how you count.

Started thinking that years ago ... and have always made the link, in my mind, between the Starship and the Spruce Goose ...

To be fair, Starship has gotten further than the Spruce Goose ever did.

I kind of agree - but relatively speaking they're at about the same place right now.

Maybe robotaxis will be the Spruce Goose.

Starlink (v2 sats in particular) alone justifies Starship. Include HLS and potential Mars stuff and the comparison does not make sense. Don't listen to people who hate on SpaceX because of Musk. If you want to hate on him pick any AI-related thing, much easier target.

Yeah, of the full possibility space of mystifying decisions, I think this one might be the global maximum... It's such a "selling shovels to the miners" business line where they are (were?) positioned really well in.

Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.

What does the Supercharger team actually do?

To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:

• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)

• To manufacture the charging equipment

• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.

• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.

• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc

• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.

• To provide customer support.

If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.

I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.

I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.

I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.

Customer support would likely be Tesla.

If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.

500+ people to even do the HIGH level bits of running a SC network isn't a lot.

Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.

Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:

1. Locations 2. Quantity of locations 3. Quality (high charging rates) 4. User experience / design of hardware - software 5. Realtime reporting and navigation 6. Uptime of network

The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.

Same, I'm a new used Model Y owner, and the supercharger infrastructure (existing, expected expansion, and maintenance) was part of the reason I bought it. It would be nice if Musk would provide some rationale of what's going on over there so we know what to expect...

Tesla's engineering culture around the Supercharger is what makes it viable. They mass produce a custom-designed unit in groups of four, and then ship them from factory directly to job site. None of the other competitors are doing that yet, which is why Tesla has been both more profitable and more reliable. Maybe that culture will survive the layoffs, but it's a fast growing business with a ton of complicated engineering work to do.

I wonder how many encryption certs are in the Supercharger environment and what will happen if they aren't maintained.

If I'm not mistaken, many companies do the product engineering in house and outsource the manufacturing/maintenance to contractors. Tesla's supercharger network is mature enough that it won't see much innovation moving forward, and that might've motivated them to remove the entire team.

Could a plausible explanation be that with the spread of NACS, the supercharger network matters more to the overall industry and so Tesla can get away without footing the costs of managing it?

Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.

In that case, they should have spun it out. I think Supercharger would be good if boring business by itself. That would also get rid of the conflict of having car company own biggest charging network.

> Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...

Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.

“ continued layoffs have even worse optics, given Tesla’s move to ask shareholders for a $55 billion payout for its CEO just days after firing 14,000 people. That $55 billion could pay for 40 years worth of six-figure salaries for those employees.”

Musk is detached from reality. He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success and Tesla, a car manufacturing company, needs to do the same. Also that cost cutting and performance reviews only apply to others, just like in Twitter and elsewhere free speech means his speech not critics.

I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.

>> I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.

I think SpaceX is one disaster away from suffering the same fate, to be honest. Like, if the next Starship doesn't make it as far as the previous attempt (for example, if it blows up on the way up), Elon is going to come in like a wrecking ball.

The pressure on the SpaceX team must be immense.

Once he rage fires Shotwell.. and given how insane that would be only validates its likelihood at this point

you seem naive. SpaceX has made it to MI complex status, and US gov will easily bail them out should worst come.

> SpaceX has made it to MI complex status, and US gov will easily bail them out should worst come.

immaterial: "the worst" here is elon destroying the engineering culture & with it their ability to keep improving on what they've done so far. not going bankrupt (by way of a bailout or otherwise) is a necessary condition for avoiding the worst (boeing syndrome), but it's not sufficient

fedgov can pour money into the military industrial complex, but it can't do a whole lot more, and that only goes so far

Boeing destroyed its engineering culture and it isn't going anywhere.

Suppose for the sake of argument I managed to secure some sort of annuity that pays just enough to subsist on, starting now.

Knowing that I'm guaranteed enough income to stay minimally solvent does not mean I have no reason to care about losing additional income streams that enable me to have things like vacations and dinners at nice restaurants and digital watches.

Similarly, the relative security of the ~1/3 of Boeing's revenue that comes from government contracts is probably small consolation to its shareholders. They do that business more-or-less at cost; essentially 100% of their profits come from other sources.

>They do that business more-or-less at cost;

Aren't all govt contracts cost plus?

Developmental contracts sure.

Buying COTS products; probably not.

Also, the "plus" part covers both overhead and profit. So, depending on what your overhead situation looks like, profit can still be minimal or non-positive.

Sure but the "plus" part is capped [1] for cost+plus.

If you're buying AWS compute through GSA I bet the rate is more than AWS's costs + 10/15%.

Or if you purchase say post-it notes from Staples; I bet they're going to be way more than the cost of paper+glue*1.15.

[1]: https://www.acquisition.gov/far/15.404-4#FAR_15_404_4__d941e...

In other words, Space X will exist as long as there are no competitors. That gives them years, not decades.

Are there any competitors expected to match SpaceX's launch costs or capacity in the next few years?

Blue Origin will catch up any time now...

SpaceX is in a much more solid position. You can tell that Musk hasn't interfered in its operations nearly as much as he has with Tesla or X (case in point: renaming it "X").

I gather that SpaceX, too, is cash flow negative and heavily invested in moonshot bets.

Meaning that, like for Elon's other companies, they might be in an incredibly vulnerable position, financially speaking. A disaster could sink the company. But simply failing to have some of these risky bets pay off could be just as damaging. For example, even if everything in the plan works on a technical level, if there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser.

Not entirely unlike how we're seeing signs that Tesla may not be a sustainable business, not necessarily because of anything fundamentally wrong with their core business, but because they made some over-aggressive assumptions about how many golden eggs their goose would lay.

> there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser

I'm wouldn't worry too much. Uncle Sam probably wants those capabilities anyway for the SDA to ramp up the NDSA now that the Russian nuclear threat is renewed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency

I think the SpaceX disaster is more likely to be a loss of crew event.

$10,000 bonus PER CAR that Tesla has sold in its LIFETIME.

Did everyone forget how growth valuations work?

Also that amount was from a contract made in 2018.

I don't think I've ever known how growth valuations work.

Sometimes I feel like the person watching the parade and wondering why nobody else is confused by the emperor's choice of attire.

Tesla now sells as many cars in a year as it did in its whole lifetime up to 2018.

So that’s why it was worth paying Elon that much. The current sales position is tremendous.

The current sales position is 1/6 of Volkswagen.

Tesla outsells Volkswagen 8 - 16x.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/06/tesla-still-1-in-world-...

Worldwide BEV sales 2023:

VW Group - 742k

Tesla - 1,808k

That's 2.5x, how did you get 8-16x?

And if you include hybrids and ICE cars, the VW group demolishes Tesla with over 9.24M vehicles sold...

From the US.

This is completely irrelevant to the original claim (it’s outrageous for elons bonus to be X percent of every previous car) or my point (nurturing exponential growth is worth burning a lot of early cash flow).

It's one thing to say Tesla has been successful. It's quite another thing to say that Tesla's success justifies a market capitalization that is not only the highest in the auto industry, but is greater than the combined market capitalization of the second through fifth automakers.

Despite being the 11th biggest by revenue.

It's true that high-end carmakers seem to get a lot of goodwill valuation simply for being high-end carmakers. But normally not that much.

I knew that he could have reduced the price of these cars... they should cost the same as their ICE car equivalent, or less.

That's not how it works. His $55b isn't in cash the company has and could have just charged less for the cars.

they just charge way too much though... it's a bit like Iphones... but both are not appealing to me, specially at a premium price

It appears that in general most legacy automakers are losing money on EVs and even plugin hybrids at this point. So I doubt there is that much profit in them currently even in the best of circumstances.

stock is a separate product than a car.

investors buy stocks.

customers buy cars.

silicon valley's product is stock.

He's personally very wealthy, seems to have some mental issues, and has admitted to having a ketamine habit (although he also claims it's good for share prices). That's a combination that would make pretty much anyone struggle with attachment to reality.

The takeaway for me is that as a fundraiser and hype man, before he ruined his reputation, he was pretty successful, but in all other ways he's a massive self-promoting hack.

He wasn't really talked about as a hype man before, was he? The world is full of them: Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick come to mind.

The hagification of Musk in the press was on another level, like Steve Jobs, DaVinci and Obama rolled together. That this carefully crafted illusion is falling apart due to his online ramblings and bizarre business decisions is something worthy of study. He and Kanye West share a very similar trajectory in this regard.

> ketamine habit

I don't think you've ever seen anyone with ketamine habit (keywords: UK k-hole).

Pretty stupid thing to say about someone who has medical prescription for ketamine to treat depression while they work 100hrs per week.

Maybe working 100 hours a week to the point that you need ketamine to cope isn't a very bright idea. Based on the Cybertruck and "X", it's easy to see that this wouldn't be his first less-than-stellar move on the old 3D chess board.

I was gonna say that doesn't math then I realized it's billions not millions.

That's over $30,000 for every single car Tesla sold in 2023.

It's not a cash payout. It's a stock grant that was worth a lot less when it was originally authorized.

It's a weird situation. It sounds like an unconscionable amount now only because of Musk's success in raising the stock value. Like he's being paid too much because he was too successful.

The size of the payout was linked to stock growth targets, so when the pay deal was agreed it would have been clear it would be worth a massive amount if the stock growth targets were hit.

Oh wow I ended up reading it at millions as well. Likely because 55 billion wasn’t within the real of belief.

Right - I can remember when basically the only number that hit was Microsoft’s market cap.

wow i didn't know that tesla only existed in 2023, and all past and future years dont exist

Bonuses are typically annual.

To be clear, the 55 billion is a request to re-authorize his compensation for 2018-2022 that Delaware courts invalidated.

The shareholders that will be voting to reauthorize are not the same shareholders that voted to authorize it originally.

I'm not a direct shareholder, but if the Deleware court gives me an option not to pay $55 Billion that I thought was committed, I'd strongly consider.

What are the implications of not approving? On the plus side, the company keeps the compensation. On the minus side, Musk will be upset; and there's a trust issue for future compensation. On the neutral side, those receiving future compensation will endeavour to follow an approval process that is likely to stand up in court.

I think the incentives are the same if the shareholders are the same or not. You covered the implications as I understand it.

Is it really a minus if Musk is upset? If he’s upset enough to leave, that seems like a potentially beneficial outcome.

There’s got to be some measurable number of people who are turned off from buying a Tesla because of his association, especially now that alternatives are available.

Tesla’s current valuation is pretty much thanks to him. His personality meme stocked the company to a valuation that made no sense.

If I’m a shareholder, I don’t want an overly inflated stock price. I want a high stock price due to solid fundamentals. Tesla was temporarily extremely overvalued, but has since lost 60% of its market cap. It’s likely still overvalued compared with peers. It’s a car company, not a b2b SaaS company.

Put another way, which company is more likely to exist in 10 years: Microsoft or Tesla?

Not sure why you are down-voted. If you are an investor, you want a fair price when you buy. Think of going to a store, when there is a sale and prices are below value of a product, it's smart to buy. Same goes with stocks.

If you are an investor, you want an unfairly low price when you buy, and an unfairly high price when you hold or sell.

Exactly

> Tesla’s current valuation is pretty much thanks to him.

And nobody has a larger interest in Tesla's valuation them Musk himself, the largest shareholder.

He can't walk and any threats to that effect are theatrics. Shareholders would be idiots to re-approve the $55bn.

This assumes he cant sell and leave. It would be costly to him, but not impossible. Both sides have leverage in a situation of mutual assured destruction. I dont think it is accurate to only consider the leverage in one direction.

It might be the case that shareholders wouldn't like him when he's angry?

> Musk is detached from reality.

Musk is arguing that paying him $55B to pump the stock price is better than paying those employees for 40 years.

If you're a shareholder that only cares about the stock price and not the underlying value of the company - that's a decent argument.

I wouldn't buy it. But maybe the shareholders will.

the fact that this argument is logical in the current economic systems says so much about the sad state of the way we structure our economy...

Meme stocks are as old as time.

It's a way to inject "office heroics" via fear, but it also has its limits. Once the burnout sets in, everyone is just part of the death march at that point, seeing the product or the company to its slow demise.

I think a sad part of the calculus is there are lots of bodies willing to be thrown in the grinder. The only danger is a real competitor with a different business model that lets them treat people better.

Case in point is AWS. I've been reading they are a PIP factory for the last couple of years. Doesn't seem like they have a major issue hiring (partly due to lack of a competitor who is doing better).

I wonder if there's a slight possibility that Musk stopped caring about Tesla's long term success when his payment was cancelled, and he is now willing to temporarily inflate the price and dump the stock.

I imagine he staked quite a bit of Tesla stock as collateral for the many billions in loans still owed for the Twitter purchase. If the stock value declines too much (down 35% this year), his creditors will want a higher interest rate to reflect the higher risk of default.

This is one of those things that Software Engineers don't believe until there is an extended Bear market: There is always a line of eager beavers outside your company's door just waiting to take your place if you leave. The last decade (especially the hot job market of 2020-2022) lulled everyone into a feeling of job security and even irreplaceability.

> He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success

Isn’t it? I use X every day and it seems to be fine now and getting better on a good cadence.

Do you pay for X?

Last I heard he's hemorrhaging paying customers (advertisers) who while publicly say it has to do with <insert popular issue>; privately say it has to do with worsening ROI (targeting).

Is that why fidelity repeatedly writes down the value of their portion of the needlessly name changed company that hemorrhaged advertisers due his personal quirky decisions and favored groups?

It sounds like you’re talking about a different topic.

I’m saying the platform seems to be good and getting better, not worse.

Is it? I used to find myself looking at Twitter due to the large number of places linking to it and orgs posting on it.

Like the local earthquake tracker on Twitter used to be great, it became unusable after musk mayhem as Twitter intentionally only showed many years old posts to those not signed in.

Nowadays that’s super rare. And I used to remember seeing links to a lot of articles published as like 13 tweets, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one of those. I think some used to be linked form HN.

Twitter is basically a zombie now. It’s way worse for the former user base at large.

It’s true that one groups probably think it’s better, those who were banned and are allowed back for example and those who liked the banned accounts.

Is it getting better? The bots have only gotten worse. They even have blue checkmarks[1] and the company does fuck all about it. And that's before we start talking about the massive hypocrisy present in Musk's implementation of "free speech".

1. https://i.postimg.cc/Bbq0yX4J/image.png

"Getting better" how? Be specific?

No downtime, my “For You” tab is interesting, media sharing seems to be good… if anybody other than Musk were at the helm, there’d be nothing here to complain about.

> I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.

We don't really need Tesla or Twitter/X. But we really do need SpaceX. He's already moved it to Texas to shield himself from lawsuits, so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.

> so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.

why?

> Musk is detached from reality.

Don’t think so, it’s just that he’s focused on another reality - losing the crown of the richest person in the world. And, he’s doing everything to keep that crown, everything else be dammed.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become Russ Hanneman

Side note: The "Tres Comas" Tequila is actually pretty good. Surprising that it's been 4 1/2 years since it debuted as a promo for the show and they're still making it today, years after the show ended.

He's #3 behind Jeff Bezos and the Bernard Arnault. That was before Tesla's very bad month.

The claim about pay is a complete lie. Musk doesn't demand money, he demands control.

The alleged money he asks for does not exist, it is just shares in Tesla, which are currently owned by the company. It's bizarre how misinformed these Journalists are, the real story is far more interesting then just Musk being greedy.

Theory floating around Tesla spaces right now is that they weren't executing well enough or fast enough, so Elon is going to start a new team from scratch. Given the remarkably slow rollout compared to most things Tesla does, wouldn't shock me at all. Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

Especially in Europe there are many locations that don't make a lot of progress. Some locations are in construction for over a year now, others just got announced and never started.

It's mostly a problem with getting permits and connections to the power grid, but still it's not a great performance. I don't know if they could do better.

This phenomenon is well known in tech. "The product doesn't work as well as expected. We can painstakingly investigate all the different issues one by one, root cause them, and put in the effort to fix them. Or we could just throw out the whole codebase and start again from scratch. That's sure to be more effective right?" Spoiler – it isn't. Musk just threw out a thousand+ years of combined experience in the area, and the new team is going to come in and repeat years' worth of the same mistakes in order to realize why things are the way they are.

People aren't code. Sometimes teams get a culture that you want to change and it's generally extremely difficult, if not impossible to change team cultures incrementally because a) they always hire people that have the same culture as them, b) they're used to the existing culture, and c) people hate being told they have to change.

So I think it may not be as crazy as you make out. On the other hand were they really underperforming? Isn't Tesla's charging network still world leading?

If there is a bad culture then work to fix it. If there are underperforming employees then root them out. Like you said, it's not like 500 totally incompetent people built out the largest and most powerful EV charging infrastructure on the planet in a matter of a decade.

Not all processes are reversible, and not all problems are fixable. When there are solutions, that doesn't mean the ROI is there.

That's my point. Sometimes the best way to fix bad culture is to start from scratch.

How much of that is the result of the individuals on the team themselves and how much is that the result of the organizational pressures, constraints, and expectations they're working under?

I suspect that just replacing the individual people would result in more or less the same unhealthy culture unless you also took steps to change the rest of the organizational context.

you mean how twitter was gonna break after so many fires but it didnt? yeah he probably knows a thing or two

P U S S Y I N B I O

But seriously, how can you not go to Twitter and see that it has become totally enshittified. The real lesson learned there is that large tech infrastructures are actually stable enough to survive a lot of BS without collapsing. Doesn't make the products pleasant to use, though.

The Twitter acquisition is like paying 500k for a house that’s worth 300k, turning around and gutting it so it’s only worth 175k, then claiming victory because “hey at least it didn’t burn down”.

I think it’s hard to see what has happened to Twitter as anything but utterly breaking the business.

I wouldn't call X-Elon-Twitter a success. It was more like not a complete failure.

The point is, there isn't literally a smoking crater where Twitter HQ used to be, therefore all criticism of the acquisition is invalid.

Throw out and rewrite can work. If you know that the old code base is beyond repair, you know how to rewrite it and are able to estimate it correctly.

What often happens is a rewrite that keeps the same mistakes as the original product (either organizational, specification wise or technical).

I have no idea about management, I just constantly see restructurings of departments going wrong.

The likelihood of doing that successfully goes up the more you know about the problems with the old thing and the more people who were involved with creating the old thing are still around.

Just firing everyone and starting over from scratch is never going to result in an improvement. Even if the problems were because the original team was just incompetent (which it rarely is), you aren't going to get a better team the next time because if you knew how to hire a competent team you wouldn't have hired an incompetent team the first time.

I disagree. Rewrites can often get rid of more debt than they generate. They are always scary for psychological reasons, nevertheless.

I'll add my two cents here. A lot of the work that goes into a codebase doesn't necessarily appear in the final product. Sometimes code is hastily written to get the system working, and then it has to be rewritten to be faster or more stable or what have you. A rewrite can just reimplement the final code. Sometimes the company changes direction (think of the stereotypical aimless startup that pivots every Tuesday) and the code solves a problem that the company is no longer interested in. A rewrite can just ignore that code. Some of this has to do with technical debt, but it's also due to the fact that it's easier to do something when you know exactly what you're trying to do.

It's like the difference between between reproducing a proof from a math textbook and actually proving a new theorem yourself. The latter takes a lot more time and effort, even though the amount of work in both cases looks the same from the outside.

Do you realize who you are talking about? This is a guy that has done this multiple times in the past and somehow always has an endless number of bodies to burn through to accomplish the task.

He did this with Starlink. One day he wasn't happy with how fast Starlink was progressing and so he went up to Seattle, fired the entire team and started over. That led to the Starlink we have now. I have spoken directly with employees there and they totally believe in the mission more than anything and they want to only work with other A players. Again, I am amazed that Musk manages to keep attracting top tier people to kill themselves over his vision but i'm not an A player so what do I know.

The sunk cost fallacy means that you should compare future costs to future costs, not that you should automatically discount all past efforts to a value of zero. You still have to consider the cost of reacquiring institutional knowledge and rebuilding the team and project from scratch. That particular "sunk cost" needs to be considered in the calculation.

"Tesla spaces" tend to be dominated by Tesla stockholders who care more about share price than cars and customers. They have a way of turning every bit of Tesla news into actually being a good thing for the stock because <reason>.

Supercharger rollout wasn't slow. They have been averaging more than one new station opened per day in the US alone. If a new gas station brand were opening 30+ new gas stations per month in the US I think we'd find that impressive.

I think in the future we're going to see a stock price that mirrors traditional auto manufacturers. It will take some time to get there and when it does it will destroy the retirements of those Tesla stockholders most active on Twitter. It's going to be interesting to say the least. Probably a lot of lag time built into the outrage because the Tesla folks are a patient bunch.

I never understood how any investors really thought this wouldn't be the case. They seemed to think that Tesla was going to devour all the traditional carmakers in a borg-like fashion. The evaluations have always been unsustainable.

Right? Even if they did somehow take over all traditional carmakers, the margins on those businesses suck. It’d just scale a shitty business (making cars).

It's a deceptively seductive industry. How hard could it be, especially with EVs? I think it's relatively easy to design a single car with some cool batteries and engines. It's another thing to build them in quantity, maintain quality, sell them, support them with spare parts so that repairs don't take forever.

> It will take some time to get there and when it does it will destroy the retirements of those Tesla stockholders most active on Twitter.

Well at least there’s that silver lining: a lot less noise in the EV space on YouTube.

There are about 200,000 gas stations in the US. At one per day, it would take >500 years to rebuild the network.

1 super charger station per day is pitiful, you don’t need to be Elon to realize that is nowhere near fast enough to transition to electric vehicles.

You don't need one Supercharger to replace each gas station.

About 2/3s of Americans live in single-family homes. Some of those won't be conducive to home charging, but most will be. If even 50% of households can charge at home, that eliminates the need for huge numbers of gas stations supplying cars for the normal daily commute.

We can also build these cheaper slow-chargers at offices, in parking garages, along urban street parking to cover many of those who can't set up their own home charging.

What you're left with is covering long-range travel along highways, as well as those who don't have the ability to charge at home or work. This is what Tesla has always been targeting with their charging network.

Most people who buy a Tesla do not go to a Supercharger once or twice a week. I use one about 4 times per year.

For the chargers that we do need, we also shouldn't be counting on one company to build all of them for us.

> Given the remarkably slow rollout compared to most things Tesla does

Oh, yes, that 1M strong self-driving taxi network promised to be delivered in 2019 is rolling out really well.

As is the Cybertruck, robots, and AI.

The supercharger network is arguably the most successful Tesla product.

> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

That, or he erratically makes decisions on a whim. Depends on how charitable your reading is.

What you said is compatible with what I said.

Fair enough!

Musk said the rollout will be slower but continue on Twitter.

Maybe he meant in the short term, but I would expect a different kind of bluster if what you said was true.

He has done similar thing in SpaceX and it worked: https://twitter.com/FoMaHun/status/1785333618157527081

Replacing a few executives is something quite different than laying the whole team off.

> Elon is going to start a new team from scratch

I wonder where they'll find people at this point that haven't heard the news that the entire organization can be fired on a whim?

What experienced capable person would want to go to that new team? Unless the pay is far far above market, it's not attractive.

https://www.businessinsider.com/employers-engineering-studen...

I mentioned experienced people, not students.

Once you have experience and maturity you also have more obligations (family) so taking a job where entire teams can be wiped out whenever a late-night twitter rage goes bad, becomes ever less interesting.

Well they have a history of repeating the entire history of mistakes that the rest of the auto industry has gone through over the last several decades. For example, GM went through the same attempts to automating everything in the factory that Tesla did in 2018/19....but in the 1970s/80s GM ended up ripping out all their robots and you would see a sea of them in the parking lot flying over the factories.

At the same time the thinking of experienced engineers has calcified in a way that prevents the attempt of risky behavior that could lead to long term success. For example, the mega castings were something proposed to automakers since the 90s but no one wanted to take the risk to try it because of politics. You risk shutting down your entire tool and die factory and dealing with the fall out of that and if it didn't work out you were hosed.

The result of plowing through the top engineering students every year is that they repeat these mistakes on speed run but they also seem to extract nuggets of gold that the "experienced" engineers don't see or have been beaten down into not seeing.

Since there seems to be an infinite amount of top students that still want to work at his companies I don't know if he will have trouble with personnel any time soon.

Yeah that's totally a good idea. Take the team that invented the product and made it so successful that other companies switched to the standard. Then fire all of that expertise and start from scratch. 5-D chess all the way.

> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

Did you see the news a few years ago when he bought a media company for $44 B and drove its profits into the ground?

What amazes me the most is that absolutely loyal cult following this guy has built. For decades Apple fans were mocked relentlessly for the adoration of Jobs. Now that cult has moved on over to Musk. Different people but same worship.

Steve Jobs also completely broke every convention and built one of the most amazing companies to ever exist. You can hate Jobs and Musk, but they both work(ed) outside the normal paradigms and forced massive progress to happen.

Tesla is in a bit of a bind in that the model y is difficult to improve (beyond the upcoming highland refresh). Fundamentally, it does its job so well that all it needs are minor tweaks.

Supercharging network is essentially complete from a fundamentals perspective, you can nearly go anywhere with a EV with a bit of planning. The market can fill in the gaps.

The roadster and semi situations are headscratchers, but I guess Tesla doesn’t want to hassle with a “sports car” with the same performance as its biggest sedan. I don’t think the Semi really works purely from an energy density perspective. Diesel-electric hybrids make far more sense for big rigs for current battery tech. The Tesla semi is sorta stuck.

The layoffs make sense in that light. They have implemented the step change in Ev Manufacturing, built the machine to build the machines, are very close with FSD, built the charging network… working to avoid innovators dilemma, perhaps?

Treating employees poorly is no good.

Advice for future Musk employees: Do a somewhat shitty job, otherwise you'll get fired as soon as you build a stable product.

same could be said for home builders and heart surgeons. Do a shitty job or you wont be needed anymore.

Home-building companies and hospitals do need home builders and heart surgeons. Are they all doing shitty jobs?

And Tesla still has employees, but fewer than before.

I was trying to highlight the idea that most workers dont have to rely on having a shitty work product to ensure their job security.

This itself is a reaction to the idea that a job offer is a life long commitment akin to marriage. In a healthy labor market, employers would want to retain talent because it is profitable to do so. I don't employers retaining unproductive employees is a desirable state.

> And Tesla still has employees, but fewer than before

They know they can hire more; Anytime they'd post an ad, there'd be millions of applicants. So, the input funnel is not their problem.

https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/much-more...

Indeed.

This means that they can employ more people when it is productive to do so, and let them go when they dont need or want them.

I think this is a good thing in general. I dont think we should structure our expectations or the labor market around the idea that companies should retain unprofitable workers.

Developing a bad reputation is like sunburn. It doesn't turn into cancer instantly, but it slowly accumulates damage over time. Right now a top worker (particularly in a critical field like AI) has a lot of choices, and the company that gets a reputation for randomly firing entire teams is going to be a harder sell.

Perhaps, but that is a strategy decision for the company, and potential employee.

Checkout Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Those who need a job urgently especially now a days wouldn't look into "reputation". They may not even leave later as long as their needs are met.

https://canadacollege.edu/dreamers/docs/Maslows-Hierarchy-of...

Pretty sure that a good techie (not even someone in AI) has most of their basic needs taken care of. Working for a psychopath who can't control his impulses does a killer number on the other levels of Maslow's needs...

>I was trying to highlight the idea that most workers dont have to rely on having a shitty work product to ensure their job security.

I think, then, that we're saying the same thing?

That, yes, most workers, like heart surgeons, or engineers at a good tech company, don't have to do a shitty job to ensure job security, whereas Musk's employees do, because that means Musk will retain them while firing many workers who do a good job. I don't think either Musk retaining unproductive employees or firing productive employees are desirable, but that seems to be what he's doing, hence the advice spawning this thread.

I guess I just dont understand where that assumption comes from. How is this or any tech layoff different? Builders and surgeons do suffer layoffs when they dont bring in more revenue than they cost.

There are tons of industries where jobs, projects, and labor demands are cyclic that dont resort to cynical employee sabotage.

I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.

In my opinion at least, jobs aren't guaranteed lifelong appointments. They are open ended contracts that either party can terminate any time. Termination from either side isn't a moral transgression in general, but I understand there can be some issues on the margin.

Im genuinely perplexed by others reactions and I think my post was an attempt to get at why so many people see it different

> I guess I just dont understand where that assumption comes from.

It comes from multiple people in this post, so it might be worth just asking them, if you want to find out. I'm sure the posters are willing to answer a good faith question.

>I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.

I have not seen this, but there are assumptions that the employees fired were somehow unprofitable. Perhaps at another company, this might be a safer assumption. In this case, it's more likely the action was irrational, impulsive, and drug- and/or ego-fueled. We'd need some evidence that they were fired because they were worth less than they cost, to make that assumption.

Employees are rarely a JIT component of a strong, healthy business. Good businesses have a little fat so that they can expand or react to changing market conditions. Make the teams too lean and then you're at constant risk of losing a key member and watching all that institutional knowledge walk out the door.

And that's if you treat employees well. Treat them like expendable cogs in the machine and your churn will be higher than industry average and you'll end up being less efficient.

Think of why the body has tons of leukocytes roaming around, just looking for viruses to whack. If your body had to wait for an infection before creating leukocytes, you'd die pretty quickly.

To be fair that’s good advice for most people in large corporations. I’ve even seen people deliberately spin up crises out of nothing to then heroically solve them and get an easy promo.

Semi has specific use cases where it's great, it's not necessarily economic for all use cases as of today though

Its target market, per Tesla, is not those use cases. I think electric yard tractors are already a thing.

The “electrify road shipping” would go a lot smoother if Tesla was honest about “electric performance + a diesel base load” but I guess Elon doesn’t want to concede the argument? Honestly surprised no one else has moved in this space?? Maybe it just doesn’t work?

I guess the way to keep your engineering job at Tesla is to perpetually work on something that isn't finished, like self driving.

♫ "Next year, oh next year, you'll love it, just next year, it's only some months a-wayyyyy." ♫

(To the tune of "Tomorrow" from Annie.)

This must be one of those 4D chess things I hear about...

Now that the charger standard is open, they don’t need to expand the network themselves.

The charger standard is CCS. It was always open.

What's happening in North America is that everyone will use CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. It's CCS type 3.

Older Teslas will need a retrofit to be able to talk CCS. Tesla chargers will still support Tesla's now dead protocol.

I think that's a weird way to look at it, but anyway, Tesla doesn't need to expand the network of Tesla-compatible chargers anymore.

It's the factual way to look at it.

This seems to be wrong, CCS type 3 looks completely different: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_3_connector

That type 3 was obsoleted and was never used as part of CCS.

Please stop your disinformation campaign here.

You are making things up and as part of that you are giving an industry standard name a new meaning.

There is no disinformation. The protocol is CCS. That's how it works.

How do you think it works?

You claimed „It's CCS type 3“, which it is not.

Instead the NACS is the proprietary Tesla plug but using the CCS protocol instead of a CAN-based one. Practically this means that all superchargers remain compatible and it also means that all cars with the CCS plug are not compatible (unless the plug is changed or an adapter is used). Therefore your statement is misleading in addition to being plain wrong about „Type 3“. Tesla has, of course, always also supported the CCS outside of the United States, both inside the superchargers and inside the cars.

So you admit it's the third plug used by CCS. You've made progress.

The Tesla plug is no longer proprietary. It's been standardized as SAE J3400.

CCS won.

No, it‘s not the third plug and it‘s certainly not „Type 3“.

> The Tesla plug is no longer proprietary. It's been standardized as SAE J3400.

Of course, that‘s the very meaning of opening up the plug.

Of course it's the third CCS plug. Europe uses type 2. North America will slowly give up on Type 1.

But they'll still be using CCS, as you yourself admit.

Tesla's protocol is dead.

The NACS is not part of CCS. The plug type is not part of CCS either. And what you called „Type 3“ is in fact a completely different plug that uses this name as standard.

And I‘ll leave the „discussion“ at that.

There was never a version of CCS using that plug.

NACS is CCS. It's how it works. It's the third CCS plug whether you like it or not. It's the practical reality.

It's a bizarre hill for you to choose to die on.

Perhaps this might help explain why you both are saying similar things in different ways and maybe just talking past each other:

CCS doesn't exist as a standards body in and of itself. It's a joint effort by the North American SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) and the European-based IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). The CCS standard is actually sets of interoperable standards defined by both the SAE and the IEC built to work in tandem. There is no actual "CCS standards document" there are only SAE standards and IEC standards, but if the joint CCS work does its job they interlock to form one worldwide mega-standard which we call CCS because it useful to name the combined Voltron form.

The NACS plug is in the final drafting process of becoming a recognized SAE standard. In that SAE standards (help) define the CCS standard, NACS is being standardized as a part of CCS, or at least the part that SAE controls/owns. Whether or not you can name it "CCS" depends on what you think the name CCS stands for. SAE and IEC always had different plug standards, so in that regard NACS isn't new to CCS and is a normal part of CCS because whatever SAE says is the North American standard plug is the CCS plug in North America. On the flipside with naming, is branding and NACS clearly has its own brand name and development history. It was developed for Tesla initially. It was opened under the brand name "NACS" to help sell it to the rest of manufacturing. "North American Charging Standard" was an intentional PR move. Because it wasn't intentionally developed for being called "CCS" and because it has a strong brand name of its own, does that mean you can't call it "CCS"? (A rose by any other name, right?)

When that standard is finalized it will be the third type of plug that has a practical rollout. Does that make it the real "Type 3" as opposed to the older prototype that didn't make it past standards processes? Do we want that to call it "CCS Type 3" in the long run to reduce confusion? If "CCS Type 1" is truly dead, but is also the standardized name for "Plug that North America uses and is SAE standardized" should we refer to it as "CCS Type 1 2.0" or something like that?

Names are one of the hardest problems to solve. But to recap the facts: NACS will be as close to a part of the CCS standard as it gets (because it will be an SAE standard), and is a new type of plug now directly related to the CCS standard. Whether you want to call NACS a part of CCS is a matter of perspective and branding as much as "standards" on the ground.

Just call it Type 4.

Scame plug is dead dead - how is NACS ccs type 3. The whole point is that it's is NOT ccs type 3 - which is actually largely dead everywhere anyways

It's the third plug that CCS uses. The whole point of NACS is that it is CCS.

It's going to be easy for everyone to support it because they support CCS already. Charger manufacturers like that. Charging networks like that. Car manufacturers like that.

All they're changing is the plug.

The plug is the thing that matters, not the protocol. It will enable non-Tesla vehicles to use the Tesla network.

No, it all matters. Supporting yet another protocol was not wanted by anyone.

The CCS support was already there so it won out.

But why not spin it off into a seperate company rather than just let an incredibly valuable team go.

Surely the superchargers can be made to be self sufficient with rates and advertising etc.

Control right? This way Tesla keeps ownership and control of the network and can license access out to competitors. If they spun it off, they would have to pay for access themselves.

Still, I can't see the 4D chess behind this move. It's far beyond my limited understanding.

If you want to settle for the Electrify America charging experience, sure. The plug on the end of the charger was never the main advantage that the supercharger network brought to the table.

For the uninitiated, what is the main advantage?

I'm going to a wild guess and that it is reliability.

I would guess a consistent and effective maintenance of equipment and decent payment system. I thought that the network was the only thing really going for Tesla, I hope everyone involved on this makes out well because I don't really care to trust some mom and pop to set the standards even though in general I really care about mom and pop.

I don't own an EV.

When I hear about Tesla and the Supercharger network what I hear about most is how easy it was to plan long trips. A road trip on gas is easy, there's a gas station in every town with a few thousand people, fast EV chargers aren't yet as common. So if your routing system understood its range, and where the charging stations where it was pretty seamless. Much better than the stuff from other EV makers.

Less often I'd hear about the chargers working more often. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/electric-cars-are-doome...

and there are a lot of them. Usually 8-16 per supercharger chargers at a single location vs the few electrify America stations I'v seen to on the east coast that have only two chargers at the station. So I'm less worried charging at a Supercharger that all the chargers will be taken. It also tells you on the screen how many chargers are available at each location before you get there.

Deep integration with the car is the most difficult piece of the Supercharger system to achieve for any other charging network. They have the best in-car and in-app charging experience, with the best routing to chargers and scheduling tools. Most networks still require you to use an app or RFID card to start a charge, Tesla you just plug in.

The other is probably just scale of the parent company in terms of being able to build out and service the network. They tend to have more prominent, nicer locations for their stations.

CCS2 supports "just plug in to charge" as an optional feature so depending on your manufacturer and CCS Type 1 charger it worked some of the time. All the charger networks and manufacturers are now migrating to NACS hardware over (the ugly) CCS Type 1 and NACS requires that CCS2 optional feature (NACS uses Tesla designed hardware but CCS protocols/software) so most charger networks including Electrify America and most manufacturers moving forward past the current transition to NACS should all support "just plug in to charge". "Soon."

Standardizing NACS was an interesting win for Tesla because their hardware design won out, but it was also a massive breach in their "moat" putting the other charging networks and other manufacturers on a much more equal footing with the charging story.

On the one hand it makes direct dumb "bottom line" business sense why Tesla would stop investing in its own network with such a massive breach in their "moat" about to spill out and maybe equalize the playing field. Perhaps especially if you think you've already earned enough recognition for your brand that you don't need to maintain it long term, just maintain the facade and PR spin of it. On the other hand, with such a huge first mover advantage and what everyone knows was a respectably huge "moat", you'd think there would be pivots to take advantage of to bulwark other parts of the same moat and still maintain some other advantage along the way to the old adage that "Teslas are the easiest to charge". Gutting the department may truly be a short term gain for shareholder quarterly results traded for a long term mistake and the risk of the loss of that first mover advantage they worked so hard to earn.

It's certainly fascinating to armchair quarterback what other options were in play here.

While I do think the Tesla / 'NACS' plug is a lot nicer/smaller/easier to use than CCS1, what really is the big win here? It's all based on CCS protocol anyway and hence will have the exact same interoperability issues than before.

The big win for interoperability is that NACS as proposed flipped some CCS protocol features from "optional" to "required". The EU mandated some of those optional features. In North America so far it has been a free for all how much of the software protocol manufacturers actually implement of CCS and many truly have done "the bare minimum". That was the bargain that NACS proposed for Supercharger compatibility in the US was that the SAE should have to also start mandating those features. If it gets standardized that way, and it seems like that will happen, a lot of the interoperability issues should start to go away. One of those features was "Plug and Charge".

I rented a Tesla and did a East Coast to West Coast journey in a week and the Tesla did all the work for me for charging planning. I had never driven a Tesla or any EV at that point and I figured it out in about 5 mins on how to drive and how to plan charging after playing with the computer. I didn't think about it at all, and a week later got the charging bill from the rental company and it was hilariously cheaper than gas.

That's the advantage

The Electrify America experience is pulling into the far corner of a Walmart parking lot, and often waiting for one of the working units, or struggling for 10 minutes to even start one.

The reliability is terrible and perhaps forcing VW to operate a charging network as a punishment does not lead to a good customer experience

Tesla and Rivian network charger locations are usually in better spots than a Walmart. The chargers work the first time, at full speed and availability is always correct in the vehicle display.

There's roughly a 25% chance the credit card reader / app will incorrectly reject payment (broken or not) on competitors' stations, and roughly a 10% chance the charger will be broken. There's a 1% chance it'll feed bad voltage to your car. There's also a 5% chance you'll have to make a phone call to arrange payment.

Of the dozens of issues that I've had across a few different cities, I think the problem was related to the connector once.

If they'd simply put standard vending machine credit card readers on them and not bothered with apps, they'd have cut their downtime by at least 75%.

I feel like this kind of attitude is where we go wrong as engineers. We spend so much time and energy bickering over and creating the perfect solution when sometimes you just need to ship and provide a solution.

I agree that sometimes things are either “a solution” or “not a solution”. EV chargers that do not charge more than half the time are still squarely in the “not a solution” category.

> Now that the charger standard is open […]

For anyone curious, this will be SAE J3400 when finalized:

* https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3400/

* https://driveelectric.gov/charging-connector

Previously the open standard was SAE J1772 / IEC 62196 Type 2:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_2_connector

The IEC 62196 Type 2 connector is the European connector and still standard in Europe. It is different from the CCS Type 1 connector that has been used in North America, also known as the SAE J1772 Type 1 "Combo" connector as it was also standardized originally in North America under SAE J1772. Wikipedia doesn't have a separate page for the "Combo" connector and mentions it in the SAE J1772 page instead. (The base Type 1 is the Level 1/Level 2 charger and the "Combo" Type 1 is the combined one with AC plugs.)

It's very useful to note that the North American SAE Type 1 "Combo" connector and the European IEC Type 2 connector have surprisingly different form factors with the SAE one being bulkier by quite a bit. That too was a factor in NACS getting fast tracked for standardization. (It's the least bulky of the three hardware designs.)

To be fair, regular chess is 4d and playing isn't the same as winning.

If chess were 4d then it wouldn't be playable on (2D) computer screens would it?

Why not?

I think your (plural) problem is that you're talking about chess as opposed to a chess board.

A chess board is 2D. But, you could technically say it's 4D (3 dimensions + time). You could also technically say it's 1D (a string) if you play by just writing the chess notation.

Just a thought experiment. I was implying that chess is a game, not a board. That game can be encoded/coded without any need for a Z variable, can't it? My Rook doesn't go up and down an ladder, it doesn't need a 3D array to record its position. So that's 2D + Time, or 3D. YRMV.

Reminder that a chessboard is a 3D object and the game of chess takes place over time, so 4D chess is just... chess. :P

You’re getting downvoted because chess is 2D, not 3D. The pieces only move on a flat plane. 3D chess exists and pieces move up and down as well.

The movements on a chess board can be mapped using purely x and y coordinates, so it's 2D.

You jest, but it is impossible to say this is a mistake without knowing the future. If anything, it's a good indicator that Tesla is forecasting very hard times for EV charging adoption. Killing the goose that lays eggs all day may be justified if the egg supply is exploding.

It's the rational consequences of Tesla failing to turn it's charger network into an network effect creating an monopoly for Tesla.

Essentially the ploy was for Tesla to use the charging network as a loss leader to make Tesla the only/most viable EV brand, and because both roads and electricity grids are well regulated utilities that failed so from here on the only source of money for Tesla is going to be the company revenue/profit, as it's phase as a buy an monopoly startup is over.

There are a crazy number of charging companies out there. They literally just install a charger at any parking spot anywhere and connect electricity. It’s the simplest thing in the world, there is no ploy to be a monopoly in the space. The issue is there is not enough EVs on the road. Think cell towers in the middle of no where, sure you wish they were there but they just are not useful or profitable to many people.

This. I think because NACS is becoming the standard is exactly why they don't want to invest in EV Charging. When Superchargers were Tesla-only, they were a way to promote and market Tesla cars. Now that every car will be able to use them, that's gone. Let someone else run EV charging networks.

Additionally, EV Charging is not going to be a high-margin, disruptive industry that is a darling of wall street. Can you imagine investors getting excited about investing in the largest operator of Gas Stations? I don't think so. It's going to end up being a tight, competitive business where people pick where to charge based on prices down to the penny. No one's going to end up as a billionaire running that business.

I have a decent amount of Tesla shares, that I purchased around 2017. All I want is a shareholder vote to get rid of Elon. His time has passed.

So, a very smart CEO works for six years to turn a minor automotive startup into the world’s most valuable car company, enriching you while you sat on shares in the company. And despite this, you think he deserves his compensation (in the form of shares in the company) to be cancelled? Even though it was contractually promised, and agreed by shareholders? Bear in mind that the package is only worth a large amount because Tesla has grown so hugely under Musk’s leadership.

I’m interested to know how many other HNers also hold this belief, or think this is a reasonable way to treat entrepreneurs in America?

Not OP but as a very minor shareholder..

I think it’s reasonable not to allow a single employee to be compensated (55b$) more than all the EBITDA the company has ever made.

I think it’s reasonable to question the decision making demonstrated by firing the most successful team at the company and put the major competitive advantage at risk.

I think it’s reasonable to question the constant monkeying with product and design (Cybertruck, removal of loved features like LIDAR or physical wiper blade controls).

I think it’s reasonable to question how the CEO has lost first mover advantage so badly by failing to improve products and introduce new models as the legacy competition and foreign companies quickly have caught up.

I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.

When the deal was agreed, it wasn't worth anything close to $55bn. It's only worth that now due to the incredible rise in value of the stock under Musk. A deal is a deal. As a £six-figure shareholder I am voting for Musk to be paid what he is owed (in the June 13th meeting). And voting for Tesla to incorporate in a state where judges don't make arbitrary decisions on executive pay

We don't know the full details of the Supercharger team's "firing" yet, so let's not speculate.

Reuters speculated when they reported about the cancellation of the affordable Model 2, and they got that reporting horribly wrong (damaging the stock price with their error).

As for Superchargers being a major competitive advantage, that's no longer the case, as the network is open to cars from other brands.

Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage. Name another American or European carmaker that sells as many EVs as Tesla. BYD briefly caught up in terms of raw sales figures, but that trend quickly reversed when China's economic woes weighed on the company.

As for "failing to improve products," the Model S has been improved in so many meaningful ways, it's practically a new car. The performance (0-60 in 1.99s) is absolutely mind-bending, and Tesla's innovations such as the carbon-wrapped motor are responsible for this.

> I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.

Which ones are failing? SpaceX is untouchable. Neuralink successfully implanted a brain/computer interface in a paraplegic man. X.com delivers features at a greater rate than Twitter 1.0, at lower operational cost, and -more importantly- it is defending free speech. xAI just secured $6bn in funding, with its value soaring to $18bn. All of which was acheived by a man who is "distracted."

And other companies that Musk co-founded (e.g. OpenAI, PayPal), seem to be ticking along nicely also.

> A deal is a deal.

Not if the deal had one party misrepresent the information they knew, such as in this case.

So let's see what you're really trying to say...

1. You want corporations, that already have huge protections, and relatively weak governance to re-domicile in states that offer even less regulations.

2. You assume that Tesla couldn't possibly make a bad decision regarding the Supercharger team and are casting reports of its demise as mere speculation when the leader of that team is terminated, and members of the team are reporting its demise.

3. You're stating that the Model 2 is still alive, and will be here any time soon!

4. That the Supercharger network isn't a competitive advantage.

5. Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage when the number of well-financed competitors has increased dramatically over the last 10 years.

6. That the Model S (which sells in minuscule amounts) is indicative of Tesla improving its product line up.

7. That X is succeeding when it's bleeding advertisers, and its value is continually being downgraded by banks.

8. And that OpenAI and PayPal owe their success to Musk who was minimally involved in OpenAI, and Musk hasn't been involved with PayPal for 23+ years.

Who's delusional here?

As Upton Sinclair famously said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

1. I want the people who built and own corporations to be able to decide what they pay their staff. If the Delaware judge wants to decide what Tesla employees get paid, she can do - but she needs to own enough of the company to have that decision-making power.

2. That's not what I said. I just said that we need to wait until all the facts and strategy emerges, rather than going on a few statements by individuals who are not (or no longer) involved in Tesla

3. Yes, as confirmed by Musk in the earnings call.

4. It used to be. It's not any more, because it's open to all carmakers, as I said

5. Well financed maybe. Fisker, Nikola, Rivian etc - they all got surprising amounts of financing. That doesn't mean they've displaced Tesla, or come anywhere near displacing Tesla. I'd advise you to read the news about Tesla competitors, both legacy and new - look how many BEVs they're shipping vs Tesla, and look at their margins on each vehicle sold. I think you might be surprised at how far Tesla leads the field

6. I gave the carbon-wrapped motor as an example of Tesla innovations. It's one of many. The refreshed Model 3 is also an example of how Tesla is improving products. You claimed Tesla is "failing" to improve products. There are many counterexamples that refute that statement

7. X bled advertisers yes. But it's still a great social network, and that's all I care about. Elon didn't buy Twitter in order to make money. He bought it because the West needs a platform that prioritises free speech (as far as legally possible). X.com is imperfect but it's an improvement on Twitter. I don't care if it's "downgraded by banks." The whole point of Elon owning Twitter is that it no longer serves the interests of a few powerful people and institutions, and instead is an inclusive platform for people across the political spectrum.

8. Musk co-founded OpenAI. If he was "minimally involved" he wouldn't be listed as a co-founder. PayPal used to be called "X.com" Guess who owned that domain name? It was renamed to "PayPal" when Elon was ousted from the management structure. I'd recommend reading up on the history here. It's very interesting - lots of twists and turns.

1. Corporations are not unitary organizations; shareholders have rights and Delaware does a good job of protecting them within reason.

2. Statements by THE PEOPLE ON THE TEAM WHO WERE JUST FIRED have a lot more weight than an internet commentator saying "let's wait for the details to arrive."

3. Sure. Musk says a lot of shit that is completely divorced from reality...

4. Competing carmakers have adopted the connector, but will they be able to really leverage the ease of use that Tesla owners have? Plug in and go?

5. I'm talking about companies like VW Group, GM, Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, BYD. Not little startups.

6. The carbon wrapped motor was first discussed in 2016, and is on the Model S, possibly the lowest selling Tesla. If Tesla is going to take 8 years for every "innovation", they're going to be DOA.

7. A great social network, filled with bots, and Nazis. Elon didn't buy Twitter for any free-speech ideals, he was forced to buy Twitter because he couldn't control his impulses and made a stupid purchase offer that he couldn't weasel his way out of. Everything else is spin. And "inclusive" is hardly what most neutral observers would use to describe Twitter.

8. Is Musk still involved with OpenAI? No. Did he do more than spend a few bucks, no. Martin Eberhard has more claim to founding Tesla than Musk does with OpenAI. And you do know that Musk was FIRED because of his stupid idea to rename PayPal and make it into a WeChat clone.

Looks like you're still delusional. That'll happen when you get financially and emotionally invested in a guy like Musk.

1. A majority of shareholders voted for the original pay deal. They deserve to have their vote respected

2. I don't judge company strategy based on statements by disgruntled ex-employees. It would be naive to do so.

3. Things Musk says in shareholder meetings are SEC audited. So if he says the Model 2 is coming, it will come.

4. The Tesla Supercharger network is great. But it's not a competitive advantage as it's open to other brands.

5. As I said, compare the number of BEVs sold and the margins, whether we're looking at startups or legacy auto. Come back to me when you've found one that comes close to Tesla in Q1 2024 sales and margins.

6. You're arguing in bad faith. As I said, the carbon-wrapped motor is just one example of innovation, and the Model 3 Highland is just one example of product improvement. Your point was that Tesla "failed" to improve their products. That point is easily disproven.

7. X.com is not filled with bots and Nazis in my experience. If it was, I wouldn't use it. What data do you base your argument on?

8. Eberhard hadn't sold a single production vehicle at Tesla. Elon Musk was co-founder, chairman, product architect and the main source of funding when Roadster (Tesla's first car) was designed and produced. He oversaw the design of the Roadster from the beginning. Musk won the Global Green 2006 product design award and the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Roadster. Not Eberhard. Musk. Production of the Roadster started in 2008, a year after Eberhard had been replaced at Tesla.

---

Let's not accuse each other of being "delusional" - let's learn from each other and contribute to a healthy conversation.

You're giving Musk a lot more credit for the share price than he deserves. If there hadn't been a pandemic, and stimulus checks, and people playing on Robinhood for fun, TSLA wouldn't have gone up nearly so much.

Put another way, sure, the stock price went above the targets he set for himself. How much did profits go up?

Why would you want TSLA to be valued like a normal car company?

It's going to be worth a lot less if Elon does to Tesla what he did to Twitter.

> if Elon does to Tesla what he did to Twitter.

Meme his way into taking the company private at a wildly inflated price per share? That's not a problem, that's a deus ex machina.

Musk is obviously the best thing that has happened to Tesla. Tesla the auto company is near worthless, Tesla the "making dreams real" company is worth money. Musk is the reason Tesla is the later and not the former.

> Tesla the "making dreams real" company is worth money.

That company no longer exists.

Next piece of news I'm expecting at this point is "Tesla stops Model Y production worldwide".

Musk: "We want our customers to be hard-core just like we are, so the Model Y will now be a home-assemble model."

If you don't get it built using every spare waking hour of your life, Elon calls you up and starts yelling at you.

I understand the competitive advantage has changed with the NACS deal, but the last major Tesla brand advantage I as a lay-observer saw was their clearly superior charging network and connector. People seemed to unanimously agree their connector was better, that opening it up was good, and that Tesla charges are more reliable and more available than competitors'. Why you'd immolate that brand equity is beyond me.

My guess is, it was too expensive. That was a huge team with a huge capex outlay and for what? They still had to slash prices to keep moving inventory.

They are not destroying superchargers. They are still there and even if they don't add a single new one for the next 5 years, it'll still be the largest and the best supercharging network in US. No need to be so melodramatic about it.

If you ask me it's a temporary cost cutting. When interest rates come down, car sales pick up and revenues pick up, they'll re-start the build out of the network.

I did not say they're destroying the chargers. You are nevertheless underselling the potential implications IMO. These chargers are finicky. People's primary complaint with Electrify America is how hit or miss they are in actually working. People have the same complaint about Tesla, but to a lesser degree. That combined with Tesla's wider presence have made people correctly laud the quality of the market. Expansion aside, these chargers will need to be maintained, and sacking the entire division doesn't leave me hopeful they will be.

Moreover, EVs are going to just keep growing in number. Every brand now has a pretty solid EV for sale. Keeping the same number of chargers isn't helping anyone.

It's their right, but my main point is that this just further convinces me Tesla isn't serious about keeping up with EVs. Pumping money into a useless truck, chasing a dozen other fanciful projects, abandoning their world class charger network. The future is -- every other manufacturer -- it would seem.

As EV sales grow the chargers not growing will lead to more and more dissatisfaction as people will be queuing for longer and longer to even start charging. In many places in California that's already the case today.

Opening the chargers up to other brands leads to an influx of more cars wanting to charge at locations that won't be growing anymore. Anyone can do the math to figure out what that'll do to the EV ecosystem.

The speculation that I heard was that Tesla saw a potential government enforcement of 1 type of connector. So they made the deals with other car makers and opened their connector so that their connector would be the open standard instead of something else. So yes they gave up their advantage, but there was a possibility that is was ending either way.

I don't know the rationale, but I do know that in spite of what tech sites and their bands of commenters would have you believe Musk makes mostly rational decisions, often to a fault. The fault in this case being that if he feels your role is not directly contributing to an optimal outcome for the company, your job will be in jeopardy.

My immediate thought was that he sees that Tesla's Supercharger advantage is not going to improve enough to justify the large team. And the experience for Tesla owners is still likely to improve over time, even if Tesla is not expanding at the same rate: even though gas cars still rule, EVs now have a significant foothold, and the rate of 3rd party charger installations will continue to accelerate.

He also said they will continue to expand existing locations and will continue with installs at a slower rate. So that means either he didn't fire everyone or he has replacements in mind.

That's just my guess though, and in addition to my guess likely being flawed, the hypothetical rationale could be flawed too.

What you said about government decisions could be important too, but it seems strange to make such a drastic decision based on potential government action, especially with an election coming up that could turn the tables.

Possibility is that Tesla won't get billions in US tax dollars to build out their network for free (and reap all profits), i.e. Elon's M.O. for all his companies. Hence the childish decision to throw the whole thing away then.

2018: My next car is a Tesla. 2024: There is no way I'd buy a Tesla. Cybertrucks are the 2024 version of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Me in 2016: Elon Musk is real life Tony Stark! :-D

2019: Buys a Model 3 Performance I love this car, though I wish Elon Musk would stop over-promising on FSD. I hope one day to get a Roadster 2.0!

2021: Elon is becoming a bit of a nut job, but his large presence in the news is good for Tesla sales.

2024: The absolute best thing Tesla could possibly do for the survival of the brand is to get rid of Elon Musk. His hard right-wing shift has destroyed left-wing environmentalist desires to get a Tesla, and if Tesla dies, the entire market takes it as a signal that EVs are not viable in the market. His claims on FSD "coming soon" are no longer forgivable and are just outright lies. No longer interested in the Roadster 2.0, hoping someone else can make an EV convertible that'll do 0-60 in under 2.2s and have a $200K or less price tag.

An old boss of mine tried to get me to come work for him at Tesla. This was early 2022.

I told him this Musk fellow doesn't inspire much confidence in me with his increasingly bizarre antics.

Seems like I dodged a bullet.

Must be bad layoff decision week. First googles python team now Tesla supercharger team

The real question is why people keep working for these obnoxious companies/leaders, I rather watch grass grow than work for Tesla and that egomaniac of Elon smuck

> And while the last layoffs were distasteful enough, continued layoffs have even worse optics, given Tesla’s move to ask shareholders for a $55 billion payout for its CEO just days after firing 14,000 people. That $55 billion could pay for 40 years worth of six-figure salaries for those employees.

Ok, I'm interested in the rebuttals from the "Elon knows better than you, as measured by his net worth" perspective. It might be really clever business, or it might be a spasm. Is this just an HR maneuver to weed out the less-than-fully-committed?

Somebody's gotta pay the twitter loan interest payments.

I don’t know if "fired" means something different in Britain, but the article says they were let go or laid off.

What does it mean in American?

Let go for cause. It has different severance and benefits status.

"Let go" is a horrible euphemism, like the employee wants to go, but is being prevented from doing so. I'm setting you free employee! Enjoy your no job and no money!

Reminds me of Bill Lumbergh in office space, "so if you could just go ahead and [thing Peter Gibbons really didn't want to do]".

Fired means the role will be backfilled, and the employee was let go for performance reasons or whatever else.

Laid off means the role won’t be backfilled. It could also mean the role was renamed, and they wanted to let the employee go but it looks better for everyone to say it was a layoff.

Let go (at least to me) could mean either.

I think Fired means it could be backfilled, but I've seen plenty of instances where the company decided to restructure or do things differently instead of hiring someone else.

Just because they were fired for cause doesn't mean the company wants to keep that job around afterwards.

That said, it is unusual not to say 'laid off' these days unless the person was fired for cause, but the recently media frenzy around the term might have them saying other things instead.

Isn't that what fired means?

Fired = You did something wrong and were let go because of that thing

Laid Off = You were let go for things outside your control (company downsizing, etc)

In the UK this would be done as redundancies with a consultation period and semi-strict laws to adhere to.

In the US it seems like you can let people go for at moments notice with little process - in the UK that looks like what we would call “being fired” generally for cause.

No, the "for cause" distinction matters in the US as well. The difference is that a layoff can happen without notice.

Parts of the USA has at-will employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment:

“In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.

[…]

The doctrine of at-will employment can be overridden by an express contract or civil service statutes (in the case of government employees). As many as 34% of all U.S. employees apparently enjoy the protection of some kind of "just cause" or objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category, including the 7.5% of unionized private-sector workers, the 0.8% of nonunion private-sector workers protected by union contracts, the 15% of nonunion private-sector workers with individual express contracts that override the at-will doctrine, and the 16% of the total workforce who enjoy civil service protections as public-sector employees.”

Yes that's what "fired" means. My understanding is that this means the same thing in the US as in Britain, although Britain has much stronger labour protection so a lot of these whimsical "I'll just fire whoever I want" things can't fly here.

In Britain, 'fired' usually implies a problem with individual performance whereas ,'made redundant' could be part of corporate restructuring. 'let go' is more ambiguous

In the US, they're complete synonyms. You say "laid off" if you're trying to be less direct about it. It's the same as saying someone "passed away" rather than "died"

No, the US usage is pretty similar to the UK senses: no one is “laid off” for stealing from the cash register or napping on the job. They get fired.

OTOH, you could say that a division was “fired” or “laid off” and they’re almost interchangeable. “Fired” might carry the connotation that the specific division was underperforming while “laid off” could mean that it was due to some outside factor (e.g., half of R&D was laid off because manufacturing costs shot up)

Nah, we say someone got fired regardless of whether it was for cause or not. It's the go-to word for any kind of employer-initiated employment termination when you don't have to be nice about it. It's just that when someone was fired for stealing from the register, you're not going to be nice about it.

Those R&D folks who got laid off are going to go home and complain about getting fired. It doesn't imply it's their fault - it implies that they're angry about it.

That’s not what fired means in the US. Being fired is for cause. If I got laid off I would never say I was fired, I would say I was laid off. If I said I was fired I’d have to explain what I did wrong, whereas if I was laid off nobody asks questions.

> Being fired is for cause.

Being laid off is also for cause, specifically the cause of "the executives need to juice the stock price".

In the US, “for cause” termination is specific terminology used to disqualify someone from getting unemployment benefits, which means the employer’s unemployment insurance premiums do not go up.

For example, if you terminate an employee for coming to work late over and over, then the employee was clearly not meeting their expectations and they get terminated due to their own actions, hence they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. Because the state does not have to pay unemployment benefits, the state does not increase the amount of unemployment insurance premiums the employer has to pay.

If you terminate someone to improve cash flow, then the employee is not considered to be terminated due to the employee’s actions, and hence they would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Hence the employer’s unemployment insurance premium probably will go up.

For the cause of the person who lost their job.

Most people wouldn't say "Greg was laid off for pissing in the water cooler"

Yes, sure, but it's also extremely common to just use "fired" colloquially for either case (in the US at least)

> Being fired is for cause.

More generally, fired is used for anything specific to the individual, whether for cause (they were incompetent) or other reasons (the boss didn't like them). Laid off is for a departure due to company reasons (lack of demand for their product).

Technically "for cause" means anything other than when the position is eliminated. So usually "laid off" means that the total headcount is being reduced, or that being reallocated to other tasks, so employees that are no longer needed are laid off.

If you fire a 500 person team and intend to replace them with new people who do the same thing, it's not really a lay-off, but for legal purposes they probably have to treat it as a lay-off in terms of severance / unemployment compensation because I doubt they can document an actual cause for most of them.

"let go" is a corporate euphemism for fired.

I find it so odd to describe firing someone as "whimsical"

I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.

So should you be able to terminate any contract for no reason and no notice whenever you want?

Or should you be able to go to court and sue for breach of contract?

You’re operating under an assumption that there is an employment contract with a long notice period in place. In many (most?) American jobs this is not the case.

In Britain the "casualisation" of labour is considered a big problem and unions fight it.

As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.

Honestly I think the difference is that there is a higher rate of self employment/small business ownership. The more legal burden placed on hiring and firing the more you fuck over small operations and give advantage to larger ones.

I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.

Most jobs in the USA are "at will" meaning there is no contract and either you or your employer can decided to terminate the arrangement at any time for any (legal) reason.

In practice the first is sometimes true, and the second always.

Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.

Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.

I don't think you can infer causality here. There are plenty of countries with easy firing (think sweatshops) and abysmal wealth levels. The US is wealthy for a bunch of reasons, including being a superpower and controlling the global reserve currency.

The US got to be a dollar-pringing superpower because of its commitment to economic growth.

If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.

The US got to be a superpower because of 2 world wars and massive purchasing of US armaments by the allies, effectively transferring British Empire wealth across the water, kickstarting large local manufacturing, and being a safe production hub after the wars.

Only militarily did the US become a superpower in WW2.

I was an economic powerhouse long before then.

The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!

As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.

According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!

[0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...

Easy hiring/firing of employees may not guarantee a robust economy, but we can see from the situation in Canada, for example, that harder-than-necessary hiring/firing can definitely inhibit an economy that would otherwise be much stronger if it didn't have to deal with such artificial obstruction.

The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.

Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.

I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.

I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.

Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.

Anecdotally, my wife and I are both small business owners here in Canada, and everything you say is spot-on.

I will almost certainly never hire in Canada. The next company I start will be in Delaware.

More tax and regulation is a moat for larger organizations who can afford to deal with it.

No I think you just should have the ability to have your contract with employees setup however you want it and the government can keep their mitts out

A business having to keep someone for some time that they don't like is the reality of labor and the cost of doing business.

If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.

Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.

I think it's fair to describe the way Elon fires people[1] as "whimsical". The reason the government has a role here is to prevent people getting fired for being black/white/male/female/etc.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...

(UK) The govt. does not force the employer to continue employing you - but they do guarantee you are given a fair amount of notice and some severance pay depending on tenure.

The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for

In casual speech it's common for people to use "fired" to cover both true firing and layoffs. It's not a great ambiguity, but when people talk about a whole team it's ~always a layoff.

Ah yea here in America you're employer and pretty much let you go for any reason and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Layoffs imply they're not your fault and firing does but it has no real meaning and the terms are used interchangeably.

I think that the BBC reporter probably thought that "fired" and "axed" are interchangeable, which they are not.

In the US being fired means you had a job yesterday but involuntarily don't have one today. Most employment is at will, so the employer doesn't need a reason to discontinue your employment. It could be performance or cost savings or some mix of both. It could also be no reason at all. The specifics don't really matter. They also don't need to provide any severance in most states, no matter the reason.

The "oh you weren't fired, you were laid off" line is manufactured by HR and is meaningless. If you come in to work one day and your boss decides they don't like the color of your shirt and shows you the door, were you fired or "laid off"?

The title works fine for me. Using the word "fired" conveys to me that Elon walked into a room and fired everyone. Not that it was part of a months-long planned corporate restructuring process.

zorg_fire_one_million_meme.gif

With all those people who have "range anxiety" and thus avoid buying EV's, this is going to do a good job of selling more Teslas...

I've been in the market searching for a car for sometime, and I was about to go with a Tesla, but this layoff pushed me away from the brand.

I don't care about Musk's politics (everyone has skeletons in their closet, so idgaf) but I don't have confidence as a customer anymore now that Tesla has truly become erratic recently.

The only reason I even seriously considered a Tesla is the supercharger network.

I don't want to have a Daewoo Motors 2.0 on my hands.

I think you probably need to look closer at the their numbers if you are really trying to claim that it is unstable car company. This comment sounds to me like you are looking for a reason to not get a Tesla because you don't like Musk.

It's a valid reason to not give money to someone you dislike. Tesla is not owed his money because they were first movers in the serious EV market, especially as time goes on and more and more options exist.

Sure, as I read the parent post, they were just saying you don't have to dress it up and pretend it is a different reason.

You read it right.

I don't disagree with your comment - not liking Elon is a great reason not to buy a Tesla.

I think it's a faux moi thing to say you don't want to support Tesla because you were disenfranchised with them because of them laying off the super charger team - that hardly seems like a major enough reason for someone to dislike a car company unless theres a personal connection to that team.

To me OP comment sounds like they are using that reason but they really don't like Musk. Just be honest about your position.

“Skeletons in the closet” implies an issue in the distant past.

> but this layoff pushed me away from the brand.

Why? They already have the largest network in the industry. And whatever the news says, they not gone fire everybody involved and stop making more superchargers.

> And whatever the news says, they not gone fire everybody involved and stop making more superchargers

The entire supercharger division was laid off [0], from the head of the BU (Rebecca Tinucci) to all the ICs.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/musk-d...

> according to two former employees and multiple postings on LinkedIn

I have serious question about what 'entire' means here. This is almost certainty a reorganization and not everybody is gone. Manufacturing and maintenance is certainty gone continue.

Musk then said:

> Musk subsequently said on X that the carmaker still plans to expand the Supercharger network, "just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations."

The reality is, Tesla Superchargers are still far more reliable then the competitors (at least in the US). And its unlikely that these firing will change that balance anytime soon.

That's too much risk for me to put on a $50-70k car - that's downpayment money for a condo.

So you are gone trust the companies that have invested virtually nothing in charging for 10 years instead, and trust them? Seems a bit strange.

I'm not saying you should buy a Tesla, but this reason doesn't really add up to me.

They literally just did this...

We have no actual data about exactly what happened and how they are actually reorganizing things.

There is literally 0% chance that literally everybody related to Superchargers was fired. There is 0% chance that the whole maintenance organization was fired.

The sources that are suggest here its comments from fired employees, and those kinds of comments can very much lead exacerbation.

This isn't the first time we got reports that 'every XY' was fired and it turned out to not actually be true in various ways.

> There is literally 0% chance that literally everybody related to Superchargers was fired. There is 0% chance that the whole maintenance organization was fired.

The only sources we have say they fired the entire division. Sure, we can wait for the dust to settle before conclusively saying what happened but "literally 0% chance" is objectively wrong.

They have 10000 of chargers in the wild. Do you think there is nobody at Tesla that knows anything about Supercharger because somebody that was just fired used the term 'entire division'? And what 'division' was it, what was its responsibility exactly?

Musk had developers PRINT OUT THEIR CODE to try and determine who was essential to Twitter...

Allow me to drop an alternative theory for this mass firing.

Tesla had a large layoff several weeks ago. Some execs pushed back, requested waivers or flat out refused to comply. Elon says: can't give me 20%? How about 100%.

This is all about sending a message to executive staff about who is in control. Not about the business unit, not about performance.

He's a white supremacist, but I guess nobody's perfect?

Ford bought a newspaper to complain about the Jews, and just wait until you hear about the VW guy...

Ford also wanted to lower consumer prices and raise salaries to help people have easier lives. But that was ruled illegal by our "justice" system, because his primary duty is apparently to shareholders[1]:

> The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries.

> ...Russell C. Ostrander argued that the profits to the stockholders should be the primary concern for the company directors. Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

So he wasn't a supporter of Nazis? I don't follow.

>I've been in the market searching for a car for sometime, and I was about to go with a Tesla, but this layoff pushed me away from the brand.

Depends on the reasons for it. If their performance is low why not lay them off?

A BU level layoff is not performance driven. I've done layoffs and this means an attempt at investor relations.

The supercharger network isn’t shutting down or even shrinking. We don’t really know the reason why this team was fired, but it’s obviously not because the charging network is losing priority. Maybe the team had internal politics or low performance or a myriad of other issues?

Rebecca Tinucci started showing up above Elon in listicle popularity contests. Investors loved her, the industry loved her, the media loved her. She wasn't yet a challenger for CEO, but she could have become one if investors soured enough on Elon.

One can't help but wonder (or personally, hope) if this move sour investors enough on Elon...

> it’s obviously not because the charging network is losing priority

Why is this obvious?

It seem obvious to me that the Twitter acquisition made Tesla as a whole lose priority to some extent.

The likely scenario is that the local electrical utilities supplying/servicing the chargers will take over the operation in the shadows until they develop their own brands and change the signage and payment terminals.

The Immediate effect is likely going to be that the prices are going to be readjusted to make sure the network makes money for the owners without Tesla funneling investment capital(they likely cant raise anymore) into the network.

Elon regularly fires teams that don't perform. He fired the management of Starlink in 2019 and the product was still a mass success. So much hatred and negativity for one of the most truly innovative companies of our time.

The Supercharger program is arguably Tesla's most valuable asset, though. Arguing that they're "under preforming" and therefore deserved a mass firing is unbelievably shortsighted. Without the Supercharger network (that was on its way to becoming a US monopoly), there isn't much differentiation between Tesla and other EVs beyond brand recognition and largely controversial design decisions.

It's still an asset, and it's still becoming a monopoly. Nothing has really changed except the team

He'll most likely re-hire the core engineers (maybe 1 per team) at higher salaries to maintain context. That's what he did at X

It seems they looked at the market, saw their 6% return on SC's and saw a lot of competition that would be drive down that low margin and be installing their NACS ports going forward anyway. If they can back away to to let 3rd party developers/funds build the low margin stuff, it could be a wise use of capital.

However, this is the ChargePoint model having 3rd parties buy/build/own/operate the stations and although Tesla's DC/AC charger builds are better, they will be confronted with the same issues ChargePoint has where station uptime is much lower due under 3rd party ownership because Tesla does not directly own and monitor the stations and it's up to the owner to maintain. The owners are more lax and the ports experience more downtime, disrepair. Literally the opposite of increasing SC uptime that was Elon's justification tweet on this team layoff. Maybe they can find a solution to the problem (only selling to large orgs/projects like they do with Megapack) but the likely outcome is the network will grow slower with outside capital but the quality/uptime is lower than before. And non Tesla SC stations/networks will be integrated into the Tesla dash like everyone other OEM does.

Masterful gambit sire.

> Musk said, in his typical bluster, that he wants Tesla to be “absolutely hard core” about headcount reduction, saying that executives whose subordinates “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test”

I'm not sure Musk passes that test.

He's not talking about executives, he's talking about "subordinates".

Lay off 20% of the work force to juice the financials and then dump the stock?

Anyone have any information about the actual individual asset valuations for a Tesla Supercharger station? I have to imagine that without tax benefits accruing to Tesla these investments don't pencil out on financials but are a necessary investment for people to feel comfortable about buying an EV.

So probably individual losses on their books that they no longer need to underwrite because the competition can start investing and operating them which expands the network for users.

Hmm, time for the over under. Which happens first: Musk is replaced as CEO, or he drives Tesla into the ground? And in the latter case, how long do we think it will take?

That's not how an over-under works

Fair. How about: "How long Musk continues to be CEO of Tesla, whether because he is replaced or because Tesla goes out of business."

Everyone on HN were predicting death of X.com under similar layoff news. But it is still ticking.

Seriously, whats different this time?

Keeping a website afloat is far less capital intensive than running a car maker. If you are building cars, you have to have a continuous massive amount of investment into development. For running a social media website you just need competent staff and cover hardware costs.

You can free-float X to a certain extent, just make sure neither users nor advertisers run away. If you are building cars and a model completely falls flat you are easily down billions of dollars.

I use twitter daily and the site is a shell of its former self. It's slow, prone to bugs, filled with bots, the amount of real users has cratered, user reports go nowhere, there's no support team, the ads are now bot accounts posting crap like "Today is a good day, be sure to make advantageous", there are no new features besides previously in-flight projects pre-Musk, they've actually removed a lot of features (like Circles, block lists, etc), and much more. He took an otherwise functioning social media service and forced it into maintenance mode. He also fired all of the people that keep the user base alive so now it's flooded with bots (which he presumably likes so he can boast about engagement being up). So yes it's still around but it's dying and the skeleton crew he has left can't do anything. In other words, he destroyed it.

It will be interesting to see this play out as a public company as opposed to a private one.

Elon wasting too much time on Twitter.

Prev I thought good leaders don't matter (and musk is still bat shit crazy) but plenty of times now I took care of stuff (a team, a product) and made it good.

But keeping it good needs still attention or someone taking over.

That Elon was/is hands on was.critical.

With him spending time on Twitter too, stupidest thing he ever did.

Seems troubling for the recent vendors Ford and Rivian that just signed on to be users of the Supercharger network if the thing now has high odds of (figuratively) rusting away without support.

I wonder if Tesla is in any breaches of contracts that they may have signed with these companies, and how much Ford/Rivian paid for acccess.

I doubt it's going to rust away, they just don't need a large team anymore.

Interesting read below! Seems plausible, not sure how true the story though.

https://x.com/fomahun/status/1785333618157527081?s=46&t=LAqP...

This is the stupidest theory ever. Supercharger expansion is not slow because of Tesla or any technical reason under their control, but because Supercharger stations require a) massive amounts of electricity and b) local government planning approvals, and the 2nd of those in particular only moves at the speed of government. There are sites in Australia that have been tied up for years by petty council politicking.

Tesla supercharger is fully compatible with BYD ev. Coincidence? I think not.

Tesla's chargers have charged all brands in Europe for a long time now.

Here's one charging a BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ

Another BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mox4tL3dR8o

Here's one charging a 400 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yflZN0dLT8s

Here's one not doing a good job charging an 800 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ2KtzMeh8

Tesla does need to do better on 800 volt charging. If Alpitronic, Kempower, ABB, EvBox, and friends can all do it then Tesla can do it too.

In Europe they are. All new chargers in Europe use the CCS2 standard, and teslas have a CCS2 socket. NACS is not suitable for Europe, because of three phase AC charging (which makes home charging much easier/faster than in the US).

I think all of the V3/V4 superchargers are open to all cars, otherwise Tesla wouldn't get government funding for expanding the charging network (at least in the EU, maybe UK changed that after brexit).

Interestingly it's still mostly teslas charging there, although superchargers are one of the cheapest options to charge.

Part of the reason seems to EU saying that Tesla must let it's competitors use it's networks. Probably didn't occur to them that this might disincentivise Tesla from investing in it.

How much of Tesla's downfall can be attributed to Elon's decision to build a clusterfuck clown truck?

For those in the thread confused about Fired vs. Laid Off in the US:

Being fired means your employer was unsatisfied with employing you, reasons can include insufficient performance, inappropriate conduct, breach of contract, and so on.

Being laid off means your employer no longer needs or wants your manhours, with no negativity otherwise implied. Reasons can include corporate restructurings and so on.

These definitions are manufactured by HR. Being fired means being fired. What reasons the company had for it are irrelevant. Most employment in the US is at will, so the company doesn't need to provide a reason for the firing. In fact they don't even need to have a reason.

Plus most layoffs are also taking performance into account. If every department is tasked with cutting headcount by 10%, they aren't going to pull the numbers out of a hat. The lowest performers will be the ones shown the door.

Superchargers are the only good thing that Tesla has going. What a shame.

Musk has clarified: "Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1785406795814510785

Why anyone gives credence to what Musk says is beyond me. The hype this guy has spewed the last decade is beyond credulous.

Cruel, but fair. But, it is a part of the story...

Musk's companies do great stuff but I wouldn't be caught dead working under him. An unwise decision in so many ways.

Elon Musk is woven into Tesla's brand. That strikes me as an opportunity that has become under leveraged.

I conjecture that technology-giant Musk firing political-opinionator Musk would be a winning brand management pivot for all his concerns, not just Tesla.

Investors might also appreciate the reduction in Musk's attention burn rate.

If he announced it like that, in all good humor, and followed through, I would expect significant share price bumps.

(I have belatedly become less of an advocate for Tesla, since Musk entered the arena for loud mouth battles over zero/negative-sum ideas. I also attribute part of my decision to pass on Cybertruck to that effect. Divisiveness does nothing for a high-visibility statement product for which "cool" and "I like Elon Musk" are inextricable selling points.)

Why would an AI company need employees to build cars and its charging network? /s

Perhaps we don't know the whole picture.

I doubt Tesla is going to abandon Superchargers anytime soon.

Who exactly is going to pickup the work?

Oh so you do know the full picture and organizational structure?

Electrify America!

(Sorry, I'll show myself out the door.)

Good question. The answer ain't 'nobody', is it? It's almost as though, perhaps, we don't know the whole picture.

WTF? This is utterly bananas. I don't get it.

The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be very high.

It could even threaten the company's survival.

But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven me -- and lots of people who are way smarter than me -- wrong, again and again, over the past two decades. He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight.

The jury is out.

> He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight.

Like Cybertruck?

Tesla Semi?

Full self driving in 2017?

Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it?

Dojo?

Hyperloop?

Solar roofs?

Battery Swap?

Dogecoin?

Tesla Roadster?

Twitter?

That snake was bad ass I heard Elon designed and built it himself in his garage

They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce

Definitely not true. Source: I worked at Tesla at the time of the Snake robot.

The above post looks like carefully constructed satire, mostly there to make fun of people who hero-worship Elon Musk into thinking that Elon Musk personally handled all tasks at Tesla like Tony Stark / Ironman.

Poe's law strikes again

People really believe that? He seems he would have troubles changing a tire, but maybe he's a great mechanic?

Tesla and SpaceX alone gives him enough credibilty for life as CEO

SpaceX, maybe.

He’s actively sinking Tesla and that’s his cash cow.

What decision did Elon make at Tesla was good for Tesla in the last 10 years?

I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today.

------

So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea.

Well, aside from Optimus I guess.

This is, frankly, a very silly way of thinking.

Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good.

Businesses change, people change, the world changes.

For the immense returns that he's been getting for over 40 years, that alone gives Bernie Madoff credibility for life in investing.

"The 8 years of the Bill Cosby show alone give Bill Cosby enough credibility for life as a wholesome family man."

Oh on the battery swap note I heard recently that may have been a ... scam?

Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.

Thank you for that. It made me chuckle!

Here are some counter-examples:

* A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.

* A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.

* A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined.

* A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt.

* A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts.

* The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M

* Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.

Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter).

But the track record is there.

It is an impressive track record. And something that does frustrate me is people who want to entirely dismiss his track record in order to bolster their current criticisms of him. I think that is motivated reasoning.

But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided.

What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.)

But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions.

So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.

Thank you. I find your comment insightful... but I don't think it gives him proper credit for a lot of "boring day-to-day decisions" he's made at Tesla and SpaceX, particularly in operations and manufacturing, over the past two decades. Tesla's early team gives him all credit for ramping up Fremont's Model 3 production in 2019 to ~2.5x what even his execs had said was physically possible. He proved all of them -- and a lot of smart short-sellers -- wrong.

Mostly happy to agree to disagree on this!

But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.

> but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day.

Hmm... That's a reasonable conclusion. You could be right.

I'll be a bit more humble and admit that there's a lot I don't know, so for me, the jury is out.

Things may implode at Tesla, or maybe the company will grow 10x. I wouldn't be surprised either way!

Respectfully, I think you're trying to do the humble thing by taking a neutral position, which I think is laudable, but your position in this thread has not actually been neutral. Your position has been (and my interpretation of this latest comment is that it still is) that this decision is more likely to actually be a good one, because it was made by Musk. But that's not a "humble" position any more than mine is. The humble position might be something like "beats me! what do I know?". I think your position is more like "deferential".

Sorry if this turned out to just be a semantic point about word choice. I originally thought that maybe it wasn't, that maybe there's something real here about what it means to have a humble view, but now I think maybe you just did mean something more like "deferential", in which case this was a pointless comment and I apologize :).

No. As I wrote in the top comment of this thread[a] and just repeated, the jury is out.

That phrase has a precise meaning:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20jury%20is%2...

[a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211380

You also wrote:

> But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because ...

I think we're both agreeing that "the jury is out", but disagreeing about which side of the question that jury is deciding should be the one with the "presumption of innocence" :)

Yeah, there's an even larger track record of making decisions that look unwise in the moment and everyone told him they were unwise and turns out they were unwise. That Bayesian prior makes it the most likely outcome until the jury returns with sufficiently convincing evidence to the contrary.

If you take his good and bad decisions and order them chronologically, do any patterns emerge?

You can just say: I don't know. I don't know why Tesla is pursuing layoffs, or this particular layoff strategy.

And because I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. That's all "benefit of the doubt" means. "I don't know one way or the other, but this guy has a pretty good track record, so until I know more I won't assume anything bad."

"Benefit of the doubt" is not a neutral "I don't know". The commenter I responded to is giving the claim "this is a good decision" the benefit of the doubt, and I'm giving the opposite claim the benefit of the doubt. Neither of us is saying we know for sure, or even with much confidence, which is the right claim, but our defaults, our "priors", are opposite.

> Like a new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.

Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel came up with that idea. Elon Musk's contribution was suing them so that he can be called a founder.

> Like a new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.

You're literally commenting on an article where the ENTIRE supercharging team was just fired, presumably to save money at Tesla.

> Like Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.

Dojo is a 7nm design while NVidia's is a 3nm design. It won't keep up at all, despite costing Tesla likely a $Billion+ to produce (between $100M mask costs, large software teams working for multiple years, etc. etc. it wouldn't surprise me to see Dojo's total cost be well in excess of a $Billion).

> You're literally commenting on an article where the ENTIRE supercharging team was just fired, presumably to save money at Tesla.

Oh I'm in shock about that. As I wrote above, "WTF?"

Whatever it is Musk is trying to do at Tesla, I don't get it.

But given his track record, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Are you saying he isn't allowed to have some failures on his very long list of ideas?

SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.

Except when you factor in timelines.. his successes are from before, not lately.

From a trend perspective, he's disrupting continuities that don't seem rational to disrupt and shouldn't prevent him from moonshot-ing separately.

Also, the "Alien Dreadnaught", a fully automated Model 3 production line with robots that move so fast you won't even be able to see them!

It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.

Don’t forget the boring company! Let’s invent the subway but worse

Lots of famous scams became insanely huge before collapsing under their facade. Enron, Theranos, etc.

You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands

Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....

Enron and theranos were actual scams though

Enron had a decent core business (market making) that was run by absolute psychopaths.

Theranos was a scam though.

I mean… sure… it was also propagating a massive, institutional scale accounting fraud that brought down a “Big Five” accounting firm. Comparing these two companies to Tesla is insincere.

FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.

I'm not sure I'd limit it to FSD. The CyberTruck has several very glaring flaws that would not have happened had someone at Tesla talked Elon into accepting just a bit of conventional wisdom from the automotive industry. Things like "provide a protective layer of paint over the sheetmetal of the vehicle's body to prevent rust."

The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems.

Fit and finish on some models remains subpar.

I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.

Disagree on that. Subpar quality, delays, rejecting conventional wisdom are not scams or fraud, though it is risky. He isn’t promising magic that doesn’t exist a la theranos, and he has even personally stated TSLA is overvalued (vs Enron…). except for FSD, which now exists with some imperfection.

I don’t own TSLA, I have owned a Y for 3 years and love it. I have a cybertruck on order knowing it may be my dumbest purchase of my life, but also maybe the best. I think Tesla is an amazing tech company that is needlessly brutal to its employees.

Enron developed quite a few actual energy projects in the real world. They were as much of a legit company as a car manufacturer, but the scam part of Enron eventually got so big that it blew everything up.

Many big scams involve substantial "real" components, and sometimes the scammers have a balancing-act where too much success in either portion can threaten the other.

See also: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies.

Theranos fell apart the second they signed a deal with Walgreens and it became obvious they were using machines made by other vendors to do blood tests, because their own thing didn't work.

Enron got away with as much as they did because of the far more generous accounting rules that were in play back then.

I’ve owned a Tesla for the last five years. It’s every bit as brilliant as Musk promised, and I can assure you Tesla is not a scam.

Past performance is not indicative of future returns.

I really wonder how true/untrue this is? For example, if you've founded and exited a company before I'm guessing you're more likely to do it again (this is gut feeling - I don't have data so happy for someone to disprove this with a study) but is that only because people think you're more likely to succeed and therefore give you more resources (capital, employees joining, customers paying etc.) improving your chances thus perpetuating this idea.

It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.

What are some recent examples of things that turned out to be crazy-brilliant that people have been proven wrong about?

Kind of buried the lead when they wrote that regulators are pushing Tesla to effectively nationalize their charger network and they just coincidentally cut the entire team.

> "But with regulators in both Europe and the US pushing the firm to open the Supercharger network to owners of other electric vehicles, it will offer less of an advantage in the future."

Mandatory interop is not nationalization. Words have specific meanings.

As far as I can tell there have been zero calls to nationalize the Supercharger network from anyone.

Nationalized in that the benefit is socialized and there is now little to no incentive for Tesla to improve their network as it doesn't advance their market position. I don't see how this is hard to understand.

> "But with regulators in both Europe and the US pushing the firm to open the Supercharger network to owners of other electric vehicles, it will offer less of an advantage in the future."

How hard can this be pushed? Tesla put in all the work, took all the risk, and now they can be forced to share it and give up one of their competitive advantages? Maybe in Europe, but it doesn't seem like a U.S. kind of move, where normally you put in the work and risk, you reap the rewards rather than being forced to hand over what you've earned to the competitors.

Your parent is either misinformed or misleading. At least in the US (not familiar with Europe) there haven’t even been mentions of nationalization.

Beyond that, the “pressure” for interoperability has entirely been tied to federal funding. The feds have money available to build electric charging stations, but the catch is that it has to work with cars from other manufacturers. If you don’t take the money, you can do whatever you want

Not really. This isn’t about government boogeymen, it’s that people have wised-up about paying 50 to 80 grand for a golf cart.

> ... regulators are pushing Tesla to effectively nationalize their charger network...

No.

Nationalize: To convert from private to governmental ownership and control.

“ "But with regulators in both Europe and the US pushing the firm to open the Supercharger network to owners of other electric vehicles, it will offer less of an advantage in the future." “

How exactly does making the Tesla charging infrastructure system open for other car manufacturers “nationalize” the network?

Network still owned and managed by private company. Private company has still manages day to day maintenance. Maybe private company gets a small kickback in return or tax deduction? But this is far from a nationalization of a privately owned infrastructure.

Looking of the popular VOD service, I see Tesla offers membership for non-Tesla owners and they can pay the membership fee or the market price at point of sale.

https://youtu.be/W-oaVLRH-js

Elon is very interesting guy, on one side he complains about birth rate, on the other side impacts people's mind to not have a kid, because they're not safe in their workplace and expects they must dedicate large part of their lives to his companies

Oh come on, i'm not a fan of elon musk but jeez

I am a fan, that's why saying he is interesting. Tell me it's not true?

Your comment elevates him to godlike status… you expect him to be managing humanity’s birthrate with his corporate decisions? He’s just running a company here, and by all indications, he’s struggling at it.

It would be a violation of his job responsibilities, and get him in trouble with shareholders if he was doing anything other than trying to make the company succeed.

Moreover, this is the basic challenge of running a business: if you are you afraid to make hard decisions, the company will collapse and every employee will be out of a job.

You really think it's fair to make Elon Musk responsible for the global birthrate and population?

He works a ton and also has about a dozen kids, so maybe it makes sense to him.

It's curious that you remain a fan despite being able to see his hypocrisy. I wonder why you haven't made the logical leap that it isn't worth being a fan of a hypocrite like this.

I mean, it's completely fair to downvote that comment, because it's not entirely productive. That said, it's an interesting point.

Musk makes no secret about how he feels people should be having more children, but at the same time he runs his companies in a way that makes it hard for people to prioritize their families. He intentionally pressures his teams to choose his business over the families that he insists people have.

Honestly, it seems like a cognitive dissonance of the entire right wing in the US these days; they expect people to work ever harder to produce more and more GDP while they lament that people are having fewer children. In the end, there are only so many hours in a week and at some point people burn out.

Hypocrisy sure is interesting

Almost like he's full of shit a lot of the time eh?

If you work for Elon chances are you aren't interested in sexual activity (too busy working 110+ hours per week, no libido or time) or you live in an area where childcare is difficult to accommodate.

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