I wonder how much Musks behavior on Twitter over the last months impacted the Tesla brand.
A lot of people I know hesitate to take a seat on a plane, even for a week-long holiday. Having to read about Elon Jet and that Musk takes a whole plane to watch a football game certainly rubs them the wrong way.
Censoring users at will for his own ego or his own benefit also seems to go against what intellectual tech enthusiasts value.
A lot of his tweets seem cold-hearted, passive-aggressive towards minorities like immigrants and LGBT people.
For the people who followed it (not sure if it is many of the Tesla target demographic), it must have been a change from "Smart free speech absolutist who works on accelerating the advent of sustainable energy to save the world" to "Unethical, narcissistic despot with ill will towards minorities".
It's a shame since Tesla and SpaceX both seemed to have reached maturity beyond the start-up/celebrity CEO stage. Yes - they're both facing teething issues, supply chain problems, demand, etc - but it'd be easier to write off these drops if the CEO wasn't busy with some glorified SMS service.
- It was so incredibly overvalued before being mature, that once it actually started to deliver on some promises its price shot up even further from where it should be.
- It reached "maturity" too late. Other car makers have caught up. Consumers can buy a Ford F-150 Lightning, an Rivian R1T or a GMC Hummer EV today, but not a Cybertruck. Kia, Nissan, Mini, Porsche, Audi, etc have great EV offerings. Tesla isn't even the biggest seller of electric cars in the world anymore (it's BYD, 354k sales vs Tesla's 254k)[1]
He is so unlikable, foolish and actually rude to people that I wouldn't want to be driving around a car that's associated with him. It' a massive shame because I really think at some point he was a force for good and he really wanted to see progress in the world. Sadly and I mean this in the nicest way possible, he now just seems like a fraud.
I actually think Tesla already had a bit of stigma associated with it, kind of a "show offs" car...but now, it's just a liability.
I wonder why he couldn't just play the "brilliant engineer innovator titan of industry" part without the "teenage edgelord stick-it-to-the-libs Twitter troll" piece. Or was the latter always a prerequisite for his success, his ability to get eyeballs at all costs?
It feels like all of that toxicity was unnecessary and he could have been impactful and transformational without it, but maybe I'm wrong.
“ Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.”
Antisocial behavior in that definition, which is the core of it, is continual criminal activity. At this point I don't believe it is present. Calling people names doesn't fit.
Why rob banks for $10k when you can whip up fervor on social media for millions?
Criminal activity is there, basically, cuz people want to get what they want, norms, morals, and the well-being of others be damned. Musk doesn't have to rob banks to get what he wants, and probably never would have since his family owned gemstone mines in S Africa.
If you want to judge the man, see how he treated his ex's, his children, etc. That paints a far less flattering picture.
If a criminal did that kind of damage to other people we'd be happy to commit them to a long stay behind bars. The fact that it is all bought and paid for makes it legal, but that's a flaw in capitalism: legal and ethical are very much disjoint concepts and you can do a lot of damage in a purposeful way that you'd never get away with otherwise if you have money and an army of lawyers.
I think he was always a jerk and now it's just coming out.
I think what gave him some cover is that for a long time nobody else was able to do what his companies could do at the same scale, or even close to it. Maybe Blue Origin is not equal to SpaceX yet, but putting Captain Kirk into orbit was a good PR coup. And the legacy car companies are not as experienced as Tesla as making electric cars, but they have been manufacturing cars for a century. US automakers were hurt by Asian carmakers a few decades ago, but survived. It might take a few more years, but I think they will figure out how to survive this transition.
His companies were close to monopolies in their niches for a long time, so he kind of walked on water. Now other companies are catching up, and he is not as special.
Just speculation, but I think his separation from his last romantic partner isn't necessarily a coincidence. I think I can no more discern what happened between him and Grimes than I could between Kanye and Kim, or any other similar power couple where kids came out of the coupling; but with that said, the timeline of the the beginning and end of the relationship does seem to line up with when the shark was jumped per sé.
The close ones are usually treated the worst and are treated badly sooner then the rest. It might just be that - them bailing out as situation worsenes.
His overall arc feels very reminiscent of Notch (of Minecraft fame). Man attains unfathomable levels of wealth and fame and decides to use their bully pulpit to explain to the world how they're the victims, actually.
Yeah. I wonder if there's something to attaining that level of success that leads people to isolation, extreme opinions, and falling out of touch with reality.
I was chatting with my neighbor, who owns a Tesla + Tesla Powerwall, about the Twitter situation and he was not shy to say how he was quite upset by the direction that Twitter is going and how he had just deleted his account and moved to Mastodon (and he is somebody who has a few thousand followers).
I doubt he is going to rip the Powerwall off his house or sell the Tesla, but I'm quite sure based on the conversation that if he didn't own either of these Tesla products right now he would seriously consider other options if he were buying today.
This is just one example obviously, but there is no doubt that Elon is upsetting some key demographics who want to purchase Tesla products, and while I have no idea if it will have a major negative impact on the bottom line, it certainly can't be good.
I've had four Teslas and Tesla solar on a previous house. I don't plan to purchase any further Tesla products with Elon at the helm and have moved to BMW's electric line which has far superior build quality.
It’s fundamentally just a car company and was wildly overvalued as a car company in large part due to the Musk cult of personality. He popped his own bubble by making everyone hate him with the twitter acquisition. Now Tesla is being revalued as a car company.
I mentioned a few times at peak it was valued as much as the entire auto industry combined plus a utility company plus a battery company plus a software company or two plus a solar company - and then some - all while manufacturing about 10% as many cars as Toyota and showing no success in anything other than cars.
It was always a question of when, and he forgot that JPow giveth and JPow taketh away.
Like Trump he could have just sailed off into the distance a rich and largely beloved man but he flew just a little too close to the sun.
I’ve joked before that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person (“I bet rich people have solid gold toilets”) in the same way Elon is a 'left-curve' idea of a genius (“I bet geniuses just spend all day inventing crazy ideas and going to Mars and digging holes and stuff”). They’re both, in real life, caricatures of what they’re projecting to be. More showmen than anything. That’s not a criticism; they’re both excellent showmen. More Barnum than Rockefeller or Nikola.
I think a large part of the valuation was also the promise of full self driving. Musk repeatedly stated that it would coming "very soon" and Tesla would have been the first worldwide with that.
Now we know that Tesla will probably not be the first with level 5 autonomy and that their no-lidar approach may not even be sufficient at all.
But the belief in their FSD was priced into Tesla's valuation as well and by now it's clear that this part was overvalued.
The man did promise FSD was one year away for each of the last 9 years. At some point it becomes a 'fool me 9 times shame on... fool me can't get fooled again' kinda deal. [1] It's just too bad the video montage got struck down. It takes a genuine showman to string people along for an entire decade.
[edit1] All while getting them to pay up to $12,000 for software that didn't exist and had no path to existing within the promised timeframe.
Textbooks will be written about this bezzle.
[edit2] > Bezzle: Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country’s business and banks. [2]
Not suggesting a crime occurred here, to be clear - just the broad shape of what transpired re: FSD rhymes real good.
I mean, I’m a Mercedes fanboy, and I don’t. I don’t need to. I don’t care who’s running the show — the cars deliver on the brands reputation and that’s all I care about.
That's the whole point. You shouldn't have to know. They're not out there calling harmless divers pedos, or retweeting far right material. They might have very conservative viewpoints - who knows - but they're not trumpeting them around and trying to influence other people in their political decisionmaking.
They’re probably significantly influencing other people, politicians with massive, unmatchable donations and behind the doors conversations. You just don’t know
Could it be that some parts of the mainstream media sees Musk as a partial replacement for Trump, a great source of over-done outrage stories, clicks and ads?
Pretty much. He’s been that kind of “magnate does strange things” since long, but since he publicly joined the political conversation, he hasn’t done anything to undo that framing.
Look, some of his points have some standing but the points have to be more nuanced. I’m also annoyed by PoCo and the power-grab by US identity-identitarian Calvinists, painting anyone that does not defer to their moral authority as fascist monsters. I’m also irritated by the “present your pronouns” because you’re “either an ally or part of the problem.”
But indeed, for every time you snap back, there’s a real trans person who’s suffering an identity crisis, victimized and exploited by all sides of the polarized flame-fest that’s smashing any chance for a reasonable debate.
I don’t know if Musk is a true reactionary bumpkin of just burnt out, and out of touch. He should really get a public relations specialist to fix his public persona and teach him how to stay out of rhetorical minefields.
Is your hypothesis that there are lots of other CEOs out there spreading crackpot conspiracy theories that are doing so unnoticed by the general public because "mainstream media" has unfairly singled out Elon Musk?
> Could it be that some parts of the mainstream media sees Musk as a partial replacement for Trump, a great source of over-done outrage stories, clicks and ads?
I think a bigger factor is that some parts of social media sees Musk as a partial replacement for Trump.
And, particularly, that the part of social media to which Trump was most valuable for several years (before he was finally booted), and which has failed to draw Trump back recently despite very visible efforts, and which Musk now owns, sees him that way.
Perhaps, but that approach didn’t work out well for Apple when Steve Jobs was ousted for John Sculley. It did work out for Steve Jobs though with the diversion only making him stronger.
I do (and it's not VW or Mercedes but Volkswagen Group AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG), but only because I follow the industry closely, I don't think their CEOs are household names until something goes wrong. Such as 'Winterkorn'. That's a name that probably rings a bell with many on account of the diesel scandal.
For a lot of reasons I like Toyota and I’m super happy I don’t really know the CEOs name. If they do something silly I won’t have to feel like I can’t continue driving Toyota
> literally upending all the bullshit from progressives on Twitter
Until those cheering him on start buying Teslas, this looks like a stupid move. Elon was bipartisan. Hell, he was so Teflon he could navigate between America and China. He threw that all away for what?
I’ve read this post several times and to be completely honest with you absolutely none of it makes a lick of sense. The words are in correct grammatical order and there’s a coherent central thesis, but it seemingly lacks any actual connection to reality.
If you told me it was written by ChatGPT I would 100% believe you.
You have to be steeped in American culture wars to decode stuff.
Many people supporting Musk at present do so because they believe him to be a champion of free speech. At the same time, they view the left as totalitarian as trying to control speech.
Twitter is viewed as a bastion of left-leaning supporters of Democrats who stole the last election from Trump by banning conservative speech from the platform. They believe Democrats are now in the process of implementing a totalitarian state in which Joe Biden, who is corrupt and the head of a crime family, is the dictator. They also believed that Joe Biden is using the FBI, which is aligned with leftists (?!) to silence critics and persecute his enemies.
In this framing, by unbanning nazis, qanon, insurrectionists, and anti-trans accounts, Elon is restoring balance to Twitter and saving free speech for the world.
It’s basically an exercise in projection to try to whitewash the Trump years through incessant whataboutism.
Progressives went nuts so he started tweeting conspiracy theories? Madness doesn’t excuse madness, even if it begets it.
In any case, this isn’t an Elon thread. It’s about Tesla. If Elon feels like styling himself as a statesman, that has obvious consequences for his businesses.
> Questioning anything is "conspiracy theory" apparently
Nothing Elon has been criticised for recently has been close to the realm of science. The science and engineering debates are one thing. The baseless nonsense tweeted to get a rise and engagement are causing the issues.
Personally, I think the whole thing is childish on all sides. But brands have been lost for less, and there appears to be a real effect on Tesla’s perception, in America but also the world, that threatens both revenues and the international stack of subsidies its margins and growth depend on.
When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in his home and nearly killed, your guy tweeted out a conspiracy theory that it was a tiff between two gay lovers.
Could you show me the Science (TM) that backed this conspiracy theory? You might struggle, considering it was debunked before and after your guy tweeted it.
You’re the perfect example of the Elon fanboy who looks at him slamming his dick in a car door and says “oh wow, masterful gambit sir”.
Yea I thought that was pretty stupid. He deleted it though. He also apologized by calling Paul for banning his account. On one of the spaces sessions, he called himself stupid for banning him.
That said, I don’t think everything he says needs to be defended. He has truly said some despicable things.
I'm really curious about this viewpoint. Can you point to a couple specific items in the Twitter Files that you find to be terrifying? I've taken a look -- definitely not a thorough reading -- of the Files and nothing particularly struck me. The Biden laptop stuff is the bit I'm somewhat leery of, but it looks arguable given the context from 2016.
And if the Twitter Files really do reveal terrifying information, how does Musk come off as likeable? The two viewpoints seem mutually exclusive: Musk is the same guy who began banning users for both petty personal and politically partisan reasons (ElonJet, people who criticized him like Paul Graham, journalists that he views as liberal mouthpieces). Is it good and positive because... he does it in the open?
The “MSM” aren’t talking about because it’s a big bag of nothing. Big social media company has contacts with governments and law enforcement agencies. Wooptiedoo.
The Twitter files seem like a whole lot of "ooh look at this things over here that sounds very nefarious and shady!" but when you look at the actual details it all seems completely reasonable and taken out of context (for example the outrage at the "paid by the FBI" thing when it was a completely normal thing to be reimbursed for law enforcement actions)
Their products have abysmal initial quality, durability, and reliability.
Their parts/service/bodywork repair/support network sucks. The cars are ludicrously expensive to repair because Musk is using insurance company payouts to subsidize his company.
They've lost almost every advantage they had. Their cars aren't the fastest in acceleration, don't have the most range, don't have the best efficiency, aren't the fastest charging, etc.
GM, Ford, and Volkswagen are gunning for Tesla and Tesla doesn't stand a chance.
Many people don't like what the owners of Chick-fil-A are up to but apparently they do really good chicken at fair price so people keep buying it anyway.
I would guess that Tesla is losing the premium they can put to their prices and that is pushing Tesla value to a transactional value. No more apologists for the build quality or features that are pay now get it next year(every year, next year), if Tesla makes good cars and sell them at good price people will buy and if they don't people won't. If can't do autonomous driving, can no longer sell autonomous driving. No more paying extra to save the planet.
On the one hand, I don't doubt there's people who boycott Chick-fil-A, but in industries that sell large volumes of relatively inconsequential purchases I would assume the effect of bad PR is less.
If I'm hungry and I'm at the airport I'll grab something that's quick and convenient. My choice might not be the best, but whatever, I'm in a hurry and I'll forget what I ate by my next meal. A car on the other hand is a purchase I'll mull over for months— I'll consider everything, because it'll involve a lot of cash and I'll live with that decision for years.
On the other hand, I think you're right, and I doubt this is all just a consequence of Twitter saga. There's a lot of other forces at play here; there's more competition, Tesla keeps pushing some promised launches back, the whole stock market in general doing poorly, etc.
Weirdly, I think you could also argue the flip side of this:
- restaurant: inconsequential which I pick, won't remember the quality of the meal, likely have a few similar options, very low stakes -- why support the chain that's owned by jerks?
- vs major life purchase, weigh all the pros and cons, mileage and economy and environmental impact and identity all come into play: how much long term, big picture economy would I trade to maximize my self identity?
They were almost the only viable electric car for a lot of use cases for a decade. Only very recently have alternatives with 300mi range that you can actually buy emerged.
You eat the meal once. When you walk down the street the next day, nobody knows that you ate at chick-fil-a the day before. Everytime you are in a Tesla, you are in a Tesla, the entire time you have the Tesla.
Most people can eat a chicken sandwich without anyone they know ever knowing it. I've eaten many meals completely unobserved by people I know. Also, it's easy enough to dispose of a half-eaten sandwich if you spot someone you know and truly care about such things.[0]
Most people I know are aware of what kind of cars I drive[1].
Even if there's equal stigma attached to both, it's easier to quickly move past spending $5 on chicken than $50k+ on a car that's going to be with you for years.
At some point Teslas product became its stock and Musk it’s tout. What lost its shine is TSLA. This is my first go around but I’m led to believe this is what the tail end of a credit cycle looks like.
What hurts Tesla isn’t a few terminally online folks refusing to buy some expensive electric cars but the perception they will in a very difficult market.
Tesla made cool cars before Elon joined (it was founded by Eberhard and Tarpenning - Elon was an early investor who started calling himself a founder one day and got sued by the actual founders, they settled allowing him to continue) and it’ll continue to make neat electric cars moving forward. But they will lose their first mover margins as more players join and that’s gonna hurt.
It’ll continue to be a player in automotive but it’ll now be priced like it. Until it can demonstrate traction in literally anything other than making cars.
I don’t think the customer base was actually meaningfully shrunk by his shenanigans on twitter but I think the perception that it was matters more. I could be wrong.
You mean, there's anything morally wrong about one of the world's richest people flying a private jet? There are tens of thousands of them in the world.
No one wins from blatantly contradicting reality. They are a thing and everyone with some cash uses one. Many of them are people as lowly as successful engineers or owners of <100 people outsourcing shops. And here we are speaking of one of the world's richest people.
No, my argument is that if people much poorer than Musk are using them routinely and no one makes a fuss about it, then it's really surprising anyone is concerned with Musk doing that.
How does saying private jets are unethical contradict reality? I don't follow you at all... does reality only reflect things which are ethical? Surely that's not the case. What on earth could you mean?
For me it’s about firing half the Twitter staff in a ridiculous way (print out your code!) and generally him behaving like a crazy entitled asshole. I would be fine owning a fun vehicle that a few people didn’t like because it was wasteful or a weird statement in one way or another but at this point everyone has an opinion about elon and it’s not like very many of them are positive. I don’t want to get mixed up in being asked to defend the antics of a deranged billionaire because of the car I own.
I’m in the market for a car and Tesla definitely lost some ground in the running because of the perceived hassle of having to defend my decision to buy supporting his behavior.
But to be honest, I can’t drive any Tesla to visit my parents without stopping to charge, especially in the winter so it’ll be a few years until I actually consider an electric car.
My mother has been in the market for a new car for the last few months. I was keen on a Tesla until the shitposter in chief took the reins. We bought an Audi last week instead.
Comparing corporations from 80 years ago under a regime that was toppled to a shitty CEO from today is utterly meaningless. The point of conscientious spending is to affect change. Not buying an Audi today does not send a message to Nazi Germany because it no longer exists (and it wasn't even Audi, it was their predecessor). Not buying a Tesla today sends a message to Tesla, because it exists. Make sense?
Really not. Only full on anti-capitalist care about origins of companies deep into last century. And even they are doing it for larger capitalism bad reasons.
Plus there is nothing wrong with virtue signaling, really. It beats vice signaling by miles and it beats passivity too.
Why is virtue signalling bad? It's demonstrating that you care about something related to human dignity. Do you really think that is so awful that you laugh at it? What would have been better virtue signalling?
Do you realize that sometimes people make choices because they have moral or ethical concerns? It is not always about sending any sort of signal to others. It is very rarely about sending any sort of signal to others.
In fact, the phrase "virtue signaling" was initially primarily used by people who seemed to lack moral or ethical concerns of their own and couldn't fathom that other people were guided by such. It's not a great term to throw around when it doesn't clearly apply.
When is the official cutoff, for a company founded by the Nazi party to be used as the positive side of a virtue-signaling comparison? Obviously less than 80 years?
Is Audi or VW presently being run by Nazis or actively supporting Nazi Germany's war effort? Is anyone who was one of those Nazis still alive, let alone in any way actively associated with the company?
Do you even know what point you're trying to make?
This makes no sense. VW is a public company, employing regular people, making good cars in Germany and elsewhere. No one brings up the past for Japanese, so not sure what the logic for punishing VW is?
Who is punishing VW? I drive one (my 3rd) & it's a great car. I'm not using it to signal my virtue though, and I am suggesting it's a poor choice for that purpose.
There is a certain kind of person who does not believe that anyone actually has morals, and so interprets any form of having a moral compass as "virtue signaling".
"moral compass" is something leftists invented to try to constrain the freedom of value creators. morals are an imaginary thing - ever read Atlas Shrugged? We all need to wake up - the left are trying to destroy capitalism and free speech with their "morals". Next they will say its wrong to cull the weak en mass to make room for more fit individuals.
Of course I read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, et all -- basic high school reading, hasn't everyone? I actually won first place in that stupid prize they set out, and all I had to do was pretend Rand wasn't a total dunce (which happily turned out to be excellent training for the business world).
Both novels, like the majority of Rand's work, are absolutely cracking as wish-fulfillment fantasies for folks without social skills who dream of having kinky, angular sex while demanding that they be made BusinessPapa for perfecting some mechanical process.
Ignoring, of course, that perfection in a vacuum means very little; it is the ability to use said process in the context of society that makes it 1) useful and 2) profitable (although I suppose Rand would order those different :)
Who is John Galt? The kid who took his ball and went home when the other children didn't let him make all the rules.
In short, I do not find Objectivism to be a useful rubric when it comes to morality. Frankly, Objectivism is incoherent except when read as a wish-fullfilment fantasy as described above, as the life of the originator handily demonstrates. Success does not come from minimizing the contributions of everyone else -- that way lies loneliness, hypocrisy, and a reliance on the teat of the State.
As I deeply value my freedom and lack of debt, I could never adhere to such a unprofitable and vacuous quote unquote philosophy.
With regard to "moral compass" being a leftist invention -- such an accusation betrays precisely the sort of total willful ignorance I have come to expect from self-proclaimed Objectivists (akin to RATM being Atlas Shrugged devotee Paul Ryan -- aka the literal machine --'s favorite band). Suffice it to say that the phrase "moral compass" appears long before the current political paradigm -- and the concept to which it refers is literally older than written language itself.
Have you read any books OTHER than Atlas Shrugged? If not, I would be happy to provide a few suggestions to get you started!
And while I'm dispensing unsolicited-but-potentially-life-changing advice: If I were you, I'd hesitate to out myself in public forums as being unfamiliar with an inner sense of morality. Most people prefer a social circle that views their friendship as something greater than a business arrangement built on symbiotic profit.
I would ALSO hesitate before living my life in the accordance with the principles of an parasitic welfare queen like Ayn Rand, but that's an entire conversation in and of itself.
No I don't, that's not what I'm suggesting. People who may have bought Teslas in the past at least partly for virtue-signalling are now buying cars built by other manufacturers as a virtue signal against Musk, now they have decided Rocket Man Bad. Some of the car companies used for the virtue signal have histories that are demonstrably worse than anything Musk has done to hurt people's feelings on Twitter, making the virtue signal attempts amusing.
How many people are alive who worked for VW in 1937? I skimmed Audi’s wiki. What does it have to do with Nazis? Because it was an active company during the rise of Nazis? Yeah of course. The company was run by capitalists. Just like most companies. We know socialists weren’t running stuff. They were executed.
VW was founded by the Nazis, and the SS ran labor camps where prisoners were forced to work for Auto Union. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned in Audi's wiki, they did make an announcement about it several years ago.
I find it amusing that this company seems to be the go-to for those refusing to buy a Tesla for ethical reasons (see also: Alyssa Milano recently announcing she sold her Tesla to buy a VW).
I couldn't name another current car company CEO off the top of my head, but in my head the Tesla brand = Elon Musk the person. Which now means "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci" or whatever the last thing he was going on about was.
I'm not in the market for a car so it's hard to say how much this would sway my decision. Probably not zero though. At the very least the future of Tesla feels more erratic.
Since when is pointing to an individual's comments who is gay and criticising them (the person or the comments) "anti-LGBT"? I'd like to see the reasoning for that one. I thought it's because Roth brings up children in questionable comments, an awful lot. YMMV.
The next link's headline is "Elon Musk should apologize for mocking gender pronouns, says group that gave Tesla top LGBTQ-friendly rating" - why? Freedom of speech includes freedom to mock. Anyone wanting, nay, demanding their own pronouns is eminently mockable, trans or not.
Next link's headline is "Elon Musk's Twitter Reinstates Anti-Trans Activists on Same Weekend as Club Q Attacked". Aside from that being a shameless guilt-by-association fallacy, the policy changed after Musk asked the question "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?"
Portraying a general amnesty as something targeted seems a tad misleading.
Next headline: “Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence.”
I had to do a bit of digging with this one. The banned group, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, claim they were suspended for two tweets (from the link you gave):
> The reason given for its account suspension, an Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club contributor told The New Republic, was that it had violated Twitter rules against “hateful conduct,” with two tweets cited: a reply to the official account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Mugging at gun point,” reads the reply to an unspecified CBP post) and another post with what seems like a retort to the perpetual conservative nonjoke about pronouns, “Every queer a riflethem.”
I don't understand why that would lead to suspension.
It turns out that they are part of Antifa and were involved in targeting a conservative activist[1][2]. Perhaps it is linked to tweets like the following by its leader? [3]
> For legal reasons, this is a direct threat. Enjoy your kneecaps while you've got them.
I can't tell. This tweet[4] from Musk in response to another thread by Ngo says:
> That is a disturbing story and very concerning that Twitter took no action, despite clear violation of ToS. Report in this thread for now.
So it seems possible that it may have been because those tweets were seen as threatening somehow, or for other violations that were previously, I'm tempted to write condoned but shall we say, overlooked?
For what it's worth, I didn't know what statements were being referred to, and I like to keep up with tech news. There are probably a lot of others in the same boat too - definitely more then there are trolls feigning ignorance about him.
It's probably best to assume good faith from the commenter, especially when their username is "transcoderx"!
* He critizised that Yoel advocated for Kids using dating platforms in his PhD thesis. It's a misrepresentation IMO, but the reasoning behind his criticism is not LGBT specific.
* This is about mocking pronouns, not about LGBT people. “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.” - EM
* He reinstated a lot of accounts that didn't violate the law (free speech). Vice cherry picked some examples that were
originally banned for "anti LGBT" tweets.
* Activist account was banned for "hateful conduct". I don't know the context here, but that classification seems reasonable.
* He did delete the pelosi tweet, presumably once he realized it was false.
* The last one is about anti LGBT behavior by employees at Tesla, not by EM himself.
So? Acting like Musk is making a point on behalf of LGBT people is so incredibly disingenuous it speaks to your character as a liar no different from Musk himself. There's a world where it's possible that could be what he meant, but it's not the one we are living in! Look around.
> Then what was your point? Do tell... it's of no consequence that something could be true. We are here determining what is true.
Look, learn to read FFS. This is a subthread where parent claims Musk is anti-LGBT based on the flag in the picture. Which has to be `(anyone who disapproves flag -> anti-LGBT) and (Musk is anyone) -> Musk is anti-LGBT`. And I am proving this sentence false from `(any LGBT is pro-LGBT) and (there's at least one L who is LGBT and who disaprroves the flag)` which contradicts the above statement rendering the argument invalid, specifically `anyone who disapproves flag -> anti-LGBT` part. Therefore the picture does not show Musk is anti-LGBT, at least not via the flag reasoning.
I have no problem reading. The assertion wasn't that Elon Musk is anti-LGBT because of that single tweet. It was that single tweet was another example of him being LGBT. The irony that you miss this while telling me to "learn to read FFS" is not lost on me and once again speaks to your lack of credibility in being a reasonable person about this. You cannot seriously suggest that Musk is engaging in criticism of the flag from a pro-LGBT stance because he's objectively not pro-LGBT. He posted the other day that his pronouns are "prosecute fauci" he's not an LGBT ally. Sorry to break it to you. But this is the state of things today. Read the fucking news or something, give me a break from your disingenuous BS.
I responded to the specific claim. You are talking about something entirely different, generalizing a lot, and equating individual policy preferences with giant groups of people.
The claim I responded to was a BS. The way you argue is a BS. If "the fucking news" are doing the same, then they are also BS, and I'd rather read sources recommended by people who actually understand what's written rather than read what they want to see between the lines.
No I didn't, and I disagree. Are you joking? The image, literally, captures every conservative grievance regarding the culture wars of late. And you think it's more likely that those needles don't represent the multiple covid vaccines that were hugely controversial amongst this same crowd? You are entirely not credible. You are making ridiculous and unreasonable posts all over this thread, trying to say that these things which obviously indicate what they do, must mean something else.
> And you think it's more likely that those needles don't represent the multiple covid vaccines that were hugely controversial amongst this same crowd?
Are you saying the drugs issue is not a "conservative grievance regarding the culture wars of late"?
This goes directly against "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
"Needle drugs" aren't a "conservative grievance regarding the culture war" and certainly nowhere near comparable to vaccines, which the image obviously reflects (the three boosters, then the fourth) and they also aren't intravenous...
I didn't stick with an easier plausible interpretation. Both of your interpretations are clear nonsense and you are not credible because you keep making completely baseless, specious arguments. If you find that offensive, stop making these kinds of arguments.
> "Needle drugs" aren't a "conservative grievance regarding the culture war" and certainly nowhere near comparable to vaccines, which the image obviously reflects (the three boosters, then the fourth) and they also aren't intravenous..
Just for you I googled up the top conservative reddit, and scanned it for topics until I hit vaccines or drugs, and drugs came up first.
The image speaks for itself. The needles are in the exact places where the vaccines go, which is also exactly where you don't put intravenous drugs. Either you are ignorant or foolish.
He just liked a tweet which claimed that Sir Winston Churchill was not responsible for Bengal Famine. Something which I think has been mostly proven beyond a doubt.
> Sir Winston Churchill was not responsible for Bengal Famine
I searched using this phrase and received lots of very interesting results that are in the affirmative, with lots of references from historians. I cannot rate the responses myself, nor the historians, as I am not an expert in the topic but it would seem that the topic is not settled.
I'll certainly enjoy taking a look into it and seeing what I think at the end of it.
There were various factors that could've gone positively or negatively that now appears to be poorly coordinated for Elon -- GOP not sweeping legislature, China manufacturing issues, competitors continue to develop, pace of market recovery, FSD beta performance, etc. Brand strength and Twitter distraction is just adding on top.
That and Elon has recently reassured his shareholders twice that he wouldn't sell and then proceeded to sell billions.
It is not just Tesla. Apple is down too, and many other famous brands are also listed. Here is more balance article: Apple and Tesla: Tech shares tumble amid supply issues https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64099654
FWIW, until a few months ago, my next car was absolutely going to be a Tesla. I can't bring myself to buy one now.
I'm still committed to getting an electric car as my next purchase and am slightly disappointed to take the Model 3 off the table but there are good options if you don't mind waiting.
> passive-aggressive towards minorities like immigrants and LGBT people
Are you kidding? he's legitimately full on aggressive to them with his tweets and retweets. the entire cruelty about pronouns is so baseless it's almost unimaginable. say you were born larry but you didn't like that name so you decided james fit you better so you ask people to call you james. that's it. I don't want to be called larry so call me james because that fits my internal idea of myself more. it's easy just call people what they want to be called. you can call them whatever you want but you're an asshole if you are calling them a different name than what they want to be called and have asked you to. and this isn't even "they are going to ostracize me if i mess it up once" kinda thing... they are aware that people get it wrong just like people getting your name wrong. this is about being deliberately cruel to people you don't think matter. it's absurd.
I mean without details it is a reasonable alternative. Why would it not be? I have teenagers around, and the effect of woke movement seems excessive on some of them.
To me even your comment is an example, because you made a personal attack and did not substantiate it at all.
> I have teenagers around, and the effect of woke movement seems excessive on some of them.
Chances are that they view you similarly. Times are changing, you change with them or you will become obsolete a bit faster than you have to. If I look back across the last 50 years or so that I remember consciously a lot of the stuff that was socially acceptable in the past is no longer socially acceptable, and for very good reasons. I recognize that some of my conditioning can't be undone and realize that future generations will use this new base as their jump-off point. In the beginning, your kids can learn from you. But later on you can learn from your kids.
Think of yourself from the position of the owner of a plantation in the deep South a few hundred years ago. That sentence would apply just the same and it would be just as wrong. Getting older is a fantastic way to find out about what your prejudices and conditioning were. Those changes that really aren't positive will eventually self-correct, and those that really are but that we - oldies - are not quite ready to accept will correct as well, either when we change or minds or a bit later when we die. It's up to you to decide how much of a disconnect you want to accept with younger generations. I have four kids in a large range of ages and these same principles keep on being pressed home to me and I've yet to find one of those exceptions where my 'old self' was in the right.
This aspect covers a lot of ground: traditions, discrimination, the whole woke thing, attitudes, music style and so on. Either you stay with the times or you'll be left behind there are no third options afaics. I'm having a relatively easy time to adapt on those things that I don't care about. The dangerous bits are those that I do care about and where I'm simply dead wrong. Typically the things I care more about are those things that I have invested either a lot of time or a lot of my ego in.
60 years ago your kids would’ve been woke about black people and women having equal rights. 20 years ago they would’ve been woke for LGB rights. Now they’re apparently woke because of trans rights. Or rights every human should have.
Why are these people refusing to comply to something so unimportant? Didn't you say there are more important things to spend time on? Getting ostracized (probably an exaggeration) for refusing to comply is so unimportant and so pointless.
The answer to that question is the same as to this hypothetical: what if I ask you to move pencil next to you 1cm to the left and you are busy.
When performed by a mob, it is a DDoS attack, and the reason to not comply with it is the same reason people block sources of the DDoS attacks. Moreover, people ban the sources, and share the list with every other good player, so they wouldn't have to deal with the same problem.
Also re "something so unimportant". I never said it is unimportant. It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
I think you're really blowing this out of the water here and making a bigger deal than it is. I'm in a very liberal area and this hasn't come up at all.
To me it sounds like you're against discussing those things - which sounds like trying to suppress speech, imo.
We're not discussing the merits of using "main" over "master" - we haven't discussed that at all. You're making some politically charged (b/c of the phrases and language you're using, I feel it is this way) argument about why it's bad to change terms of things in general. We haven't gotten to the point of discussing the benefits of this specific thing, and to me it seems like you don't want to discuss them (or the lack of them) b/c you're sold on it being a bad thing, no matter what.
It is obviously good to change certain terms. For example, we don't call Asian people Orientals anymore.
Lol what? The thread here is asking why would I or anyone else would refuse to tolerate a "minor inconvenience". And the example is spot on. Keep up man, you are out of line with personal attacks.
Yeah and the best defense you have to your position is a ridiculous example about a pencil. You can't engage with the hypo because you can't genuinely make your argument in it, so you are talking about pencils. I'm not stupid. Your argument is a personal attack to everyone's intelligence because it's so specious.
You are calling an argument ridiculous, but you are not making any explanation why is it ridiculous. This claim is baseless, and any further claim you base on that is therefore baseless too.
If you have a valid reason, I'd do the pencil thing. I'm busy a lot of the time. I still can do stuff for people.
I'm confused how the pencil hypothetical is related. The terminology has a reason. The pencil moving has no reason. I gave specific reasons why the terminology matters to people. The hypothetical is irrelevant. The DDOS is also out of scope.
This all seems incredibly unimportant. There doesn't appear to be any principle behind not moving the pencil or not going along with terminology changes.
> It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
Life is about other people too. Not just ourselves. You have a small minor issue while others have actual grievances. How is using main instead of master ruining your efficiency? Life changes. Stuff changes. Progress happens.
I am sorry, but you seem to not understand key points of what I am saying, or appear to be deliberately ignoring them, and/or things said previously. So I have to conclude this conversation, as you have all the answers you demand above.
For instance:
> Why are these people refusing to comply to something so unimportant?
> I'm confused how the pencil hypothetical is related.
Here's the answer. Connect the dots.
> The terminology has a reason.
> The problem is to be triggered by etymology.
Here's the answer.
> There doesn't appear to be any principle behind not moving the pencil or not going along with terminology changes.
> There are more important things to spend any kind of effort than to please someone who's (demands are unimportant).
Here's the answer.
> Life is about other people too. Not just ourselves. You have a small minor issue while others have actual grievances.
> When performed by a mob, it is a DDoS attack, and the reason to not comply with it is the same reason people block sources of the DDoS attacks.
Here's one answer.
> I never said it is unimportant. It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
Here's the other.
> How is using main instead of master ruining your efficiency?
> very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
You seem the same as the other commenter, who ignores that: 1. It is certainly not free in terms of efficiency, and 2. It affects millions of other people, which makes it a big problem. Imagine every Honda car would shuffle dashboard buttons once a month. Every one individually can tolerate that, but added together it would be a huge problem. So precisely like spam.
> No one responding to you knows one another. The politics of people responding to you vary widely. Everyone agrees you’re wrong. That’s a huge indicator to take some time and self reflect.
Man, there are 3 people under my topmost comment, including myself. And the one who is neither you nor me claimed I am against discussing the topic in the discussion of the topic which I started. Imagine how ridiculous this statement of yours is from my perspective in the light of that.
> Why would you refuse to comply with that? If you're difficult at work you're going to have a bad time, maybe more people should be told this.
Can you hear what you are saying? Tech workers aren't mindless typing machines. When I think a decision from management is stupid and wasteful, I don't hesitate to tell that. If you want mindless typing machines in your company's offices, you're free to acquire them by whatever means necessary. Good luck getting great results from such setup though.
Isn't that nice that your kids want to make amends even in a small way for people who were and are hurt because of systemic issues. Systemic issues like the country being built off of rich white men and white people in general being above everyone especially black people they literally OWNED. People were actually owned by other people 150 years ago. I feel like we say this a lot but we don't appreciate how insane that is. Then the country absolutely fucked black people and minorities for the next 100 years at minimum.
Your example is minor and inconsequential. Why do you care? It's hard for me to understand why someone like you who seems like a bright and kind person to care about this stuff.
Ah, the old HN trope of "nice guys succeed in business because I myself am a nice guy, and tough operators with rough edges are all freakshows and got their success through thuggery and criminal activities".
Tesla was already over-priced on any basic metric. Elon is a phenomenal operator, regardless of whether you like his tweets or not. And if you follow the media coverage of any public figure on how you're "supposed" to think about them, I would recommend taking a breather and re-evaluating to whom you give root access to your mind to.
Heartbreaking is how it feels.
I’m going to admit that I have been an Elon fanboy since he launched SpaceX. He seemed to be the purest incarnation of the entrepreneurs of the last century (Edison, Westinghouse, etc.) especially compared with the bluster of the non-tech-tech people that really just did Web (or CS on a good day).
Now, he has turned into Howard Hughes with a megaphone, and it is not pretty.
There are no excuses for idolizing humans, the folly is my own, he is just a man after all..
How did you come to terms with how he failed upward with X.com and Paypal? He tried to ruin Paypal but was rewarded with $180M. SpaceX and Tesla being Elon’s wouldn’t be a thing.
I think it’s basically my internal valuations of the endeavors. Building a payment facilitator seems like a side hustle compared to the space/energy initiatives. That said, X/PayPal certainly helped a good number of people bootstrap more ambitious companies.
That's a bit unfair - he had shares in the combined X.com and Paypal which did well and so he made money when it was sold. Fair enough he was replaced as CEO after a brief stint but it doesn't really matter that much.
I'll be happy to bet that there were quite a few ordinary employees of Paypal that had more of a positive effect on that outcome than Elon but that were compensated to a very small fraction for their efforts.
Capitalism is more than a bit unfair. Having the most stake in PayPal because he merged a different entity with its parent company while being lucky enough to be fired before he could ruin the company doesn’t seem like it deserves positive recognition.
Lets never idolise humans, but we can still be proud of the achievements that companies like SpaceX have achieved on behalf of humanity, despite their management's behaviour.
And you can feel better in knowing that he is not the brain behind any of the technology that SpaceX has created.
I have worked at companies that had a similar personality to Elmo's (though not to his level) working in a C-suit role. They are the hype machines that land contracts for the companies, or attract investors, nothing more.
> I wonder how much Musks behavior on Twitter over the last months impacted the Tesla brand.
Definitely affects mine, I'd buy literally any other electric car now.
But... Tesla had a ridiculous valuation anyways compared to profits. They were always a long gamble for anyone with money. Given bonds are more attractive now, makes sense it'd tank.
I'm probably giving Elon too much credit, but I think his Twitter takeover and subsequent offensive behavior is a part of a concerted effort to improve Tesla's brand in red states, specifically Trump Country. The Tweets that many view as "cold-hearted" are embraced/worshipped in Trump Country. The Tweets about Nancy Pelosi's husband and "pronouns are prosecute/Fauci" are perfect examples, just to name a few.
Why would Elon care about his and Tesla's brands in red states? Well, it seems Tesla has pretty much saturated the tech-forward, eco-friendly, upper-middle-class car buying demographic. Everyone in SV/CA that was gonna buy a Tesla has already bought one. Time to find new markets: red states.
Red states have generally had a very low opinion of EVs. Elon is just trying to sell the sizzle, not the steak. He could promote all the cool tech of Tesla vehicles, but it would generally fall on deaf ears. Coal rollers don't care about battery tech, but they do care about owning the libs, and Elon's their guy now.
Furthermore, Tesla's Cybertruck is gonna ship eventually, and its destiny is Trump Country. The bulletproof panels, unbreakable glass and ginormous size are all features that resonate in red states. I'm sure many Cybertruck owners will utilize all the cool features, but I'm guessing that most just want attention, just like those obnoxious Hummer H2 owners from 20 years ago. Then there's the Tesla Semi that will need to be at least accepted in red states in order to be successful.
And that's just cars/trucks. Tesla is also expanding its power grids, and I think Elon views red states like Texas and Florida as integral to this. Red state governments will be a lot more receptive to Tesla's power grids if Elon is already considered political gold. There's a lot of opportunity in Texas, and I think Elon wants to get to the front of the line.
And lastly, I think the icing on the cake for Elon is replacing Trump as the King Of Owning The Libs, effectively neutralizing Trump's greatest strength, making him seem old and lame. My understanding is that Elon butted heads with Trump when he was president, and now he's doing everything he can to keep Trump out of the White House, either hoping to get a more friendly Administration or simply to get back at Trump.
Or, then again, maybe Elon's just a jerk with a bunch of money.
No, Trump country knows what a truck looks like: A Ford-150 or GMC Sierra. Trump country knows that a Cybertruck is something those left-wing loonies would buy.
For me the most important bit is that if he had any checks and balances at Tesla / SpaceX / life in general they would've reigned in his Twitter behaviour.
Any normal CEO would've had a big discussion with his supervisory board if he damaged his companies' brand like this in Twitter.
The fact that he seemingly doesn't have any accountability on it worries me the most.
Most billionaires figured this out ages ago: thread very carefully when speaking publicly,or don't say anything at all unless it somehow benefits you down the line. There were litterly cases of large companies collapsing because some arrogant tool at the top couldn't keep their mouth shut. I never was a fan of him, but apart from being a huge douche, he's unpredictable,so how could I invest in anything behind him if he goes from zero to hundred and then back multiple times a day?
In general we want the richest and most powerful members of society to behave predictably, and ideally rationally, so that we can make long term plans without worrying about the fickleness of a small number of people. We have a lot of problems to solve over the next few decades and chaos agents in the billionaire ranks won't help. Global economic growth depends on predictability.
If we want another chaos agent in charge we should elect them democratically.
I think we might be overindexed on his Twitter antics. Yes, he’s proven himself an incompetent moron for not realising the difficulty of running Twitter despite repeatedly being told it’s difficult. But this was only noticed by terminally online people and those adjacent to them.
It’s like the panel gaps on Tesla cars. Yes, they exist. Yes, they could indicate worse QA issues with the car. But for most part, this is something that only bothers car reviewers. Ordinary consumers don’t notice it and still buy Teslas thinking they’re quality cars.
Ultimately, what impacts Teslas sales isn’t his cruelty of the last few months. It’s something much more mundane - other manufacturers make decent electric cars now. And their charging infra is comparable to Tesla’s.
SpaceX was always a defense contractor. Their own payloads and military are bulk of the launches.
I would be worried more about USA turning the screw. Elon is extremely close and exposed to their biggest adversary, China. I’m actually surprised he wasn’t forced out of spacex by the military by now.
And replace him with who? The bloated NASA thing? The guys from Detroit who saw their lunch eaten several times during the last few decades by foreign car companies? (that is if you treat the car industry as a strategic one, as I think the US military does). By the looks of it there are still some cooler heads at the Pentagon.
I think OP was just talking about removing him from SpaceX, not ditching SpaceX entirely. The company would be fine without him, it's run by Gwynne Shotwell anyway.
I don't think that to be true on the middle to long term, things would just settle into a nice local maximum for SpaceX/Tesla as companies but most of the real innovation would be gone for good. Just look at Apple, they're a nice $2 trillion company but they've got nothing Earth-shattering since Jobs has been gone.
To put it another way, without Musk there would have been no Starlink, which is an Earth-shattering thing in its own way (satellite internet for the masses is Earth-shattering). Without Starlink being possible the West wouldn't have had the same military results on the war front against Russia as it now has. Move Musk aside and who will come with the next Starlink?
Later edit: Speaking of the car industry and its strategic value, we all know at this point that Henry Ford was literally a Nazi sympathiser and a Hitler groupie.
That didn't stop him from doing business with Stalin's USSR since early in 1929, when the US hadn't established diplomatic relations with the Soviets just yet.
If it hadn't been for Ford and for the American vehicles Stalin and USSR would have found it next to impossible to defeat Hitler and the Nazis a decade later. Stalin himself praised Henry Ford in 1944, i.e. after Ford's direct contacts with the Nazis in the late 1930s.
> Stalin wrote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling Henry Ford “one of the world’s greatest industrialists” and expressing the hope that “may God preserve him.”
In other words, without the help of Nazi-loving Henry Ford most probably the Nazis wouldn't have been defeated.
Like I said, hopefully there are still some cooler heads in the Pentagon who try to look at the middle to long term and try not to be influenced by the latest ideological scandals.
$100? $50? Who is to say. Stop loss orders may well accelerate the drop if that should happen. And the lower it goes the more they will have to sell to keep up! That feedback loop could get quite interesting soon.
Tesla's is still clearly the worst, at -69%, but Ford and GM have -45 and -43% respectively. If it's market-cap weighted (I can't tell at a glance), TSLA will have outsized influence, at a current market cap of $344B vs Ford and GM at $45B and $47B, and those three together being about 90% of the index's market cap.
GM down 42% Past year
Ford (F) down 46% Past Year
Chrysler/Jeep (Stellantis) down 26% Past Year
Toyota (TM) down 27% Past year
Mercedes (MGGYY) down 31% Past Year
Lucid Group (LCID) down 84% Past Year
Nissan (NSANY) Down 36% Past Year
Tesla (TSLA) Down 71% Past Year
Honda (HMC) Down 18% Past Year
Volkswagon (VWAGY) Down 48% Past Year
BMW (BMWYY) down 13% Past Year
> Tesla went up a lot. It seems only fair to also compare the upward trend like saying from 2020pr 2019 or something
Every company is up infinitely from its founding. The implied question is how Tesla is faring in the current market, and how it is weathering Musk’s recent travails. Neither of those defend a 2019 starting point.
Going down 70% might be normal or not normal. It is difficult to say without considering a relevant context like being extremely overvalued like 1y ago.
For example, PayPal and Square are down 64% ytd. Is it because their CEOs go mental on social media too?
> Going down 70% might be normal or not normal. It is difficult to say without considering a relevant context like being extremely overvalued like 1y ago. For example, PayPal and Square are down 64% ytd. Is it because their CEOs go mental on social media too?
No, but it means there are firm-specific factors driving their value down faster than their benchmarks. We can’t answer why it’s happening. But we can say it’s abnormal.
In order to know whether it is firm-specific, we'll also need to look at other firms. SQ and PYPL also dropped by a comparable percentage, so it doesn't look like firm specific. It's more like they were all overvalued a year ago.
But, for some reason nobody mentions this, They all point to Musk + Twitter instead.
Another counter evidence: Musk accused British diver of being a pedophile. You would think nobody would want to associate themselves with people who falsely accused other people with pedophilia, right?
Then, the stock went up 40x.
If it had any impact, it shouldn't have been 40x. I doubt Musk's erratic behavior impacts the stock price that much.
The goal in the comparison is to reduce variables right? So comparing the stock price change of Tesla to that of two companies that aren't even remotely in the auto business doesn't help in that reduction.
My comment above compares the change in price to other car companies because that is really what makes sense right?
That doesn't make sense to not consider other factors.
Tesla went up 40x but other car companies went up 2x at best.
Tesla was overvalued like other tech companies. It is actually the most overvalued tech stock. It going down like other tech stocks seems sensible. Going up a lot -> going down a lot.
Also, I provided an example how musk's erratic behaviour didn't impact stock price.
But you didn't actually provide any comparable example. You just kinda declared that musk's behaviour impacted stock price...
It doesn't (average to 62%) two things are going into that 62% number, one it starts on 1 january 2022 and these are the "last 12 months" so they start from the 26th December 2021. Also different analysts will pick different "sets" for their mix, so some will be "all US automakers" or "all 'major' automakers" (for some arbitrary definition of "major"). But stock prices are well publicized and easily available in forms for doing data analysis (the whole "day trader" craze in the 90's really kicked off some interesting "technical analysis tools" for stocks.)
And if you're at the point where you have some "extra" savings that you want to take out of a CD or savings account and put into a fund of some sort, reading the various fund manager reports on different funds is endlessly entertaining in how they "hide the sausage" as one does.
All that said, it seems a fair question is this; "Over the last 12 months, how has the stock price of companies that primarily make cars changed?" And the answer to that is that they have all gone down somewhat, some more than others. Interesting to me that BMW was the least affected and Lucid the most. I don't have many car stocks in my portfolio. I did add some when people were paying more to buy back used cars than they sold them for because that suggested to me they would have an uptick when the supply chain bounced back, and I do have Honda (long) since I've always admired the company's management. Other than that though, I got out mid last year (summer '21).
I like Tesla's products - they have good engineers that are building cool stuff - but I still think the stock is overvalued and people don't understand all the off balance sheet liabilities and risks faced by Tesla.
For example, supporting old models, maintaining inventories of available parts, complying with new regulations, labor issues and unionization, dependence on commodity input costs, environmental issues in production, risk of lawsuits as a result of accidents. Risk of lawsuits over dealership relations and bypassing local laws. Risk of lawsuits over "fully self-driving" marketing. Geopolitical risks with factories in China. Competitive risks from Chinese EV producers.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say too many investors are treating it as a tech stock rather than as a manufacturing company, and they don't understand that there are solid reasons why manufacturing companies tend not to do well in the U.S., and aren't able to defend high operating margins nearly as well as tech companies. At least no one has managed to explain to me why Tesla should succeed in maintaining high margins for domestic auto manufacturing when so many others have failed.
But there is (was?) a popular argument that Tesla is a tech company that happens to build cars, not a car manufacturer. So how do they compare to the tech sector?
Is it really though? If you consider how few EVs there are on the roads relatively speaking, and of that small fraction only another fraction are Teslas...
Assuming we're on the cusp of a global electrification of transportation, we should be looking at exponential growth. 54%->37% is the opposite of that.
A stock that never rose on fundamentals (Tesla stock at its peak valuation was more than GM and Ford combined, their fundamentals were never that good) will also fall regardless of fundamentals.
If the argument is about Tesla stock was worth that because of future expectations, then this fall can just be equally described as based on future expectations. Tesla still has a 33.7 P/E ratio, it could still fall another 50% again before the valuation is "worth it" depending on what metric you personally decide to base your investments.
The craziness is that this company is indeed still performing really well in terms of revenue and growth. And yet investors are selling their shares. Presumably at a loss. And probably it's a really good investment opportunity at this point. I actually bought some mor shares a few weeks ago. Short term that's obviously not working out for me but I have good hopes longer term.
It's still a good market to be producing batteries and electrical vehicles in. Tesla is still a market leader in that market. They've got production capacity, supply chains, etc. working just fine with more capacity coming online. It's still growth market. Nothing has changed really other than people's perceptions. And those can change again.
It does raise the question: why are people selling shares at a loss? Who are these people? Why are they panicking so much that they'll take the loss? It's not very rational behavior. Which suggests an answer that maybe there are some people with a financial interest in this manipulating the markets.
Either way, I expect Elon Musk might be buying some shares back at a discount just to make a point. There has been talk of buying back shares by Tesla in any case so there is plenty of support for that among share holders. At the current prices of the shares, that might actually not be the worst way to spend a few billion. And slightly evil of Elon Musk as well. So, entirely in character. Sell shares to buy Twitter, cause chaos there, watch Tesla's stock price collapse, buy back some Tesla shares at a discount, stock price goes back up again and Tesla continues making money and growing like nothing happened. Win win. Maybe Twitter survives all this. Maybe it won't. But does it matter if he comes out making a profit?
That would be the case if he weren't in charge of both companies, but he is. The actions of a company's CEO reflects on the company, as it should. They want to pull all the strings, so they get to shoulder all the responsibility as well. If the CEO of a company you're invested in starts acting erratically, it doesn't matter where they're doing it, it's going to affect your investment.
A huge part of Tesla's value is based on their brand. They have great manufacturing capabilities that incumbent automakers struggle to compete against, but if a large portion of their target market stops wanting to buy a Tesla because they feel like doing so is giving their endorsement to someone who behaves in erratic and alarming ways, then their cars aren't going to enjoy such a large profit margin going forward. They might make just as many cars as they would otherwise, but the business is worth less than it would be if they could sell at higher prices.
That erratic behavior could also be a means to shift the target market. If Musk and thus Tesla are no longer perceived as left then people on the right are able to buy Teslas without losing face.
If somebody wants to drive their car with coal, it has to be an electric car. Apart from nostalgic maga hats, what's a better match for an electric car than a person who can make America great again by supporting state of the art technology?
The opportunity is there. The future will tell how many of Musk's recent decisions were clever.
It's plausible. I don't know how Musk looks from the point of view of, say, a pro-Trump Republican, but from my own biased point of view he doesn't come across as a serious businessman with conservative or libertarian leanings, but rather as someone who has, for some reason, begun making unpredictable self-destructive decisions. I think he's probably losing a lot more potential customers than he's gaining.
There may be a political aspect to it, but the way I look at it is that he's an ordinary fallible human. We all know people who would make a big mess of things if they took Musk's place, but we don't usually worry about them all that much (except maybe on their behalf) because their ability to help or harm other people is limited.
I think the effects of social media on the brains of famous people who get stuck in that feedback loop, is akin to being on drugs. Same level of addiction, same deterioration of connection to reality.
Why though? I welcome it! The pile could have been used to buy land and extract rent. But no, it was pissed away in a vanity project that is now feeding a robust alternative. That is great! More billionaires should do this and take their oligarch friends with them on the ride.
Of course, the pile could also have been used to drive tech advancement. Yea, that'd been nice. Humanity might have gotten more out of it that way.
Is this really news or is it being posted as snark at Elon?
Most of the market is down, outside of energy and defense sectors. Tech and tech related things have taken a massive hit. Tesla was massively overvalued on future sales. Given we going to a recession predicted as hard landing, its within reason this stock drops and more than Toyota, honda etc
But sure, Tesla is suffering because elon is too focused on Twitter.
feels more to me like corporate news media and progressive allies have a fight with elon. they wanted him to close the Twitter deal, then they were upset elon got rid of the woke crowd running the company. now now i keep hearing Twitter is about to collapse and Tesla is collapsing, all because of elon.
i don’t buy this narrative. Nope. and from the corporate news media reports, i had a fairly negative perception of this guy until i saw his interviews and on some podcasts. he’s brash but ultimately he threatens publishing industry with what he might do at Twitter. corporate media fears him and almost has a 24/7 section devoted to him and his companies, just to get ahead in case he knives them like trump did.
> feels more to me like corporate news media and progressive allies have a fight with elon.
The fact that it feels this way to you is exactly the problem. It's pointless to politicize a car company but that's what Musk has gone ahead and done. It's not helping Tesla's stock price and it's not helping Tesla sell cars.
> they wanted him to close the Twitter deal
Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter and then spent six months trying to back out of the deal. When Musk realized a contract is a contract and he wasn't going to win in court, he finally closed the deal.
No one has done this to him. He did it to himself.
I can never keep it straight: Is he a grifter business guy with no real influence on the success of Tesla, or the "Technoking" of the company, as you (admittedly amusingly) put it?
It's not Musk who politicized Tesla. It's our culture that's so overtly politicized that the man can't have a single eccentric, interesting, or contrarian opinion while being the CEO of Tesla, without people seeking to punish the company over it out of spite.
If a founder or executive is distracted by another business venture, that's an issue. It has nothing to do with "politics", except in the minds of his critics.
Oh come on, he went full on culture war bullshit to pander for some people with specific political orientation. He's not saying some well thought opinions about politics we might not agree with. He is spouting trollish and plain evil crap (Roth is a pedo shananigans) meant to troll without any regard to the consequences. He is acting unhinged and that certainly should reflect on how we perceive his business acumen and ability to run companies and make rational decisions.
He is grifter business guy able to raise money that made tesla big through combination of charizma, cult of personality and bullying business associates+employees to take advantage of them.
He is alson bad at actually running companies and his personality cult ia breaking up now, so the overvaluation is ending along with that
I thought I was making it clear that I welcome it. If I cared about internet points on this account, I'd never post anything positive about Elon Musk here.
> No one has done this to him. He did it to himself
done what exactly to himself?
hes still one of the wealthiest people on the planet. he could literally shutdown Twitter tomorrow and the people who’d cry the hardest are the ones cheering for twitters collapse, on Twitter, who refuse to leave.
elon is still running spacex, Twitter, and boring company. if he lost every dime and every company, he’d get the Silicon Valley vc funding, even in this economic climate, to go do the next thing.
one thing elon has done he doesn’t get credit for is ripping the mask off this massive grift in the tech industry. With over half of the Twitter workforce gone, the site runs just fine. what exactly were these people doing? in fact, they had little to no productive output of course with exception of their culture war/far left battles they were fighting in cahoots with government.
i digress but this grift is widespread across google, meta, amazon.. all big tech. class of professional managers and a propped up elite who produce little economic output. 20% of the biz drives bottom line for the other 80%’s empire building, territorial wars, and bloated bureaucratic nonsense.
no one wants to come out and say it in fear of attacks from the corporate media, but these execs are taking note from what Elon just pulled off, in big tech and Silicon Valley vc backed companies alike
> Bought Twitter, made himself look foolish doing it, and continues to make himself look foolish in the running of it.
to who? you? corporate media? this is nothing personal but do you honestly believe musk cares about how you or the corporate media portrays him? that it clouds his mind in the morning “oh no, I look like a fool?”
Are we talking about musk, whose resume includes spacex, tesla, boring company, paypal? Are you sure we’re not talking about kim kardashian?
The guy has money and influence at the .1% but it’s the fear of “looking” like a fool?
Musk 100% cares about the opinion of the average person, yes. He is a insecure little boy at heart, which is why he is constantly trying to win the approval of the internet and shitposts like it’s an early 2000’s forum. It’s why he bought Twitter. It’s why him being booed at that Dave Chapelle show devastated him. It’s why he rapidly turned into alt-right idiot: because those were the only people still cheering him on.
Take a look at his replies on Twitter. He's constantly appreciating random nobodies who tweeted praise of him. Or look at the whole view count thing. Yes, he absolutely cares.
any well built service architecture doesn’t require a massive head count of engineers to keep things running. if code isn’t constantly changing because of new features, it’s behavior should be same. If traffic increases, more hardware will automatically get provisioned and added behind your load balancers, and lbs should auto scale as well.
you must need a few support staff which you can hire contractors for to keep things like OS and other software dependencies patched with latest updates.. and if u using third party cloud, depending on abstraction you get this taken care of as part of the package.
Unlike some other companies, Tesla was significantly overvalued to begin with. i think even elon joked as much himself. they never an energy/battery company first and they dont know how to fit and finish. none of this regressed in the last year.
1m to date:
TSLA -40%
AMZN -11%
AAPL -10%
GOOG -8%
MSFT -2%
NFLX -1%
META +5%
These numbers seem to directly contradict your thesis that TSLA decline is just a consequence of the tech market decline, given that the second bigger loss during last month was 4 times less in percentage compared to TSLA.
Anecdotal evidence, but I was planning to buy a Model 3 early next year mostly for in town driving with two small kids. Not going to happen anymore because of Elon openly spreading blatant conspiracy theories. Even if I didn't personally care, I feel like the brand has taken such a reputation hit. I might go for an Ionic 5 instead, need to do a test drive and some research.
This makes me really sad because I used to admire Elon for being a CEO that really understood the technology that his companies create.
Really bizarre that on a site where people from incredibly diverse backgrounds can have reasonable, adult discussions about topics like politics and religion, civil discourse breaks down as soon as someone says the phrase "Elon Musk".
The thing about Tesla is that short-sellers were right about the company being overvalued but wrong about the reasons people invested in Tesla.
Tesla's FSD was obviously anything but; Tesla could have never gotten most of the EV market, unavoidable production limits made sure of that even before considering Tesla's patent stance (of not holding EV patents). However, many investors actually held Tesla as an 'ethical' climate-based contribution and never cared that much about profitability or hype or value. Musk was useful in promoting the brand by keeping it in the spotlight.
Now, with other carmakers finally entering EV in force + Musk being, well, Musk, this contribution factor will strongly reduce. The risk now is overcorrection in the other direction - Tesla is too firmly established to go away.
People focus on the Musk (key person risk) factor, but there is the broader tech factor (overhyping / faking what is being offered), the macro interest rates factor (unwinding risky bets) and possibly also the sector specific EV factor (fitness to the broader mobility / energy landscape) and the competitive landscape factor
Putting aside all things Elon: Tesla was arguably incredibly overpriced (pick your reasons) and in a falling market that price is correcting.
We like to construct simple narratives in which causes are few and their effects are clear. The real world is far messier than our stories about it. Perhaps Elon's actions at Twitter have played a factor here but to pretend that that is the sole (or even primary) cause would require some greater evidence than anecdotes of users who changed their minds about buying a Tesla.
It would be great to see some debate about this story in the spirit of traders discussing the merits of the business rather than a fans-vs-haters style discussion about Elon.
Lots of people are saying this is due to Elons behavior which I think misses the underlying actual reason. Tesla was extremely overvalued. Elon leveraged this value to purchase Twitter and is now funding that dumpster fire with Tesla's gold. The market is effectively correctly for this. Nothing more, nothing less. The market doesn't care what you say. It cares what you do.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadA lot of people I know hesitate to take a seat on a plane, even for a week-long holiday. Having to read about Elon Jet and that Musk takes a whole plane to watch a football game certainly rubs them the wrong way.
Censoring users at will for his own ego or his own benefit also seems to go against what intellectual tech enthusiasts value.
A lot of his tweets seem cold-hearted, passive-aggressive towards minorities like immigrants and LGBT people.
For the people who followed it (not sure if it is many of the Tesla target demographic), it must have been a change from "Smart free speech absolutist who works on accelerating the advent of sustainable energy to save the world" to "Unethical, narcissistic despot with ill will towards minorities".
- It was so incredibly overvalued before being mature, that once it actually started to deliver on some promises its price shot up even further from where it should be.
- It reached "maturity" too late. Other car makers have caught up. Consumers can buy a Ford F-150 Lightning, an Rivian R1T or a GMC Hummer EV today, but not a Cybertruck. Kia, Nissan, Mini, Porsche, Audi, etc have great EV offerings. Tesla isn't even the biggest seller of electric cars in the world anymore (it's BYD, 354k sales vs Tesla's 254k)[1]
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-ev-sales-61-q2-2...
https://www.ev-volumes.com/
The most important part in the EV transition is still who can buy/produce the most batteries.
He is so unlikable, foolish and actually rude to people that I wouldn't want to be driving around a car that's associated with him. It' a massive shame because I really think at some point he was a force for good and he really wanted to see progress in the world. Sadly and I mean this in the nicest way possible, he now just seems like a fraud.
I actually think Tesla already had a bit of stigma associated with it, kind of a "show offs" car...but now, it's just a liability.
It feels like all of that toxicity was unnecessary and he could have been impactful and transformational without it, but maybe I'm wrong.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
Quacks like a duck for me.
Why rob banks for $10k when you can whip up fervor on social media for millions?
Criminal activity is there, basically, cuz people want to get what they want, norms, morals, and the well-being of others be damned. Musk doesn't have to rob banks to get what he wants, and probably never would have since his family owned gemstone mines in S Africa.
If you want to judge the man, see how he treated his ex's, his children, etc. That paints a far less flattering picture.
I think what gave him some cover is that for a long time nobody else was able to do what his companies could do at the same scale, or even close to it. Maybe Blue Origin is not equal to SpaceX yet, but putting Captain Kirk into orbit was a good PR coup. And the legacy car companies are not as experienced as Tesla as making electric cars, but they have been manufacturing cars for a century. US automakers were hurt by Asian carmakers a few decades ago, but survived. It might take a few more years, but I think they will figure out how to survive this transition.
His companies were close to monopolies in their niches for a long time, so he kind of walked on water. Now other companies are catching up, and he is not as special.
Musk was divorced like 5 times already.
I doubt he is going to rip the Powerwall off his house or sell the Tesla, but I'm quite sure based on the conversation that if he didn't own either of these Tesla products right now he would seriously consider other options if he were buying today.
This is just one example obviously, but there is no doubt that Elon is upsetting some key demographics who want to purchase Tesla products, and while I have no idea if it will have a major negative impact on the bottom line, it certainly can't be good.
I mentioned a few times at peak it was valued as much as the entire auto industry combined plus a utility company plus a battery company plus a software company or two plus a solar company - and then some - all while manufacturing about 10% as many cars as Toyota and showing no success in anything other than cars.
It was always a question of when, and he forgot that JPow giveth and JPow taketh away.
Like Trump he could have just sailed off into the distance a rich and largely beloved man but he flew just a little too close to the sun.
I’ve joked before that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person (“I bet rich people have solid gold toilets”) in the same way Elon is a 'left-curve' idea of a genius (“I bet geniuses just spend all day inventing crazy ideas and going to Mars and digging holes and stuff”). They’re both, in real life, caricatures of what they’re projecting to be. More showmen than anything. That’s not a criticism; they’re both excellent showmen. More Barnum than Rockefeller or Nikola.
Now we know that Tesla will probably not be the first with level 5 autonomy and that their no-lidar approach may not even be sufficient at all.
But the belief in their FSD was priced into Tesla's valuation as well and by now it's clear that this part was overvalued.
[edit1] All while getting them to pay up to $12,000 for software that didn't exist and had no path to existing within the promised timeframe.
Textbooks will be written about this bezzle.
[edit2] > Bezzle: Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country’s business and banks. [2]
Not suggesting a crime occurred here, to be clear - just the broad shape of what transpired re: FSD rhymes real good.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne...
[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85179
This bubble birthed and featured Cathie and Saylor (again) to a large degree, but the real star was Elon.
There's always too much poetry in these cycles for him not to fall apart on the way back down.
Look, some of his points have some standing but the points have to be more nuanced. I’m also annoyed by PoCo and the power-grab by US identity-identitarian Calvinists, painting anyone that does not defer to their moral authority as fascist monsters. I’m also irritated by the “present your pronouns” because you’re “either an ally or part of the problem.”
But indeed, for every time you snap back, there’s a real trans person who’s suffering an identity crisis, victimized and exploited by all sides of the polarized flame-fest that’s smashing any chance for a reasonable debate.
I don’t know if Musk is a true reactionary bumpkin of just burnt out, and out of touch. He should really get a public relations specialist to fix his public persona and teach him how to stay out of rhetorical minefields.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Döpfner Who apparently texted Musk during the Twitter transaction. He’s a media magnate too eh!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barre_Seid You should thank this respectable man for the Roe repeal. Good luck avoiding their products.
I think a bigger factor is that some parts of social media sees Musk as a partial replacement for Trump.
And, particularly, that the part of social media to which Trump was most valuable for several years (before he was finally booted), and which has failed to draw Trump back recently despite very visible efforts, and which Musk now owns, sees him that way.
For a lot of reasons I like Toyota and I’m super happy I don’t really know the CEOs name. If they do something silly I won’t have to feel like I can’t continue driving Toyota
When I buy a Toyota
Until those cheering him on start buying Teslas, this looks like a stupid move. Elon was bipartisan. Hell, he was so Teflon he could navigate between America and China. He threw that all away for what?
If you told me it was written by ChatGPT I would 100% believe you.
Many people supporting Musk at present do so because they believe him to be a champion of free speech. At the same time, they view the left as totalitarian as trying to control speech.
Twitter is viewed as a bastion of left-leaning supporters of Democrats who stole the last election from Trump by banning conservative speech from the platform. They believe Democrats are now in the process of implementing a totalitarian state in which Joe Biden, who is corrupt and the head of a crime family, is the dictator. They also believed that Joe Biden is using the FBI, which is aligned with leftists (?!) to silence critics and persecute his enemies.
In this framing, by unbanning nazis, qanon, insurrectionists, and anti-trans accounts, Elon is restoring balance to Twitter and saving free speech for the world.
It’s basically an exercise in projection to try to whitewash the Trump years through incessant whataboutism.
In any case, this isn’t an Elon thread. It’s about Tesla. If Elon feels like styling himself as a statesman, that has obvious consequences for his businesses.
Nothing Elon has been criticised for recently has been close to the realm of science. The science and engineering debates are one thing. The baseless nonsense tweeted to get a rise and engagement are causing the issues.
Personally, I think the whole thing is childish on all sides. But brands have been lost for less, and there appears to be a real effect on Tesla’s perception, in America but also the world, that threatens both revenues and the international stack of subsidies its margins and growth depend on.
Could you show me the Science (TM) that backed this conspiracy theory? You might struggle, considering it was debunked before and after your guy tweeted it.
You’re the perfect example of the Elon fanboy who looks at him slamming his dick in a car door and says “oh wow, masterful gambit sir”.
That said, I don’t think everything he says needs to be defended. He has truly said some despicable things.
That was the first sentence in the link
And if the Twitter Files really do reveal terrifying information, how does Musk come off as likeable? The two viewpoints seem mutually exclusive: Musk is the same guy who began banning users for both petty personal and politically partisan reasons (ElonJet, people who criticized him like Paul Graham, journalists that he views as liberal mouthpieces). Is it good and positive because... he does it in the open?
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-...
Their products have abysmal initial quality, durability, and reliability.
Their parts/service/bodywork repair/support network sucks. The cars are ludicrously expensive to repair because Musk is using insurance company payouts to subsidize his company.
They've lost almost every advantage they had. Their cars aren't the fastest in acceleration, don't have the most range, don't have the best efficiency, aren't the fastest charging, etc.
GM, Ford, and Volkswagen are gunning for Tesla and Tesla doesn't stand a chance.
Uhh, wat?
I would guess that Tesla is losing the premium they can put to their prices and that is pushing Tesla value to a transactional value. No more apologists for the build quality or features that are pay now get it next year(every year, next year), if Tesla makes good cars and sell them at good price people will buy and if they don't people won't. If can't do autonomous driving, can no longer sell autonomous driving. No more paying extra to save the planet.
If I'm hungry and I'm at the airport I'll grab something that's quick and convenient. My choice might not be the best, but whatever, I'm in a hurry and I'll forget what I ate by my next meal. A car on the other hand is a purchase I'll mull over for months— I'll consider everything, because it'll involve a lot of cash and I'll live with that decision for years.
On the other hand, I think you're right, and I doubt this is all just a consequence of Twitter saga. There's a lot of other forces at play here; there's more competition, Tesla keeps pushing some promised launches back, the whole stock market in general doing poorly, etc.
- restaurant: inconsequential which I pick, won't remember the quality of the meal, likely have a few similar options, very low stakes -- why support the chain that's owned by jerks?
- vs major life purchase, weigh all the pros and cons, mileage and economy and environmental impact and identity all come into play: how much long term, big picture economy would I trade to maximize my self identity?
I think it works your way too -- just seems neat.
They were never "good money vs value" tradeoff kind of choice.
Most people I know are aware of what kind of cars I drive[1].
Even if there's equal stigma attached to both, it's easier to quickly move past spending $5 on chicken than $50k+ on a car that's going to be with you for years.
0. I don't. It's a sandwich.
1. Both EVs, neither made by Tesla.
What hurts Tesla isn’t a few terminally online folks refusing to buy some expensive electric cars but the perception they will in a very difficult market.
Tesla made cool cars before Elon joined (it was founded by Eberhard and Tarpenning - Elon was an early investor who started calling himself a founder one day and got sued by the actual founders, they settled allowing him to continue) and it’ll continue to make neat electric cars moving forward. But they will lose their first mover margins as more players join and that’s gonna hurt.
It’ll continue to be a player in automotive but it’ll now be priced like it. Until it can demonstrate traction in literally anything other than making cars.
I’m in the market for a car and Tesla definitely lost some ground in the running because of the perceived hassle of having to defend my decision to buy supporting his behavior.
But to be honest, I can’t drive any Tesla to visit my parents without stopping to charge, especially in the winter so it’ll be a few years until I actually consider an electric car.
"Didn't buy a Tesla, bought an Audi" = poorly-executed virtue signal attempt.
Plus there is nothing wrong with virtue signaling, really. It beats vice signaling by miles and it beats passivity too.
In fact, the phrase "virtue signaling" was initially primarily used by people who seemed to lack moral or ethical concerns of their own and couldn't fathom that other people were guided by such. It's not a great term to throw around when it doesn't clearly apply.
Do you even know what point you're trying to make?
Both novels, like the majority of Rand's work, are absolutely cracking as wish-fulfillment fantasies for folks without social skills who dream of having kinky, angular sex while demanding that they be made BusinessPapa for perfecting some mechanical process.
Ignoring, of course, that perfection in a vacuum means very little; it is the ability to use said process in the context of society that makes it 1) useful and 2) profitable (although I suppose Rand would order those different :)
Who is John Galt? The kid who took his ball and went home when the other children didn't let him make all the rules.
In short, I do not find Objectivism to be a useful rubric when it comes to morality. Frankly, Objectivism is incoherent except when read as a wish-fullfilment fantasy as described above, as the life of the originator handily demonstrates. Success does not come from minimizing the contributions of everyone else -- that way lies loneliness, hypocrisy, and a reliance on the teat of the State.
As I deeply value my freedom and lack of debt, I could never adhere to such a unprofitable and vacuous quote unquote philosophy.
With regard to "moral compass" being a leftist invention -- such an accusation betrays precisely the sort of total willful ignorance I have come to expect from self-proclaimed Objectivists (akin to RATM being Atlas Shrugged devotee Paul Ryan -- aka the literal machine --'s favorite band). Suffice it to say that the phrase "moral compass" appears long before the current political paradigm -- and the concept to which it refers is literally older than written language itself.
Have you read any books OTHER than Atlas Shrugged? If not, I would be happy to provide a few suggestions to get you started!
And while I'm dispensing unsolicited-but-potentially-life-changing advice: If I were you, I'd hesitate to out myself in public forums as being unfamiliar with an inner sense of morality. Most people prefer a social circle that views their friendship as something greater than a business arrangement built on symbiotic profit.
I would ALSO hesitate before living my life in the accordance with the principles of an parasitic welfare queen like Ayn Rand, but that's an entire conversation in and of itself.
I find it amusing that this company seems to be the go-to for those refusing to buy a Tesla for ethical reasons (see also: Alyssa Milano recently announcing she sold her Tesla to buy a VW).
Probably a lot. Musk is too closely associated with the brand. For many people, Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla.
They've been called "Muskmobiles" in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if people also started to call them "Twitter cars".
I'm not in the market for a car so it's hard to say how much this would sway my decision. Probably not zero though. At the very least the future of Tesla feels more erratic.
Musk is known to be anti-LGBT: https://www.them.us/story/elon-musk-gay-twitter-employee-gro...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/elon-musk-should-apologize-f...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epz8jz/elon-musk-twitter-col...
https://newrepublic.com/article/169112/elon-musk-anti-trans-...
He even insinuated Pelosi's husband had gay hookers in his house! https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20221101-...
and that's nothing new for him: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/19/tesla-fac...
> Assume good faith.
As to your claims:
> Musk is known to be anti-LGBT
Since when is pointing to an individual's comments who is gay and criticising them (the person or the comments) "anti-LGBT"? I'd like to see the reasoning for that one. I thought it's because Roth brings up children in questionable comments, an awful lot. YMMV.
The next link's headline is "Elon Musk should apologize for mocking gender pronouns, says group that gave Tesla top LGBTQ-friendly rating" - why? Freedom of speech includes freedom to mock. Anyone wanting, nay, demanding their own pronouns is eminently mockable, trans or not.
Next link's headline is "Elon Musk's Twitter Reinstates Anti-Trans Activists on Same Weekend as Club Q Attacked". Aside from that being a shameless guilt-by-association fallacy, the policy changed after Musk asked the question "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?"
Portraying a general amnesty as something targeted seems a tad misleading.
Next headline: “Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence.”
I had to do a bit of digging with this one. The banned group, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, claim they were suspended for two tweets (from the link you gave):
> The reason given for its account suspension, an Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club contributor told The New Republic, was that it had violated Twitter rules against “hateful conduct,” with two tweets cited: a reply to the official account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Mugging at gun point,” reads the reply to an unspecified CBP post) and another post with what seems like a retort to the perpetual conservative nonjoke about pronouns, “Every queer a riflethem.”
I don't understand why that would lead to suspension.
It turns out that they are part of Antifa and were involved in targeting a conservative activist[1][2]. Perhaps it is linked to tweets like the following by its leader? [3]
> For legal reasons, this is a direct threat. Enjoy your kneecaps while you've got them.
I can't tell. This tweet[4] from Musk in response to another thread by Ngo says:
> That is a disturbing story and very concerning that Twitter took no action, despite clear violation of ToS. Report in this thread for now.
So it seems possible that it may have been because those tweets were seen as threatening somehow, or for other violations that were previously, I'm tempted to write condoned but shall we say, overlooked?
[1] https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1557475321678647297
[2] https://humanevents.com/2022/08/10/meet-the-woman-antifa-mil...
[3] https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1557478306760597504
[4] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596071799410003969
For what it's worth, I didn't know what statements were being referred to, and I like to keep up with tech news. There are probably a lot of others in the same boat too - definitely more then there are trolls feigning ignorance about him.
It's probably best to assume good faith from the commenter, especially when their username is "transcoderx"!
Given that HN is a site by nerds for nerds, I think you’re leaping to conclusions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding :-)
* He critizised that Yoel advocated for Kids using dating platforms in his PhD thesis. It's a misrepresentation IMO, but the reasoning behind his criticism is not LGBT specific.
* This is about mocking pronouns, not about LGBT people. “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.” - EM
* He reinstated a lot of accounts that didn't violate the law (free speech). Vice cherry picked some examples that were originally banned for "anti LGBT" tweets.
* Activist account was banned for "hateful conduct". I don't know the context here, but that classification seems reasonable.
* He did delete the pelosi tweet, presumably once he realized it was false.
* The last one is about anti LGBT behavior by employees at Tesla, not by EM himself.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607997591870124032
Depicting the LGBT flag as one of the attributes of a brainwashed person.
You can see many tweets like this, belittling minorities, when you scroll through the "Tweets & replies" tab on Musks profile.
You are fighting imaginary windmills here. I never said Musk is acting on behalf of LGBT.
Look, learn to read FFS. This is a subthread where parent claims Musk is anti-LGBT based on the flag in the picture. Which has to be `(anyone who disapproves flag -> anti-LGBT) and (Musk is anyone) -> Musk is anti-LGBT`. And I am proving this sentence false from `(any LGBT is pro-LGBT) and (there's at least one L who is LGBT and who disaprroves the flag)` which contradicts the above statement rendering the argument invalid, specifically `anyone who disapproves flag -> anti-LGBT` part. Therefore the picture does not show Musk is anti-LGBT, at least not via the flag reasoning.
I responded to the specific claim. You are talking about something entirely different, generalizing a lot, and equating individual policy preferences with giant groups of people.
The claim I responded to was a BS. The way you argue is a BS. If "the fucking news" are doing the same, then they are also BS, and I'd rather read sources recommended by people who actually understand what's written rather than read what they want to see between the lines.
Are you saying the drugs issue is not a "conservative grievance regarding the culture wars of late"?
This goes directly against "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
> You are entirely not credible.
That's just a personal attack again.
I didn't stick with an easier plausible interpretation. Both of your interpretations are clear nonsense and you are not credible because you keep making completely baseless, specious arguments. If you find that offensive, stop making these kinds of arguments.
Just for you I googled up the top conservative reddit, and scanned it for topics until I hit vaccines or drugs, and drugs came up first.
I searched using this phrase and received lots of very interesting results that are in the affirmative, with lots of references from historians. I cannot rate the responses myself, nor the historians, as I am not an expert in the topic but it would seem that the topic is not settled.
I'll certainly enjoy taking a look into it and seeing what I think at the end of it.
That and Elon has recently reassured his shareholders twice that he wouldn't sell and then proceeded to sell billions.
Elon Musk’s Twitter obsession isn’t the core reason for Tesla stock’s plunge
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/23/investing/elon-musk-tesla...
Now with no direction of Twitter, fumbling features and losing customers and users, the "product genius" fell apart.
1) does anyone else have the battery and EV production capacity of Tesla? Maybe some Chinese makers ... maybe?
2) are they releasing new models and continuing to scale production? Yes.
3) is the exigent need of electrifying transportation still at red alert klaxon level? Oh yes.
4) does anyone else have as good a drivetrain tech yet? Not really, the lead is likely shrinking rapidly.
The fact that twitter is impacting a company in an almost totally unrelated industrial area shows that there is massive irrationalism around Tesla.
I'm still committed to getting an electric car as my next purchase and am slightly disappointed to take the Model 3 off the table but there are good options if you don't mind waiting.
Are you kidding? he's legitimately full on aggressive to them with his tweets and retweets. the entire cruelty about pronouns is so baseless it's almost unimaginable. say you were born larry but you didn't like that name so you decided james fit you better so you ask people to call you james. that's it. I don't want to be called larry so call me james because that fits my internal idea of myself more. it's easy just call people what they want to be called. you can call them whatever you want but you're an asshole if you are calling them a different name than what they want to be called and have asked you to. and this isn't even "they are going to ostracize me if i mess it up once" kinda thing... they are aware that people get it wrong just like people getting your name wrong. this is about being deliberately cruel to people you don't think matter. it's absurd.
To me even your comment is an example, because you made a personal attack and did not substantiate it at all.
Chances are that they view you similarly. Times are changing, you change with them or you will become obsolete a bit faster than you have to. If I look back across the last 50 years or so that I remember consciously a lot of the stuff that was socially acceptable in the past is no longer socially acceptable, and for very good reasons. I recognize that some of my conditioning can't be undone and realize that future generations will use this new base as their jump-off point. In the beginning, your kids can learn from you. But later on you can learn from your kids.
This aspect covers a lot of ground: traditions, discrimination, the whole woke thing, attitudes, music style and so on. Either you stay with the times or you'll be left behind there are no third options afaics. I'm having a relatively easy time to adapt on those things that I don't care about. The dangerous bits are those that I do care about and where I'm simply dead wrong. Typically the things I care more about are those things that I have invested either a lot of time or a lot of my ego in.
Best of luck with this, it isn't an easy problem.
You are assuming here I take every change as bad. That's plain wrong, so you have no point.
Why do you care about this? Shouldn't you just... ignore it?
When performed by a mob, it is a DDoS attack, and the reason to not comply with it is the same reason people block sources of the DDoS attacks. Moreover, people ban the sources, and share the list with every other good player, so they wouldn't have to deal with the same problem.
Also re "something so unimportant". I never said it is unimportant. It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
To me it sounds like you're against discussing those things - which sounds like trying to suppress speech, imo.
You are taking on a lot here.
Besides, number of people agreeing has no consequences on objective reality.
So I disagree with both validity/applicability of the argument, and its premise.
It is obviously good to change certain terms. For example, we don't call Asian people Orientals anymore.
Hypo?
I'm confused how the pencil hypothetical is related. The terminology has a reason. The pencil moving has no reason. I gave specific reasons why the terminology matters to people. The hypothetical is irrelevant. The DDOS is also out of scope.
This all seems incredibly unimportant. There doesn't appear to be any principle behind not moving the pencil or not going along with terminology changes.
> It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
Life is about other people too. Not just ourselves. You have a small minor issue while others have actual grievances. How is using main instead of master ruining your efficiency? Life changes. Stuff changes. Progress happens.
For instance:
> Why are these people refusing to comply to something so unimportant?
> I'm confused how the pencil hypothetical is related.
Here's the answer. Connect the dots.
> The terminology has a reason.
> The problem is to be triggered by etymology.
Here's the answer.
> There doesn't appear to be any principle behind not moving the pencil or not going along with terminology changes.
> There are more important things to spend any kind of effort than to please someone who's (demands are unimportant).
Here's the answer.
> Life is about other people too. Not just ourselves. You have a small minor issue while others have actual grievances.
> When performed by a mob, it is a DDoS attack, and the reason to not comply with it is the same reason people block sources of the DDoS attacks.
Here's one answer.
> I never said it is unimportant. It is very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
Here's the other.
> How is using main instead of master ruining your efficiency?
> very important for my workflow to be consistent over time for efficiency.
Here's the answer.
Man, there are 3 people under my topmost comment, including myself. And the one who is neither you nor me claimed I am against discussing the topic in the discussion of the topic which I started. Imagine how ridiculous this statement of yours is from my perspective in the light of that.
Can you hear what you are saying? Tech workers aren't mindless typing machines. When I think a decision from management is stupid and wasteful, I don't hesitate to tell that. If you want mindless typing machines in your company's offices, you're free to acquire them by whatever means necessary. Good luck getting great results from such setup though.
Your example is minor and inconsequential. Why do you care? It's hard for me to understand why someone like you who seems like a bright and kind person to care about this stuff.
No, it is not. There are more important things to spend any kind of effort than to please someone who's triggered by etymology.
Yes there are more important things. You're spending time being upset about some minor inconsequential terminology. That's not important.
There's nothing wrong with being triggered. The problem is to be triggered by etymology.
> You're spending time being upset about some minor inconsequential terminology. That's not important.
That is incorrect, cause this is an instance of much, much bigger whole, which as a whole is very important.
> The problem is to be triggered by etymology.
Why are you being triggered by it then?
> That is incorrect, cause this is an instance of much, much bigger whole, which as a whole is very important.
What whole? Is this still about being against Elon's daughter?
This defies what reasonable means. Reasonable would be someone disagreeing with you on your own volition.
In the past few months they have gone full 1950s and are back to accusing gay men of being groomers/pedophiles.
Tesla was already over-priced on any basic metric. Elon is a phenomenal operator, regardless of whether you like his tweets or not. And if you follow the media coverage of any public figure on how you're "supposed" to think about them, I would recommend taking a breather and re-evaluating to whom you give root access to your mind to.
There are no excuses for idolizing humans, the folly is my own, he is just a man after all..
And you can feel better in knowing that he is not the brain behind any of the technology that SpaceX has created.
I have worked at companies that had a similar personality to Elmo's (though not to his level) working in a C-suit role. They are the hype machines that land contracts for the companies, or attract investors, nothing more.
Definitely affects mine, I'd buy literally any other electric car now.
But... Tesla had a ridiculous valuation anyways compared to profits. They were always a long gamble for anyone with money. Given bonds are more attractive now, makes sense it'd tank.
Why would Elon care about his and Tesla's brands in red states? Well, it seems Tesla has pretty much saturated the tech-forward, eco-friendly, upper-middle-class car buying demographic. Everyone in SV/CA that was gonna buy a Tesla has already bought one. Time to find new markets: red states.
Red states have generally had a very low opinion of EVs. Elon is just trying to sell the sizzle, not the steak. He could promote all the cool tech of Tesla vehicles, but it would generally fall on deaf ears. Coal rollers don't care about battery tech, but they do care about owning the libs, and Elon's their guy now.
Furthermore, Tesla's Cybertruck is gonna ship eventually, and its destiny is Trump Country. The bulletproof panels, unbreakable glass and ginormous size are all features that resonate in red states. I'm sure many Cybertruck owners will utilize all the cool features, but I'm guessing that most just want attention, just like those obnoxious Hummer H2 owners from 20 years ago. Then there's the Tesla Semi that will need to be at least accepted in red states in order to be successful.
And that's just cars/trucks. Tesla is also expanding its power grids, and I think Elon views red states like Texas and Florida as integral to this. Red state governments will be a lot more receptive to Tesla's power grids if Elon is already considered political gold. There's a lot of opportunity in Texas, and I think Elon wants to get to the front of the line.
And lastly, I think the icing on the cake for Elon is replacing Trump as the King Of Owning The Libs, effectively neutralizing Trump's greatest strength, making him seem old and lame. My understanding is that Elon butted heads with Trump when he was president, and now he's doing everything he can to keep Trump out of the White House, either hoping to get a more friendly Administration or simply to get back at Trump.
Or, then again, maybe Elon's just a jerk with a bunch of money.
Any normal CEO would've had a big discussion with his supervisory board if he damaged his companies' brand like this in Twitter.
The fact that he seemingly doesn't have any accountability on it worries me the most.
If we want another chaos agent in charge we should elect them democratically.
It’s like the panel gaps on Tesla cars. Yes, they exist. Yes, they could indicate worse QA issues with the car. But for most part, this is something that only bothers car reviewers. Ordinary consumers don’t notice it and still buy Teslas thinking they’re quality cars.
Ultimately, what impacts Teslas sales isn’t his cruelty of the last few months. It’s something much more mundane - other manufacturers make decent electric cars now. And their charging infra is comparable to Tesla’s.
(27 out of 28 reliability report)
But it is incomprehensible to imagine having double-digit BILLIONS cash in the bank, not on paper, in hand, and doing what he did to twitter?
It would be like the President of the United States daily tweeting insane petty crass things.
He obviously had competent people running SpaceX, Tesla, because all those products are too technical for him to be in charge exclusively.
But with twitter nope nope, it was an ego trip, hitting every branch on the way down.
I cannot comprehend having that much comfort in life and THAT is what you do with your time.
Each state in the US has a billionaire but most names are unknown. Not him.
I would be worried more about USA turning the screw. Elon is extremely close and exposed to their biggest adversary, China. I’m actually surprised he wasn’t forced out of spacex by the military by now.
I don't think that to be true on the middle to long term, things would just settle into a nice local maximum for SpaceX/Tesla as companies but most of the real innovation would be gone for good. Just look at Apple, they're a nice $2 trillion company but they've got nothing Earth-shattering since Jobs has been gone.
To put it another way, without Musk there would have been no Starlink, which is an Earth-shattering thing in its own way (satellite internet for the masses is Earth-shattering). Without Starlink being possible the West wouldn't have had the same military results on the war front against Russia as it now has. Move Musk aside and who will come with the next Starlink?
Later edit: Speaking of the car industry and its strategic value, we all know at this point that Henry Ford was literally a Nazi sympathiser and a Hitler groupie. That didn't stop him from doing business with Stalin's USSR since early in 1929, when the US hadn't established diplomatic relations with the Soviets just yet.
If it hadn't been for Ford and for the American vehicles Stalin and USSR would have found it next to impossible to defeat Hitler and the Nazis a decade later. Stalin himself praised Henry Ford in 1944, i.e. after Ford's direct contacts with the Nazis in the late 1930s.
> Stalin wrote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling Henry Ford “one of the world’s greatest industrialists” and expressing the hope that “may God preserve him.”
In other words, without the help of Nazi-loving Henry Ford most probably the Nazis wouldn't have been defeated.
Like I said, hopefully there are still some cooler heads in the Pentagon who try to look at the middle to long term and try not to be influenced by the latest ideological scandals.
[1] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-signs-agree...
Some interesting times ahead if we start seeing some mass sell-offs triggered.
5 Years TSLA: 425.53% GM: -18.71% FORD: -10.33% STLA: -21.52%
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/index/DOW-JONES-US-AUTO...
Tesla's is still clearly the worst, at -69%, but Ford and GM have -45 and -43% respectively. If it's market-cap weighted (I can't tell at a glance), TSLA will have outsized influence, at a current market cap of $344B vs Ford and GM at $45B and $47B, and those three together being about 90% of the index's market cap.
Only three components of it are up for the year.
Also, Tesla went up a lot. It seems only fair to also compare the upward trend like saying from 2020pr 2019 or something.
Every company is up infinitely from its founding. The implied question is how Tesla is faring in the current market, and how it is weathering Musk’s recent travails. Neither of those defend a 2019 starting point.
For example, PayPal and Square are down 64% ytd. Is it because their CEOs go mental on social media too?
No, but it means there are firm-specific factors driving their value down faster than their benchmarks. We can’t answer why it’s happening. But we can say it’s abnormal.
But, for some reason nobody mentions this, They all point to Musk + Twitter instead.
Another counter evidence: Musk accused British diver of being a pedophile. You would think nobody would want to associate themselves with people who falsely accused other people with pedophilia, right?
Then, the stock went up 40x.
If it had any impact, it shouldn't have been 40x. I doubt Musk's erratic behavior impacts the stock price that much.
My comment above compares the change in price to other car companies because that is really what makes sense right?
Tesla went up 40x but other car companies went up 2x at best.
Tesla was overvalued like other tech companies. It is actually the most overvalued tech stock. It going down like other tech stocks seems sensible. Going up a lot -> going down a lot.
Also, I provided an example how musk's erratic behaviour didn't impact stock price.
But you didn't actually provide any comparable example. You just kinda declared that musk's behaviour impacted stock price...
By cherry picking
A down 10%
B down 90%
If B is 50% of the market, the market is down by like... 50%
You can construct practically any total within the extrema if you use the right weights.
And if you're at the point where you have some "extra" savings that you want to take out of a CD or savings account and put into a fund of some sort, reading the various fund manager reports on different funds is endlessly entertaining in how they "hide the sausage" as one does.
All that said, it seems a fair question is this; "Over the last 12 months, how has the stock price of companies that primarily make cars changed?" And the answer to that is that they have all gone down somewhat, some more than others. Interesting to me that BMW was the least affected and Lucid the most. I don't have many car stocks in my portfolio. I did add some when people were paying more to buy back used cars than they sold them for because that suggested to me they would have an uptick when the supply chain bounced back, and I do have Honda (long) since I've always admired the company's management. Other than that though, I got out mid last year (summer '21).
Toyota's market cap is 180b
Ford/GM/BMW/Honda's are around 50b
Tesla has 350b market cap now. About equal to all the ones I listed above.
It'd have an outsized affect plummeting from over 1 trillion a year ago to 350 billion now.
For example, supporting old models, maintaining inventories of available parts, complying with new regulations, labor issues and unionization, dependence on commodity input costs, environmental issues in production, risk of lawsuits as a result of accidents. Risk of lawsuits over dealership relations and bypassing local laws. Risk of lawsuits over "fully self-driving" marketing. Geopolitical risks with factories in China. Competitive risks from Chinese EV producers.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say too many investors are treating it as a tech stock rather than as a manufacturing company, and they don't understand that there are solid reasons why manufacturing companies tend not to do well in the U.S., and aren't able to defend high operating margins nearly as well as tech companies. At least no one has managed to explain to me why Tesla should succeed in maintaining high margins for domestic auto manufacturing when so many others have failed.
This kind of snark is uncalled for in a purportedly serious domain like financial journalism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/elon-musk-420-tw...
https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/did-you-know-that-all...
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/technology/2022/06/a-day-in-t...
That is some crazy growth still.
Assuming we're on the cusp of a global electrification of transportation, we should be looking at exponential growth. 54%->37% is the opposite of that.
And you can get an EV from any manufacturer these days, so I'd still consider double digit growth pretty incredible.
Azure had 33% growth a couple of quarters ago and financial analysts acted like they are on the verge of collapse.
If the argument is about Tesla stock was worth that because of future expectations, then this fall can just be equally described as based on future expectations. Tesla still has a 33.7 P/E ratio, it could still fall another 50% again before the valuation is "worth it" depending on what metric you personally decide to base your investments.
It's still a good market to be producing batteries and electrical vehicles in. Tesla is still a market leader in that market. They've got production capacity, supply chains, etc. working just fine with more capacity coming online. It's still growth market. Nothing has changed really other than people's perceptions. And those can change again.
It does raise the question: why are people selling shares at a loss? Who are these people? Why are they panicking so much that they'll take the loss? It's not very rational behavior. Which suggests an answer that maybe there are some people with a financial interest in this manipulating the markets.
Either way, I expect Elon Musk might be buying some shares back at a discount just to make a point. There has been talk of buying back shares by Tesla in any case so there is plenty of support for that among share holders. At the current prices of the shares, that might actually not be the worst way to spend a few billion. And slightly evil of Elon Musk as well. So, entirely in character. Sell shares to buy Twitter, cause chaos there, watch Tesla's stock price collapse, buy back some Tesla shares at a discount, stock price goes back up again and Tesla continues making money and growing like nothing happened. Win win. Maybe Twitter survives all this. Maybe it won't. But does it matter if he comes out making a profit?
The opportunity is there. The future will tell how many of Musk's recent decisions were clever.
There may be a political aspect to it, but the way I look at it is that he's an ordinary fallible human. We all know people who would make a big mess of things if they took Musk's place, but we don't usually worry about them all that much (except maybe on their behalf) because their ability to help or harm other people is limited.
Of course, the pile could also have been used to drive tech advancement. Yea, that'd been nice. Humanity might have gotten more out of it that way.
Most of the market is down, outside of energy and defense sectors. Tech and tech related things have taken a massive hit. Tesla was massively overvalued on future sales. Given we going to a recession predicted as hard landing, its within reason this stock drops and more than Toyota, honda etc
But sure, Tesla is suffering because elon is too focused on Twitter.
feels more to me like corporate news media and progressive allies have a fight with elon. they wanted him to close the Twitter deal, then they were upset elon got rid of the woke crowd running the company. now now i keep hearing Twitter is about to collapse and Tesla is collapsing, all because of elon.
i don’t buy this narrative. Nope. and from the corporate news media reports, i had a fairly negative perception of this guy until i saw his interviews and on some podcasts. he’s brash but ultimately he threatens publishing industry with what he might do at Twitter. corporate media fears him and almost has a 24/7 section devoted to him and his companies, just to get ahead in case he knives them like trump did.
The fact that it feels this way to you is exactly the problem. It's pointless to politicize a car company but that's what Musk has gone ahead and done. It's not helping Tesla's stock price and it's not helping Tesla sell cars.
> they wanted him to close the Twitter deal
Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter and then spent six months trying to back out of the deal. When Musk realized a contract is a contract and he wasn't going to win in court, he finally closed the deal.
No one has done this to him. He did it to himself.
That's the practical reality of it whether you like it or not.
It's not Musk who politicized Tesla. It's our culture that's so overtly politicized that the man can't have a single eccentric, interesting, or contrarian opinion while being the CEO of Tesla, without people seeking to punish the company over it out of spite.
I didn't put it that way, Musk did:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331315/elon-musk-tesla-...
> It's not Musk who politicized Tesla.
Yes it is. His antics and his absence is why there are calls for him to get his focus back on Tesla or be replaced at Tesla by a full time CEO:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-shareholder-ditch-elon-m...
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2022/12/27/tesla-sto...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/27/tesla-sto...
He is alson bad at actually running companies and his personality cult ia breaking up now, so the overvaluation is ending along with that
Why do people do this? State your point, don't preemptively whine about the reaction.
done what exactly to himself?
hes still one of the wealthiest people on the planet. he could literally shutdown Twitter tomorrow and the people who’d cry the hardest are the ones cheering for twitters collapse, on Twitter, who refuse to leave.
elon is still running spacex, Twitter, and boring company. if he lost every dime and every company, he’d get the Silicon Valley vc funding, even in this economic climate, to go do the next thing.
one thing elon has done he doesn’t get credit for is ripping the mask off this massive grift in the tech industry. With over half of the Twitter workforce gone, the site runs just fine. what exactly were these people doing? in fact, they had little to no productive output of course with exception of their culture war/far left battles they were fighting in cahoots with government.
i digress but this grift is widespread across google, meta, amazon.. all big tech. class of professional managers and a propped up elite who produce little economic output. 20% of the biz drives bottom line for the other 80%’s empire building, territorial wars, and bloated bureaucratic nonsense.
no one wants to come out and say it in fear of attacks from the corporate media, but these execs are taking note from what Elon just pulled off, in big tech and Silicon Valley vc backed companies alike
Bought Twitter, made himself look foolish doing it, and continues to make himself look foolish in the running of it.
to who? you? corporate media? this is nothing personal but do you honestly believe musk cares about how you or the corporate media portrays him? that it clouds his mind in the morning “oh no, I look like a fool?”
Are we talking about musk, whose resume includes spacex, tesla, boring company, paypal? Are you sure we’re not talking about kim kardashian?
The guy has money and influence at the .1% but it’s the fear of “looking” like a fool?
Yes. He desperately craves the attention and most especially the adulation. It's sad.
you must need a few support staff which you can hire contractors for to keep things like OS and other software dependencies patched with latest updates.. and if u using third party cloud, depending on abstraction you get this taken care of as part of the package.
His plan was not to keep it running with skeleton crew.
While that's true, if you look at S&P 500, or even just a bunch of tech stocks like GOOG or MSFT, it's pretty clear Tesla is doing much worse still.
https://i.imgur.com/JbbyghN.png
Certainly much worse, all since November.
Unlike some other companies, Tesla was significantly overvalued to begin with. i think even elon joked as much himself. they never an energy/battery company first and they dont know how to fit and finish. none of this regressed in the last year.
These numbers seem to directly contradict your thesis that TSLA decline is just a consequence of the tech market decline, given that the second bigger loss during last month was 4 times less in percentage compared to TSLA.
How all masses including journalists missed this is beyond me
This makes me really sad because I used to admire Elon for being a CEO that really understood the technology that his companies create.
Tesla's FSD was obviously anything but; Tesla could have never gotten most of the EV market, unavoidable production limits made sure of that even before considering Tesla's patent stance (of not holding EV patents). However, many investors actually held Tesla as an 'ethical' climate-based contribution and never cared that much about profitability or hype or value. Musk was useful in promoting the brand by keeping it in the spotlight.
Now, with other carmakers finally entering EV in force + Musk being, well, Musk, this contribution factor will strongly reduce. The risk now is overcorrection in the other direction - Tesla is too firmly established to go away.
We like to construct simple narratives in which causes are few and their effects are clear. The real world is far messier than our stories about it. Perhaps Elon's actions at Twitter have played a factor here but to pretend that that is the sole (or even primary) cause would require some greater evidence than anecdotes of users who changed their minds about buying a Tesla.
It would be great to see some debate about this story in the spirit of traders discussing the merits of the business rather than a fans-vs-haters style discussion about Elon.