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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

Thinking of re-upping my put options on $TSLA. This launch is destined to be a fiasco. It's unbelievable to me that they doubled down on vision-only at the expense of lidar. Google/Waymo is going to eat their lunch on the self-driving side, and the Tesla brand is dying with consumers. This company is cooked.

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So - the cooked-ness of Tesla may depend on what you think Musk's goal was with Tesla.

If you believe he was out to change the world - maybe he'll let Tesla die. It's unlikely they are going to accomplish much else at this point, better, smarter more experienced competitors are sweeping the board.

If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can, he'll probably course correct at some point. Lidar it is clear will be the future of self-driving, and with all the adopters the economies of scale will kick in at some point.

Elon has positioned adopting lidar as a personal defeat - I am curious if his ego would allow that course correction.

Amongst his many faults, I don't think is one of them. One of his sayings is "if you don't have to revert 10% of your decisions, you're not being aggressive enough".

And you see him undoing decisions quite regularly. For example they tried removing all of the stalks on the steering wheel, but ended up putting one of them back.

What will prevent that course correction is the liability. They sold millions of car that were "FSD ready". If they need to add additional hardware to actually make them FSD ready they'll either have to retrofit it to millions of cars or pay out a giant civil lawsuit.

> If you need a geofenced area, you don't have real self-driving.

Elon Musk, 2019

I don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can. He's already made his money. Now he's gone full Howard Hughes. "I would like to die on Mars" is a direct quote.

I think he is on a power trip but the last 6 months have taught him that his opinions are not as valued as he thought.

Easily accomplished with a 1 way rocket (it doesn't even need a lander).

Actions like leveraging the relationship with Trump to get the government to buy a ton of StarLink and Cybertrucks? Him and his companies hold a few billion in crypto, and is possibly one of the major holders of the Trump shitcoin?

It appears to be self-dealing for profit to me, the Trump relationship being his path to his next hundred billion dollars in net worth. What does it look like to you?

When he was tight with Trump, it all seemed strategic, but how does it look now? Now that he torpedoed his most important brand and got into a public feud with Trump? People think Elon is playing 4 dimensional chess, but it's actually a 1 dimensional ketamine-fueled daymare.

> Actions like leveraging the relationship with Trump to get the government to buy a ton of StarLink and Cybertrucks

Source about the Cybertrucks?

Or are you just parroting debunked misinformation.

> I don't understand how you could look at Elon's actions and think he has any interest in making as much money as he can.

Oh totally. That's why when Tesla shareholders sued Tesla over Elon's massive compensation package, Elon said, "I reject the compensation package entirely. Pay me nothing! Actually, I'll pay you to let me work here!"

That whole storyline is about him forcing the board to prove their loyalty—it has nothing to do with the money. He wants fealty.

Mmhmm. And I suppose ending his feud with Trump had nothing to do with the $50+ drop in TSLA stock price. Probably some kind of principled, non-financial action, certainly.

Letting him keep his job demonstrates fealty.

You might want to make the sarcasm clearer. People might think Elon Musk actually said that.

If he doesn't have any interest in making as much money as he can, why did he put so much effort in defending his exorbitant compensation package in court?

Because he takes it as personal slight against himself. Hurts the ego to be seen as losing.

> If you believe he's out to make as much money as he can

Well, twitter shows that he'll burn money if it suits his ego. However, I think his bigger problem is his promise to all existing Tesla owners that FSD would use cameras. If Tesla switches their approach to lidar they'll probably be facing a class action suit from all those camera-only Tesla buyers.

If I owned a Tesla which I paid for the FSD package, I wouldn't care if it had to use LIDAR or not, as long as I didn't have to pay for any extra hardware.

I was a little annoyed at the VW cheating Diesel scandal, but they had the good sense to make the modifications free and pay you almost 7k in "We're Sorry" money, which helps make up for the loss of fuel efficiency.

It's clearly the latter goal, but he just needs to be able to extract money from Tesla rather than keep it going well indefinitely. He's still fighting to get his unprecedented >$50B payout (more money than the company has made selling cars in its entire history). After that he'll try to extract more 10s of billions, like he had started before the courts got in his way. Once he's sucked enough money out of the company he'll move onto other fresher pursuits.

The danger about shorting TSLA is that Elon may have a staff buying puts and calls to balance on the trading troughs. I was watching the trading volume during the big declines in the spring think the support was dropping out but it always came back. The biggest recovery was when he went to the Middle East with Trump. I think his dog and pony show had a big buy in at a critical time.

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