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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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