Hacker News Reader

Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com