I've always considered the Supercharger network as their most valuable asset, besides arguably their mindshare, so I cannot see how losing the entire team could be a rational decision in the long term.
Also, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.
Agree 100%. The change in Musk’s public persona combined with his more recent business decisions are alarming. And you may say that his public persona shouldn’t matter, but when he willfully alienates a large portion of his traditional customer base, one wonders what he is even thinking.
This might ironically be the downside of being less money driven and more principle driven. I think he legitimately thinks “the woke mind virus” is a bigger short term threat to (western) civilization than failing to transition to sustainable energy (Tesla) or failing to become a multi planetary species (SpaceX). If he was primarily financially driven I think he would have kept quiet and just focused on the existing companies, like most people probably would even if they privately held similarly controversial opinions.
I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.
The thing is, he’s never been paid to stay quiet and focus on the money.
Musk’s value add is as the celebrity CEO; the Jobsian ideal taken to its natural conclusion. He’s supposed to be this forward-looking visionary and having him at the helm of your company is supposed to make it forward-looking by proxy.
This is all well and good until the celebrity CEO fries his brain with Special K and builds a bubble of yes-men around him. Then it becomes a massive liability.
A lot of it’s explained by drugs, incredible impulsivity, some magical thinking, and remarkably thin skin, plus (I think the rest are in plain evidence—this gets speculative) maybe some discontent over his personal life and especially his kids.
TSLA down > 50% from the peak. The stock went up on earnings miss because things were not as bad as shareholders were expecting, but the shareholders are expecting things to be pretty bad.
But I think the point people have made (correctly!) is that TSLA's price is detached from any normal way we have for pricing a car company. Their market cap is 160% that of Toyota, despite selling 16% as many cars. How are they ever going to justify their current valuation? Kicking Elon out to get rational CEO behavior could result in a rational market assessment of Tesla's value, which would be bad from the shareholders' perspective!
The only thing separating Tesla from a realistic multiple is Musk. For shareholders it's rational to want to keep him around. Otherwise they would have to face a much worse reversion to the mean.
Hmmm... Usually the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes implies the people around him went along with the fiction because they feared personal retribution from the Emperor... But what if nobles did it to prevent a drop in the "stock" of the empire itself?
To me, this just doesn't seem factual. I became an admirer of his in the 2010s. I don't believe he was spending so much time back then picking petty fights and saying unhinged or just extremely politically polarized things on social media in that time period, which the media was just covering differently than they are now. I think his public behavior has changed notably, not just the reporting on him.
if the media reaction to that had been "tesla ceo pulls private driving detail in attempt to discredit journalist" it would have formed a much more obvious through-line with the Top Gear "tesla ceo pulls battery telemetry to sue comedy show" from years prior and "tesla employees can watch you have sex in your car" from years later.
See Also the ongoing excuse of "autopilot was not engaged when the crash happened" or Tesla's insurance charging more if you drive at night. https://electrek.co/2023/09/15/musk-wanted-to-use-tesla-came... Things add up to: Elon Musk does not believe in any sort of right to your privacy.
Like in general while his public persona has gotten less reasonable over the years there's a lot of things that could/should be reported as "patterns of behavior" that, in the early days got reported as if they happened in a vacuum which let it seem reasonable at the time.
I think two things are true, both that his behavior has really changed significantly, and that the media has been increasingly less friendly to his eccentric behavior. But I think it's the first of those true things that has impacted peoples' perceptions of him far more than the second.
It takes a tremendous amount of attention for a message to get into the public in 2024. For you to know Elon’s name in the first place is a result of careful marketing and PR.
So now that media is interested in Elon the question is what changed. Did Elon lapse on marketing? More likely is that he is giving off similar messaging but the media receiving it has decided to focus on other things.
I've honestly wondered whether or not he's going to end up as this generation's Howard Hughes. Makes fortune in other industry, parlays that into becoming a manufacturing/aerospace titan, slowly goes insane. He's 2 or 2.5 for 3 depending on how you count.
Starlink (v2 sats in particular) alone justifies Starship. Include HLS and potential Mars stuff and the comparison does not make sense. Don't listen to people who hate on SpaceX because of Musk. If you want to hate on him pick any AI-related thing, much easier target.
Yeah, of the full possibility space of mystifying decisions, I think this one might be the global maximum... It's such a "selling shovels to the miners" business line where they are (were?) positioned really well in.
Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.
To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:
• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)
• To manufacture the charging equipment
• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.
• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.
• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc
• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.
• To provide customer support.
If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.
I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.
I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.
I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.
Customer support would likely be Tesla.
If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.
500+ people to even do the HIGH level bits of running a SC network isn't a lot.
Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.
Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:
1. Locations
2. Quantity of locations
3. Quality (high charging rates)
4. User experience / design of hardware - software
5. Realtime reporting and navigation
6. Uptime of network
The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.
Same, I'm a new used Model Y owner, and the supercharger infrastructure (existing, expected expansion, and maintenance) was part of the reason I bought it. It would be nice if Musk would provide some rationale of what's going on over there so we know what to expect...
Tesla's engineering culture around the Supercharger is what makes it viable. They mass produce a custom-designed unit in groups of four, and then ship them from factory directly to job site. None of the other competitors are doing that yet, which is why Tesla has been both more profitable and more reliable. Maybe that culture will survive the layoffs, but it's a fast growing business with a ton of complicated engineering work to do.
If I'm not mistaken, many companies do the product engineering in house and outsource the manufacturing/maintenance to contractors. Tesla's supercharger network is mature enough that it won't see much innovation moving forward, and that might've motivated them to remove the entire team.
Could a plausible explanation be that with the spread of NACS, the supercharger network matters more to the overall industry and so Tesla can get away without footing the costs of managing it?
Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.
In that case, they should have spun it out. I think Supercharger would be good if boring business by itself. That would also get rid of the conflict of having car company own biggest charging network.
Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.
> Musk said, in his typical bluster, that he wants Tesla to be “absolutely hard core” about headcount reduction, saying that executives whose subordinates “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test”
“ continued layoffs have even worse optics, given Tesla’s move to ask shareholders for a $55 billion payout for its CEO just days after firing 14,000 people. That $55 billion could pay for 40 years worth of six-figure salaries for those employees.”
Musk is detached from reality. He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success and Tesla, a car manufacturing company, needs to do the same. Also that cost cutting and performance reviews only apply to others, just like in Twitter and elsewhere free speech means his speech not critics.
I think SpaceX is one disaster away from suffering the same fate, to be honest. Like, if the next Starship doesn't make it as far as the previous attempt (for example, if it blows up on the way up), Elon is going to come in like a wrecking ball.
> SpaceX has made it to MI complex status, and US gov will easily bail them out should worst come.
immaterial: "the worst" here is elon destroying the engineering culture & with it their ability to keep improving on what they've done so far. not going bankrupt (by way of a bailout or otherwise) is a necessary condition for avoiding the worst (boeing syndrome), but it's not sufficient
fedgov can pour money into the military industrial complex, but it can't do a whole lot more, and that only goes so far
Suppose for the sake of argument I managed to secure some sort of annuity that pays just enough to subsist on, starting now.
Knowing that I'm guaranteed enough income to stay minimally solvent does not mean I have no reason to care about losing additional income streams that enable me to have things like vacations and dinners at nice restaurants and digital watches.
Similarly, the relative security of the ~1/3 of Boeing's revenue that comes from government contracts is probably small consolation to its shareholders. They do that business more-or-less at cost; essentially 100% of their profits come from other sources.
Also, the "plus" part covers both overhead and profit. So, depending on what your overhead situation looks like, profit can still be minimal or non-positive.
SpaceX is in a much more solid position. You can tell that Musk hasn't interfered in its operations nearly as much as he has with Tesla or X (case in point: renaming it "X").
I gather that SpaceX, too, is cash flow negative and heavily invested in moonshot bets.
Meaning that, like for Elon's other companies, they might be in an incredibly vulnerable position, financially speaking. A disaster could sink the company. But simply failing to have some of these risky bets pay off could be just as damaging. For example, even if everything in the plan works on a technical level, if there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser.
Not entirely unlike how we're seeing signs that Tesla may not be a sustainable business, not necessarily because of anything fundamentally wrong with their core business, but because they made some over-aggressive assumptions about how many golden eggs their goose would lay.
> there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser
I'm wouldn't worry too much. Uncle Sam probably wants those capabilities anyway for the SDA to ramp up the NDSA now that the Russian nuclear threat is renewed.
This is completely irrelevant to the original claim (it’s outrageous for elons bonus to be X percent of every previous car) or my point (nurturing exponential growth is worth burning a lot of early cash flow).
It's one thing to say Tesla has been successful. It's quite another thing to say that Tesla's success justifies a market capitalization that is not only the highest in the auto industry, but is greater than the combined market capitalization of the second through fifth automakers.
Despite being the 11th biggest by revenue.
It's true that high-end carmakers seem to get a lot of goodwill valuation simply for being high-end carmakers. But normally not that much.
It appears that in general most legacy automakers are losing money on EVs and even plugin hybrids at this point. So I doubt there is that much profit in them currently even in the best of circumstances.
He's personally very wealthy, seems to have some mental issues, and has admitted to having a ketamine habit (although he also claims it's good for share prices). That's a combination that would make pretty much anyone struggle with attachment to reality.
The takeaway for me is that as a fundraiser and hype man, before he ruined his reputation, he was pretty successful, but in all other ways he's a massive self-promoting hack.
He wasn't really talked about as a hype man before, was he? The world is full of them: Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick come to mind.
The hagification of Musk in the press was on another level, like Steve Jobs, DaVinci and Obama rolled together. That this carefully crafted illusion is falling apart due to his online ramblings and bizarre business decisions is something worthy of study. He and Kanye West share a very similar trajectory in this regard.
Maybe working 100 hours a week to the point that you need ketamine to cope isn't a very bright idea. Based on the Cybertruck and "X", it's easy to see that this wouldn't be his first less-than-stellar move on the old 3D chess board.
It's not a cash payout. It's a stock grant that was worth a lot less when it was originally authorized.
It's a weird situation. It sounds like an unconscionable amount now only because of Musk's success in raising the stock value. Like he's being paid too much because he was too successful.
The size of the payout was linked to stock growth targets, so when the pay deal was agreed it would have been clear it would be worth a massive amount if the stock growth targets were hit.
The shareholders that will be voting to reauthorize are not the same shareholders that voted to authorize it originally.
I'm not a direct shareholder, but if the Deleware court gives me an option not to pay $55 Billion that I thought was committed, I'd strongly consider.
What are the implications of not approving? On the plus side, the company keeps the compensation. On the minus side, Musk will be upset; and there's a trust issue for future compensation. On the neutral side, those receiving future compensation will endeavour to follow an approval process that is likely to stand up in court.
Is it really a minus if Musk is upset? If he’s upset enough to leave, that seems like a potentially beneficial outcome.
There’s got to be some measurable number of people who are turned off from buying a Tesla because of his association, especially now that alternatives are available.
If I’m a shareholder, I don’t want an overly inflated stock price. I want a high stock price due to solid fundamentals. Tesla was temporarily extremely overvalued, but has since lost 60% of its market cap. It’s likely still overvalued compared with peers. It’s a car company, not a b2b SaaS company.
Put another way, which company is more likely to exist in 10 years: Microsoft or Tesla?
Not sure why you are down-voted. If you are an investor, you want a fair price when you buy. Think of going to a store, when there is a sale and prices are below value of a product, it's smart to buy. Same goes with stocks.
This assumes he cant sell and leave. It would be costly to him, but not impossible. Both sides have leverage in a situation of mutual assured destruction. I dont think it is accurate to only consider the leverage in one direction.
It's a way to inject "office heroics" via fear, but it also has its limits. Once the burnout sets in, everyone is just part of the death march at that point, seeing the product or the company to its slow demise.
I think a sad part of the calculus is there are lots of bodies willing to be thrown in the grinder. The only danger is a real competitor with a different business model that lets them treat people better.
Case in point is AWS. I've been reading they are a PIP factory for the last couple of years. Doesn't seem like they have a major issue hiring (partly due to lack of a competitor who is doing better).
I wonder if there's a slight possibility that Musk stopped caring about Tesla's long term success when his payment was cancelled, and he is now willing to temporarily inflate the price and dump the stock.
I imagine he staked quite a bit of Tesla stock as collateral for the many billions in loans still owed for the Twitter purchase. If the stock value declines too much (down 35% this year), his creditors will want a higher interest rate to reflect the higher risk of default.
This is one of those things that Software Engineers don't believe until there is an extended Bear market: There is always a line of eager beavers outside your company's door just waiting to take your place if you leave. The last decade (especially the hot job market of 2020-2022) lulled everyone into a feeling of job security and even irreplaceability.
Last I heard he's hemorrhaging paying customers (advertisers) who while publicly say it has to do with <insert popular issue>; privately say it has to do with worsening ROI (targeting).
Is that why fidelity repeatedly writes down the value of their portion of the needlessly name changed company that hemorrhaged advertisers due his personal quirky decisions and favored groups?
Is it? I used to find myself looking at Twitter due to the large number of places linking to it and orgs posting on it.
Like the local earthquake tracker on Twitter used to be great, it became unusable after musk mayhem as Twitter intentionally only showed many years old posts to those not signed in.
Nowadays that’s super rare. And I used to remember seeing links to a lot of articles published as like 13 tweets, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one of those. I think some used to be linked form HN.
Twitter is basically a zombie now. It’s way worse for the former user base at large.
It’s true that one groups probably think it’s better, those who were banned and are allowed back for example and those who liked the banned accounts.
Is it getting better? The bots have only gotten worse. They even have blue checkmarks[1] and the company does fuck all about it. And that's before we start talking about the massive hypocrisy present in Musk's implementation of "free speech".
No downtime, my “For You” tab is interesting, media sharing seems to be good… if anybody other than Musk were at the helm, there’d be nothing here to complain about.
We don't really need Tesla or Twitter/X. But we really do need SpaceX. He's already moved it to Texas to shield himself from lawsuits, so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.
Don’t think so, it’s just that he’s focused on another reality - losing the crown of the richest person in the world. And, he’s doing everything to keep that crown, everything else be dammed.
Side note: The "Tres Comas" Tequila is actually pretty good. Surprising that it's been 4 1/2 years since it debuted as a promo for the show and they're still making it today, years after the show ended.
The claim about pay is a complete lie. Musk doesn't demand money, he demands control.
The alleged money he asks for does not exist, it is just shares in Tesla, which are currently owned by the company. It's bizarre how misinformed these Journalists are, the real story is far more interesting then just Musk being greedy.
The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be very high.
It could even threaten the company's survival.
But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven me -- and lots of people who are way smarter than me -- wrong, again and again, over the past two decades. He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight.
The above post looks like carefully constructed satire, mostly there to make fun of people who hero-worship Elon Musk into thinking that Elon Musk personally handled all tasks at Tesla like Tony Stark / Ironman.
What decision did Elon make at Tesla was good for Tesla in the last 10 years?
I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today.
------
So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea.
Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good.
Businesses change, people change, the world changes.
Oh on the battery swap note I heard recently that may have been a ... scam?
Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
* A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.
* A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
* A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined.
* A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt.
* A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts.
* The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M
It is an impressive track record. And something that does frustrate me is people who want to entirely dismiss his track record in order to bolster their current criticisms of him. I think that is motivated reasoning.
But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided.
What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.)
But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions.
So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.
Thank you. I find your comment insightful... but I don't think it gives him proper credit for a lot of "boring day-to-day decisions" he's made at Tesla and SpaceX, particularly in operations and manufacturing, over the past two decades. Tesla's early team gives him all credit for ramping up Fremont's Model 3 production in 2019 to ~2.5x what even his execs had said was physically possible. He proved all of them -- and a lot of smart short-sellers -- wrong.
But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.
> but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day.
Hmm... That's a reasonable conclusion. You could be right.
I'll be a bit more humble and admit that there's a lot I don't know, so for me, the jury is out.
Things may implode at Tesla, or maybe the company will grow 10x. I wouldn't be surprised either way!
Respectfully, I think you're trying to do the humble thing by taking a neutral position, which I think is laudable, but your position in this thread has not actually been neutral. Your position has been (and my interpretation of this latest comment is that it still is) that this decision is more likely to actually be a good one, because it was made by Musk. But that's not a "humble" position any more than mine is. The humble position might be something like "beats me! what do I know?". I think your position is more like "deferential".
Sorry if this turned out to just be a semantic point about word choice. I originally thought that maybe it wasn't, that maybe there's something real here about what it means to have a humble view, but now I think maybe you just did mean something more like "deferential", in which case this was a pointless comment and I apologize :).
> But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because ...
I think we're both agreeing that "the jury is out", but disagreeing about which side of the question that jury is deciding should be the one with the "presumption of innocence" :)
Yeah, there's an even larger track record of making decisions that look unwise in the moment and everyone told him they were unwise and turns out they were unwise. That Bayesian prior makes it the most likely outcome until the jury returns with sufficiently convincing evidence to the contrary.
You can just say: I don't know. I don't know why Tesla is pursuing layoffs, or this particular layoff strategy.
And because I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. That's all "benefit of the doubt" means. "I don't know one way or the other, but this guy has a pretty good track record, so until I know more I won't assume anything bad."
"Benefit of the doubt" is not a neutral "I don't know". The commenter I responded to is giving the claim "this is a good decision" the benefit of the doubt, and I'm giving the opposite claim the benefit of the doubt. Neither of us is saying we know for sure, or even with much confidence, which is the right claim, but our defaults, our "priors", are opposite.
> Like a new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.
Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel came up with that idea. Elon Musk's contribution was suing them so that he can be called a founder.
> Like a new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
You're literally commenting on an article where the ENTIRE supercharging team was just fired, presumably to save money at Tesla.
> Like Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Dojo is a 7nm design while NVidia's is a 3nm design. It won't keep up at all, despite costing Tesla likely a $Billion+ to produce (between $100M mask costs, large software teams working for multiple years, etc. etc. it wouldn't surprise me to see Dojo's total cost be well in excess of a $Billion).
Are you saying he isn't allowed to have some failures on his very long list of ideas?
SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
Also, the "Alien Dreadnaught", a fully automated Model 3 production line with robots that move so fast you won't even be able to see them!
It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
Lots of famous scams became insanely huge before collapsing under their facade. Enron, Theranos, etc.
You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands
Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....
I mean… sure… it was also propagating a massive, institutional scale accounting fraud that brought down a “Big Five” accounting firm. Comparing these two companies to Tesla is insincere.
FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.
I'm not sure I'd limit it to FSD. The CyberTruck has several very glaring flaws that would not have happened had someone at Tesla talked Elon into accepting just a bit of conventional wisdom from the automotive industry. Things like "provide a protective layer of paint over the sheetmetal of the vehicle's body to prevent rust."
The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems.
Fit and finish on some models remains subpar.
I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.
Disagree on that. Subpar quality, delays, rejecting conventional wisdom are not scams or fraud, though it is risky. He isn’t promising magic that doesn’t exist a la theranos, and he has even personally stated TSLA is overvalued (vs Enron…). except for FSD, which now exists with some imperfection.
I don’t own TSLA, I have owned a Y for 3 years and love it. I have a cybertruck on order knowing it may be my dumbest purchase of my life, but also maybe the best. I think Tesla is an amazing tech company that is needlessly brutal to its employees.
Enron developed quite a few actual energy projects in the real world. They were as much of a legit company as a car manufacturer, but the scam part of Enron eventually got so big that it blew everything up.
Many big scams involve substantial "real" components, and sometimes the scammers have a balancing-act where too much success in either portion can threaten the other.
See also: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies.
Theranos fell apart the second they signed a deal with Walgreens and it became obvious they were using machines made by other vendors to do blood tests, because their own thing didn't work.
Enron got away with as much as they did because of the far more generous accounting rules that were in play back then.
I really wonder how true/untrue this is? For example, if you've founded and exited a company before I'm guessing you're more likely to do it again (this is gut feeling - I don't have data so happy for someone to disprove this with a study) but is that only because people think you're more likely to succeed and therefore give you more resources (capital, employees joining, customers paying etc.) improving your chances thus perpetuating this idea.
It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.
Hmm, time for the over under. Which happens first: Musk is replaced as CEO, or he drives Tesla into the ground? And in the latter case, how long do we think it will take?
In my opinion, this is all a massive gamble by Musk to pivot Tesla to an AI-first tech company. Except that Tesla cannot really do AI well and don't have the resources or talent the likes of Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. does to do novel research and push AI forward.
And he has to make this gamble because Tesla's fundamentals as a car company is going down the drain and its entire valuation hinges on the fact that they are not just a car company. That's why he's constantly announcing new products (robotaxis, humanoid robots) that are nowhere close to materializing, making visits to China to ink HD maps deal with Baidu for FSD and claiming to spend $10B on AI infrastructure this year.
He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.
Except that AI has not shown itself to be useful, at least not considering the staggering costs, anyway. Tens of billions of dollars to... fix people's grammar and generate tons of SEO spam? What PROBLEM are they solving here?
I think the parent poster stated it pretty clearly: the problem they're trying to solve is how to keep the stock price floating at a multiple of what the business's actual fundamentals suggest it should be.
The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.
In what way is it useful? What value is being provided? In my experience it requires constant supervision and readiness to intervene at any moment. There are plenty of reports and photos of it running wheels into curbs with little time for the driver to react.
Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful.
I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.
FSD is cool as a great demo. But the optics and facts are that it’s got people killed. Multiple people over the years. Silly mistakes causing crashes.
It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic.
Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead.
I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!
> While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.
For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.
How the heck did you reach the conclusion that the current state of FSD is safer than a human driver. The Tesla Community FSD tracker has it at 157 city miles per disengagement at the moment. The people collecting this data are the Tesla enthusiasts as well.
It has a very long way to go before it is better than a human. We won’t know the true stats until it is allowed to operate without supervision.
This notion is ridiculous to me everytime I hear it. How can we objectively measure that its safer? It feels way too easy to miss an externality and just chalk that up to teslas mile per mile being safer on a technicality
I subscribe to this thought. HN has really made a turn that anything Elon does is bad even when he has managed to pull off some unbelievable feats. He isn't binary in his accomplishments as most people are fairly complex.
It's a sad state of affairs - though I imagine its mostly cross-over of younger generations blending in their polarizing reddit politics over here. It is a dilutive process unfortunately.
"Any recent version", because "still recent, but not AS recent versions" were lucky to navigate a well marked roundabout in daylight without causing near misses.
FSD will be "close to magic" when it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, and it still gets you home.
If it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, then the safe behaviour is to wait it out and drive in the morning.
If FSD didn't work in those conditions, and this encouraged you to wait it out, then it might have just saved your life (or the lives of other road users).
I don't think they lead the pack on that, though. Everybody in the self-driving space is using AI to some degree.
E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something.
I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).
You have to remember a lot of those expenses are actually goosing the companies revenues side with low qual revenue. A good portion of investment dollars into OpenAI are with Microsoft credits -- which OpenAI then uses as opposed to real money.
Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.
Yes, that seems correct from what I've seen. And if self driving can be improved enough, then it will pay off. However, I remain skeptical that he'll be able to improve it enough to compensate for other deficiencies in the product.
Uber has been "out" of the self-driving game since end of 2020. The post T.K (Travis Kalanick) era has seen major divesting and shifting of the balance sheet away from longer term bets like self-driving in an attempt to reach profitability & shielding Uber from more risk. Here is a short history of self-driving @ Uber.
August '15: Uber announces its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in Pittsburgh, focusing on self-driving technology research and development.
May '16: Uber begins testing its self-driving Ford Fusion vehicles in Pittsburgh, marking its first public demonstration of autonomous vehicle technology.
August '16: Uber acquires Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineers. This ended up with a lawsuit over stolen IP that was a large setback from what I remember.
Sept. '16: Uber launches its first self-driving ride-hailing service in Pittsburgh, using a fleet of modified Ford Fusion's. Safety drivers are present in each car to take control if needed.
December '16: Uber starts testing its self-driving cars in San Francisco without obtaining the necessary permits from the CA DMV. The DMV revokes the registration of Uber's test vehicles, forcing the company to halt its operations in the city.
March '17: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Arizona, taking advantage of the state's friendly regulations for autonomous vehicle testing.
March '18: A fatal accident occurs in Tempe, Arizona, when an Uber self-driving vehicle strikes and kills a pedestrian. Uber suspends its self-driving testing program across all cities in the aftermath of the incident.
July '18: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Pittsburgh, with additional safety measures and limitations on the vehicles' operating conditions.
March '19: Uber receives a $1 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, Toyota, and DENSO for its self-driving unit, valuing the division at $7.25 billion.
June '19: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in San Francisco, having obtained the necessary permits from the California DMV.
Dec '20: Uber sells its ATG division to Aurora, a self-driving vehicle startup, in a deal valued at $4 billion. As part of the agreement, Uber invests $400 million in Aurora and retains a 26% stake in the combined company.
If you're a top-tier AI researcher, why TF would you choose Tesla to work for? The shine has gone off Musk as a super-genius. All you'd be getting is an arbitrary, capricious boss and terrible work hours.
Tesla AI orgs can pay well above market for AI talent. Thats about the only reason anyone would join. If you are insensitive to work hours but want to get paid, its not the worst option.
Do they really outbid Google, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, Apple, etc.? I totally believe they pay better than the average startup but those companies are spraying money around right now and their stock options have a lot more upside – Tesla’s P/E is wildly high so they’d need a phenomenal reversal in fortune to drive it enough higher for anyone to see a great return.
Its not uncommon for PhD hires from top schools to be paid upper 6figs (i.e 600k+) of real money, according to a few friends of mine doing PhDs at top schools. OpenAI is probably the only one thats truly "competitive."
I also (personally) know of several non-ML offers that were substantially higher than FAANG. Though even within FAANG only Meta and maybe Google (and Amazon at hogher levels) are very competitive. Meta and Google likely have better growth prospects though with better refreshers, bonuses, stock growth, etc. But up front Tesla AI offers are definitely very strong. Even then I'm not sure its worth the stress.
The real question is why people keep working for these obnoxious companies/leaders, I rather watch grass grow than work for Tesla and that egomaniac of Elon smuck
Tesla is in a bit of a bind in that the model y is difficult to improve (beyond the upcoming highland refresh). Fundamentally, it does its job so well that all it needs are minor tweaks.
Supercharging network is essentially complete from a fundamentals perspective, you can nearly go anywhere with a EV with a bit of planning. The market can fill in the gaps.
The roadster and semi situations are headscratchers, but I guess Tesla doesn’t want to hassle with a “sports car” with the same performance as its biggest sedan. I don’t think the Semi really works purely from an energy density perspective. Diesel-electric hybrids make far more sense for big rigs for current battery tech. The Tesla semi is sorta stuck.
The layoffs make sense in that light. They have implemented the step change in Ev Manufacturing, built the machine to build the machines, are very close with FSD, built the charging network… working to avoid innovators dilemma, perhaps?
And Tesla still has employees, but fewer than before.
I was trying to highlight the idea that most workers dont have to rely on having a shitty work product to ensure their job security.
This itself is a reaction to the idea that a job offer is a life long commitment akin to marriage. In a healthy labor market, employers would want to retain talent because it is profitable to do so. I don't employers retaining unproductive employees is a desirable state.
This means that they can employ more people when it is productive to do so, and let them go when they dont need or want them.
I think this is a good thing in general. I dont think we should structure our expectations or the labor market around the idea that companies should retain unprofitable workers.
Developing a bad reputation is like sunburn. It doesn't turn into cancer instantly, but it slowly accumulates damage over time. Right now a top worker (particularly in a critical field like AI) has a lot of choices, and the company that gets a reputation for randomly firing entire teams is going to be a harder sell.
Checkout Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Those who need a job urgently especially now a days wouldn't look into "reputation". They may not even leave later as long as their needs are met.
Pretty sure that a good techie (not even someone in AI) has most of their basic needs taken care of. Working for a psychopath who can't control his impulses does a killer number on the other levels of Maslow's needs...
>I was trying to highlight the idea that most workers dont have to rely on having a shitty work product to ensure their job security.
I think, then, that we're saying the same thing?
That, yes, most workers, like heart surgeons, or engineers at a good tech company, don't have to do a shitty job to ensure job security, whereas Musk's employees do, because that means Musk will retain them while firing many workers who do a good job. I don't think either Musk retaining unproductive employees or firing productive employees are desirable, but that seems to be what he's doing, hence the advice spawning this thread.
I guess I just dont understand where that assumption comes from. How is this or any tech layoff different? Builders and surgeons do suffer layoffs when they dont bring in more revenue than they cost.
There are tons of industries where jobs, projects, and labor demands are cyclic that dont resort to cynical employee sabotage.
I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.
In my opinion at least, jobs aren't guaranteed lifelong appointments. They are open ended contracts that either party can terminate any time. Termination from either side isn't a moral transgression in general, but I understand there can be some issues on the margin.
Im genuinely perplexed by others reactions and I think my post was an attempt to get at why so many people see it different
> I guess I just dont understand where that assumption comes from.
It comes from multiple people in this post, so it might be worth just asking them, if you want to find out. I'm sure the posters are willing to answer a good faith question.
>I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.
I have not seen this, but there are assumptions that the employees fired were somehow unprofitable. Perhaps at another company, this might be a safer assumption. In this case, it's more likely the action was irrational, impulsive, and drug- and/or ego-fueled. We'd need some evidence that they were fired because they were worth less than they cost, to make that assumption.
Employees are rarely a JIT component of a strong, healthy business. Good businesses have a little fat so that they can expand or react to changing market conditions. Make the teams too lean and then you're at constant risk of losing a key member and watching all that institutional knowledge walk out the door.
And that's if you treat employees well. Treat them like expendable cogs in the machine and your churn will be higher than industry average and you'll end up being less efficient.
Think of why the body has tons of leukocytes roaming around, just looking for viruses to whack. If your body had to wait for an infection before creating leukocytes, you'd die pretty quickly.
To be fair that’s good advice for most people in large corporations. I’ve even seen people deliberately spin up crises out of nothing to then heroically solve them and get an easy promo.
Its target market, per Tesla, is not those use cases. I think electric yard tractors are already a thing.
The “electrify road shipping” would go a lot smoother if Tesla was honest about “electric performance + a diesel base load” but I guess Elon doesn’t want to concede the argument? Honestly surprised no one else has moved in this space?? Maybe it just doesn’t work?
Seems troubling for the recent vendors Ford and Rivian that just signed on to be users of the Supercharger network if the thing now has high odds of (figuratively) rusting away without support.
I wonder if Tesla is in any breaches of contracts that they may have signed with these companies, and how much Ford/Rivian paid for acccess.
So, a very smart CEO works for six years to turn a minor automotive startup into the world’s most valuable car company, enriching you while you sat on shares in the company. And despite this, you think he deserves his compensation (in the form of shares in the company) to be cancelled? Even though it was contractually promised, and agreed by shareholders? Bear in mind that the package is only worth a large amount because Tesla has grown so hugely under Musk’s leadership.
I’m interested to know how many other HNers also hold this belief, or think this is a reasonable way to treat entrepreneurs in America?
I think it’s reasonable not to allow a single employee to be compensated (55b$) more than all the EBITDA the company has ever made.
I think it’s reasonable to question the decision making demonstrated by firing the most successful team at the company and put the major competitive advantage at risk.
I think it’s reasonable to question the constant monkeying with product and design (Cybertruck, removal of loved features like LIDAR or physical wiper blade controls).
I think it’s reasonable to question how the CEO has lost first mover advantage so badly by failing to improve products and introduce new models as the legacy competition and foreign companies quickly have caught up.
I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.
When the deal was agreed, it wasn't worth anything close to $55bn. It's only worth that now due to the incredible rise in value of the stock under Musk. A deal is a deal. As a £six-figure shareholder I am voting for Musk to be paid what he is owed (in the June 13th meeting). And voting for Tesla to incorporate in a state where judges don't make arbitrary decisions on executive pay
We don't know the full details of the Supercharger team's "firing" yet, so let's not speculate.
Reuters speculated when they reported about the cancellation of the affordable Model 2, and they got that reporting horribly wrong (damaging the stock price with their error).
As for Superchargers being a major competitive advantage, that's no longer the case, as the network is open to cars from other brands.
Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage. Name another American or European carmaker that sells as many EVs as Tesla. BYD briefly caught up in terms of raw sales figures, but that trend quickly reversed when China's economic woes weighed on the company.
As for "failing to improve products," the Model S has been improved in so many meaningful ways, it's practically a new car. The performance (0-60 in 1.99s) is absolutely mind-bending, and Tesla's innovations such as the carbon-wrapped motor are responsible for this.
> I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.
Which ones are failing? SpaceX is untouchable. Neuralink successfully implanted a brain/computer interface in a paraplegic man. X.com delivers features at a greater rate than Twitter 1.0, at lower operational cost, and -more importantly- it is defending free speech. xAI just secured $6bn in funding, with its value soaring to $18bn. All of which was acheived by a man who is "distracted."
And other companies that Musk co-founded (e.g. OpenAI, PayPal), seem to be ticking along nicely also.
1. You want corporations, that already have huge protections, and relatively weak governance to re-domicile in states that offer even less regulations.
2. You assume that Tesla couldn't possibly make a bad decision regarding the Supercharger team and are casting reports of its demise as mere speculation when the leader of that team is terminated, and members of the team are reporting its demise.
3. You're stating that the Model 2 is still alive, and will be here any time soon!
4. That the Supercharger network isn't a competitive advantage.
5. Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage when the number of well-financed competitors has increased dramatically over the last 10 years.
6. That the Model S (which sells in minuscule amounts) is indicative of Tesla improving its product line up.
7. That X is succeeding when it's bleeding advertisers, and its value is continually being downgraded by banks.
8. And that OpenAI and PayPal owe their success to Musk who was minimally involved in OpenAI, and Musk hasn't been involved with PayPal for 23+ years.
Who's delusional here?
As Upton Sinclair famously said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
1. I want the people who built and own corporations to be able to decide what they pay their staff. If the Delaware judge wants to decide what Tesla employees get paid, she can do - but she needs to own enough of the company to have that decision-making power.
2. That's not what I said. I just said that we need to wait until all the facts and strategy emerges, rather than going on a few statements by individuals who are not (or no longer) involved in Tesla
3. Yes, as confirmed by Musk in the earnings call.
4. It used to be. It's not any more, because it's open to all carmakers, as I said
5. Well financed maybe. Fisker, Nikola, Rivian etc - they all got surprising amounts of financing. That doesn't mean they've displaced Tesla, or come anywhere near displacing Tesla. I'd advise you to read the news about Tesla competitors, both legacy and new - look how many BEVs they're shipping vs Tesla, and look at their margins on each vehicle sold. I think you might be surprised at how far Tesla leads the field
6. I gave the carbon-wrapped motor as an example of Tesla innovations. It's one of many. The refreshed Model 3 is also an example of how Tesla is improving products. You claimed Tesla is "failing" to improve products. There are many counterexamples that refute that statement
7. X bled advertisers yes. But it's still a great social network, and that's all I care about. Elon didn't buy Twitter in order to make money. He bought it because the West needs a platform that prioritises free speech (as far as legally possible). X.com is imperfect but it's an improvement on Twitter. I don't care if it's "downgraded by banks." The whole point of Elon owning Twitter is that it no longer serves the interests of a few powerful people and institutions, and instead is an inclusive platform for people across the political spectrum.
8. Musk co-founded OpenAI. If he was "minimally involved" he wouldn't be listed as a co-founder. PayPal used to be called "X.com" Guess who owned that domain name? It was renamed to "PayPal" when Elon was ousted from the management structure. I'd recommend reading up on the history here. It's very interesting - lots of twists and turns.
1. Corporations are not unitary organizations; shareholders have rights and Delaware does a good job of protecting them within reason.
2. Statements by THE PEOPLE ON THE TEAM WHO WERE JUST FIRED have a lot more weight than an internet commentator saying "let's wait for the details to arrive."
3. Sure. Musk says a lot of shit that is completely divorced from reality...
4. Competing carmakers have adopted the connector, but will they be able to really leverage the ease of use that Tesla owners have? Plug in and go?
5. I'm talking about companies like VW Group, GM, Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, BYD. Not little startups.
6. The carbon wrapped motor was first discussed in 2016, and is on the Model S, possibly the lowest selling Tesla. If Tesla is going to take 8 years for every "innovation", they're going to be DOA.
7. A great social network, filled with bots, and Nazis. Elon didn't buy Twitter for any free-speech ideals, he was forced to buy Twitter because he couldn't control his impulses and made a stupid purchase offer that he couldn't weasel his way out of. Everything else is spin. And "inclusive" is hardly what most neutral observers would use to describe Twitter.
8. Is Musk still involved with OpenAI? No. Did he do more than spend a few bucks, no. Martin Eberhard has more claim to founding Tesla than Musk does with OpenAI. And you do know that Musk was FIRED because of his stupid idea to rename PayPal and make it into a WeChat clone.
Looks like you're still delusional. That'll happen when you get financially and emotionally invested in a guy like Musk.
1. A majority of shareholders voted for the original pay deal. They deserve to have their vote respected
2. I don't judge company strategy based on statements by disgruntled ex-employees. It would be naive to do so.
3. Things Musk says in shareholder meetings are SEC audited. So if he says the Model 2 is coming, it will come.
4. The Tesla Supercharger network is great. But it's not a competitive advantage as it's open to other brands.
5. As I said, compare the number of BEVs sold and the margins, whether we're looking at startups or legacy auto. Come back to me when you've found one that comes close to Tesla in Q1 2024 sales and margins.
6. You're arguing in bad faith. As I said, the carbon-wrapped motor is just one example of innovation, and the Model 3 Highland is just one example of product improvement. Your point was that Tesla "failed" to improve their products. That point is easily disproven.
7. X.com is not filled with bots and Nazis in my experience. If it was, I wouldn't use it. What data do you base your argument on?
8. Eberhard hadn't sold a single production vehicle at Tesla. Elon Musk was co-founder, chairman, product architect and the main source of funding when Roadster (Tesla's first car) was designed and produced. He oversaw the design of the Roadster from the beginning. Musk won the Global Green 2006 product design award and the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Roadster. Not Eberhard. Musk. Production of the Roadster started in 2008, a year after Eberhard had been replaced at Tesla.
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Let's not accuse each other of being "delusional" - let's learn from each other and contribute to a healthy conversation.
You're giving Musk a lot more credit for the share price than he deserves. If there hadn't been a pandemic, and stimulus checks, and people playing on Robinhood for fun, TSLA wouldn't have gone up nearly so much.
Put another way, sure, the stock price went above the targets he set for himself. How much did profits go up?
Musk is obviously the best thing that has happened to Tesla. Tesla the auto company is near worthless, Tesla the "making dreams real" company is worth money. Musk is the reason Tesla is the later and not the former.
This is the stupidest theory ever. Supercharger expansion is not slow because of Tesla or any technical reason under their control, but because Supercharger stations require a) massive amounts of electricity and b) local government planning approvals, and the 2nd of those in particular only moves at the speed of government. There are sites in Australia that have been tied up for years by petty council politicking.
"Let go" is a horrible euphemism, like the employee wants to go, but is being prevented from doing so. I'm setting you free employee! Enjoy your no job and no money!
Reminds me of Bill Lumbergh in office space, "so if you could just go ahead and [thing Peter Gibbons really didn't want to do]".
Fired means the role will be backfilled, and the employee was let go for performance reasons or whatever else.
Laid off means the role won’t be backfilled. It could also mean the role was renamed, and they wanted to let the employee go but it looks better for everyone to say it was a layoff.
I think Fired means it could be backfilled, but I've seen plenty of instances where the company decided to restructure or do things differently instead of hiring someone else.
Just because they were fired for cause doesn't mean the company wants to keep that job around afterwards.
That said, it is unusual not to say 'laid off' these days unless the person was fired for cause, but the recently media frenzy around the term might have them saying other things instead.
In the UK this would be done as redundancies with a consultation period and semi-strict laws to adhere to.
In the US it seems like you can let people go for at moments notice with little process - in the UK that looks like what we would call “being fired” generally for cause.
“In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.
[…]
The doctrine of at-will employment can be overridden by an express contract or civil service statutes (in the case of government employees). As many as 34% of all U.S. employees apparently enjoy the protection of some kind of "just cause" or objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category, including the 7.5% of unionized private-sector workers, the 0.8% of nonunion private-sector workers protected by union contracts, the 15% of nonunion private-sector workers with individual express contracts that override the at-will doctrine, and the 16% of the total workforce who enjoy civil service protections as public-sector employees.”
Yes that's what "fired" means. My understanding is that this means the same thing in the US as in Britain, although Britain has much stronger labour protection so a lot of these whimsical "I'll just fire whoever I want" things can't fly here.
In Britain, 'fired' usually implies a problem with individual performance whereas ,'made redundant' could be part of corporate restructuring. 'let go' is more ambiguous
In the US, they're complete synonyms. You say "laid off" if you're trying to be less direct about it. It's the same as saying someone "passed away" rather than "died"
No, the US usage is pretty similar to the UK senses: no one is “laid off” for stealing from the cash register or napping on the job. They get fired.
OTOH, you could say that a division was “fired” or “laid off” and they’re almost interchangeable. “Fired” might carry the connotation that the specific division was underperforming while “laid off” could mean that it was due to some outside factor (e.g., half of R&D was laid off because manufacturing costs shot up)
Nah, we say someone got fired regardless of whether it was for cause or not. It's the go-to word for any kind of employer-initiated employment termination when you don't have to be nice about it. It's just that when someone was fired for stealing from the register, you're not going to be nice about it.
Those R&D folks who got laid off are going to go home and complain about getting fired. It doesn't imply it's their fault - it implies that they're angry about it.
That’s not what fired means in the US. Being fired is for cause. If I got laid off I would never say I was fired, I would say I was laid off. If I said I was fired I’d have to explain what I did wrong, whereas if I was laid off nobody asks questions.
In the US, “for cause” termination is specific terminology used to disqualify someone from getting unemployment benefits, which means the employer’s unemployment insurance premiums do not go up.
For example, if you terminate an employee for coming to work late over and over, then the employee was clearly not meeting their expectations and they get terminated due to their own actions, hence they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. Because the state does not have to pay unemployment benefits, the state does not increase the amount of unemployment insurance premiums the employer has to pay.
If you terminate someone to improve cash flow, then the employee is not considered to be terminated due to the employee’s actions, and hence they would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Hence the employer’s unemployment insurance premium probably will go up.
More generally, fired is used for anything specific to the individual, whether for cause (they were incompetent) or other reasons (the boss didn't like them). Laid off is for a departure due to company reasons (lack of demand for their product).
Technically "for cause" means anything other than when the position is eliminated. So usually "laid off" means that the total headcount is being reduced, or that being reallocated to other tasks, so employees that are no longer needed are laid off.
If you fire a 500 person team and intend to replace them with new people who do the same thing, it's not really a lay-off, but for legal purposes they probably have to treat it as a lay-off in terms of severance / unemployment compensation because I doubt they can document an actual cause for most of them.
You’re operating under an assumption that there is an employment contract with a long notice period in place. In many (most?) American jobs this is not the case.
In Britain the "casualisation" of labour is considered a big problem and unions fight it.
As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.
Honestly I think the difference is that there is a higher rate of self employment/small business ownership. The more legal burden placed on hiring and firing the more you fuck over small operations and give advantage to larger ones.
I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.
Most jobs in the USA are "at will" meaning there is no contract and either you or your employer can decided to terminate the arrangement at any time for any (legal) reason.
In practice the first is sometimes true, and the second always.
Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
I don't think you can infer causality here. There are plenty of countries with easy firing (think sweatshops) and abysmal wealth levels. The US is wealthy for a bunch of reasons, including being a superpower and controlling the global reserve currency.
The US got to be a dollar-pringing superpower because of its commitment to economic growth.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
The US got to be a superpower because of 2 world wars and massive purchasing of US armaments by the allies, effectively transferring British Empire wealth across the water, kickstarting large local manufacturing, and being a safe production hub after the wars.
Only militarily did the US become a superpower in WW2.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
Easy hiring/firing of employees may not guarantee a robust economy, but we can see from the situation in Canada, for example, that harder-than-necessary hiring/firing can definitely inhibit an economy that would otherwise be much stronger if it didn't have to deal with such artificial obstruction.
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
A business having to keep someone for some time that they don't like is the reality of labor and the cost of doing business.
If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.
Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.
I think it's fair to describe the way Elon fires people[1] as "whimsical". The reason the government has a role here is to prevent people getting fired for being black/white/male/female/etc.
(UK) The govt. does not force the employer to continue employing you - but they do guarantee you are given a fair amount of notice and some severance pay depending on tenure.
The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for
In casual speech it's common for people to use "fired" to cover both true firing and layoffs. It's not a great ambiguity, but when people talk about a whole team it's ~always a layoff.
Ah yea here in America you're employer and pretty much let you go for any reason and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Layoffs imply they're not your fault and firing does but it has no real meaning and the terms are used interchangeably.
In the US being fired means you had a job yesterday but involuntarily don't have one today. Most employment is at will, so the employer doesn't need a reason to discontinue your employment. It could be performance or cost savings or some mix of both. It could also be no reason at all. The specifics don't really matter. They also don't need to provide any severance in most states, no matter the reason.
The "oh you weren't fired, you were laid off" line is manufactured by HR and is meaningless. If you come in to work one day and your boss decides they don't like the color of your shirt and shows you the door, were you fired or "laid off"?
The title works fine for me. Using the word "fired" conveys to me that Elon walked into a room and fired everyone. Not that it was part of a months-long planned corporate restructuring process.
Instead the NACS is the proprietary Tesla plug but using the CCS protocol instead of a CAN-based one. Practically this means that all superchargers remain compatible and it also means that all cars with the CCS plug are not compatible (unless the plug is changed or an adapter is used). Therefore your statement is misleading in addition to being plain wrong about „Type 3“. Tesla has, of course, always also supported the CCS outside of the United States, both inside the superchargers and inside the cars.
The NACS is not part of CCS.
The plug type is not part of CCS either.
And what you called „Type 3“ is in fact a completely different plug that uses this name as standard.
Perhaps this might help explain why you both are saying similar things in different ways and maybe just talking past each other:
CCS doesn't exist as a standards body in and of itself. It's a joint effort by the North American SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) and the European-based IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). The CCS standard is actually sets of interoperable standards defined by both the SAE and the IEC built to work in tandem. There is no actual "CCS standards document" there are only SAE standards and IEC standards, but if the joint CCS work does its job they interlock to form one worldwide mega-standard which we call CCS because it useful to name the combined Voltron form.
The NACS plug is in the final drafting process of becoming a recognized SAE standard. In that SAE standards (help) define the CCS standard, NACS is being standardized as a part of CCS, or at least the part that SAE controls/owns. Whether or not you can name it "CCS" depends on what you think the name CCS stands for. SAE and IEC always had different plug standards, so in that regard NACS isn't new to CCS and is a normal part of CCS because whatever SAE says is the North American standard plug is the CCS plug in North America. On the flipside with naming, is branding and NACS clearly has its own brand name and development history. It was developed for Tesla initially. It was opened under the brand name "NACS" to help sell it to the rest of manufacturing. "North American Charging Standard" was an intentional PR move. Because it wasn't intentionally developed for being called "CCS" and because it has a strong brand name of its own, does that mean you can't call it "CCS"? (A rose by any other name, right?)
When that standard is finalized it will be the third type of plug that has a practical rollout. Does that make it the real "Type 3" as opposed to the older prototype that didn't make it past standards processes? Do we want that to call it "CCS Type 3" in the long run to reduce confusion? If "CCS Type 1" is truly dead, but is also the standardized name for "Plug that North America uses and is SAE standardized" should we refer to it as "CCS Type 1 2.0" or something like that?
Names are one of the hardest problems to solve. But to recap the facts: NACS will be as close to a part of the CCS standard as it gets (because it will be an SAE standard), and is a new type of plug now directly related to the CCS standard. Whether you want to call NACS a part of CCS is a matter of perspective and branding as much as "standards" on the ground.
It's the third plug that CCS uses. The whole point of NACS is that it is CCS.
It's going to be easy for everyone to support it because they support CCS already. Charger manufacturers like that. Charging networks like that. Car manufacturers like that.
Control right? This way Tesla keeps ownership and control of the network and can license access out to competitors. If they spun it off, they would have to pay for access themselves.
Still, I can't see the 4D chess behind this move. It's far beyond my limited understanding.
If you want to settle for the Electrify America charging experience, sure. The plug on the end of the charger was never the main advantage that the supercharger network brought to the table.
I would guess a consistent and effective maintenance of equipment and decent payment system. I thought that the network was the only thing really going for Tesla, I hope everyone involved on this makes out well because I don't really care to trust some mom and pop to set the standards even though in general I really care about mom and pop.
When I hear about Tesla and the Supercharger network what I hear about most is how easy it was to plan long trips. A road trip on gas is easy, there's a gas station in every town with a few thousand people, fast EV chargers aren't yet as common. So if your routing system understood its range, and where the charging stations where it was pretty seamless. Much better than the stuff from other EV makers.
and there are a lot of them. Usually 8-16 per supercharger chargers at a single location vs the few electrify America stations I'v seen to on the east coast that have only two chargers at the station. So I'm less worried charging at a Supercharger that all the chargers will be taken. It also tells you on the screen how many chargers are available at each location before you get there.
Deep integration with the car is the most difficult piece of the Supercharger system to achieve for any other charging network. They have the best in-car and in-app charging experience, with the best routing to chargers and scheduling tools. Most networks still require you to use an app or RFID card to start a charge, Tesla you just plug in.
The other is probably just scale of the parent company in terms of being able to build out and service the network. They tend to have more prominent, nicer locations for their stations.
CCS2 supports "just plug in to charge" as an optional feature so depending on your manufacturer and CCS Type 1 charger it worked some of the time. All the charger networks and manufacturers are now migrating to NACS hardware over (the ugly) CCS Type 1 and NACS requires that CCS2 optional feature (NACS uses Tesla designed hardware but CCS protocols/software) so most charger networks including Electrify America and most manufacturers moving forward past the current transition to NACS should all support "just plug in to charge". "Soon."
Standardizing NACS was an interesting win for Tesla because their hardware design won out, but it was also a massive breach in their "moat" putting the other charging networks and other manufacturers on a much more equal footing with the charging story.
On the one hand it makes direct dumb "bottom line" business sense why Tesla would stop investing in its own network with such a massive breach in their "moat" about to spill out and maybe equalize the playing field. Perhaps especially if you think you've already earned enough recognition for your brand that you don't need to maintain it long term, just maintain the facade and PR spin of it. On the other hand, with such a huge first mover advantage and what everyone knows was a respectably huge "moat", you'd think there would be pivots to take advantage of to bulwark other parts of the same moat and still maintain some other advantage along the way to the old adage that "Teslas are the easiest to charge". Gutting the department may truly be a short term gain for shareholder quarterly results traded for a long term mistake and the risk of the loss of that first mover advantage they worked so hard to earn.
It's certainly fascinating to armchair quarterback what other options were in play here.
While I do think the Tesla / 'NACS' plug is a lot nicer/smaller/easier to use than CCS1, what really is the big win here? It's all based on CCS protocol anyway and hence will have the exact same interoperability issues than before.
The big win for interoperability is that NACS as proposed flipped some CCS protocol features from "optional" to "required". The EU mandated some of those optional features. In North America so far it has been a free for all how much of the software protocol manufacturers actually implement of CCS and many truly have done "the bare minimum". That was the bargain that NACS proposed for Supercharger compatibility in the US was that the SAE should have to also start mandating those features. If it gets standardized that way, and it seems like that will happen, a lot of the interoperability issues should start to go away. One of those features was "Plug and Charge".
I rented a Tesla and did a East Coast to West Coast journey in a week and the Tesla did all the work for me for charging planning. I had never driven a Tesla or any EV at that point and I figured it out in about 5 mins on how to drive and how to plan charging after playing with the computer. I didn't think about it at all, and a week later got the charging bill from the rental company and it was hilariously cheaper than gas.
The Electrify America experience is pulling into the far corner of a Walmart parking lot, and often waiting for one of the working units, or struggling for 10 minutes to even start one.
The reliability is terrible and perhaps forcing VW to operate a charging network as a punishment does not lead to a good customer experience
Tesla and Rivian network charger locations are usually in better spots than a Walmart. The chargers work the first time, at full speed and availability is always correct in the vehicle display.
There's roughly a 25% chance the credit card reader / app will incorrectly reject payment (broken or not) on competitors' stations, and roughly a 10% chance the charger will be broken. There's a 1% chance it'll feed bad voltage to your car. There's also a 5% chance you'll have to make a phone call to arrange payment.
Of the dozens of issues that I've had across a few different cities, I think the problem was related to the connector once.
If they'd simply put standard vending machine credit card readers on them and not bothered with apps, they'd have cut their downtime by at least 75%.
I feel like this kind of attitude is where we go wrong as engineers. We spend so much time and energy bickering over and creating the perfect solution when sometimes you just need to ship and provide a solution.
I agree that sometimes things are either “a solution” or “not a solution”. EV chargers that do not charge more than half the time are still squarely in the “not a solution” category.
The IEC 62196 Type 2 connector is the European connector and still standard in Europe. It is different from the CCS Type 1 connector that has been used in North America, also known as the SAE J1772 Type 1 "Combo" connector as it was also standardized originally in North America under SAE J1772. Wikipedia doesn't have a separate page for the "Combo" connector and mentions it in the SAE J1772 page instead. (The base Type 1 is the Level 1/Level 2 charger and the "Combo" Type 1 is the combined one with AC plugs.)
It's very useful to note that the North American SAE Type 1 "Combo" connector and the European IEC Type 2 connector have surprisingly different form factors with the SAE one being bulkier by quite a bit. That too was a factor in NACS getting fast tracked for standardization. (It's the least bulky of the three hardware designs.)
I think your (plural) problem is that you're talking about chess as opposed to a chess board.
A chess board is 2D. But, you could technically say it's 4D (3 dimensions + time). You could also technically say it's 1D (a string) if you play by just writing the chess notation.
Just a thought experiment. I was implying that chess is a game, not a board. That game can be encoded/coded without any need for a Z variable, can't it? My Rook doesn't go up and down an ladder, it doesn't need a 3D array to record its position. So that's 2D + Time, or 3D. YRMV.
You jest, but it is impossible to say this is a mistake without knowing the future. If anything, it's a good indicator that Tesla is forecasting very hard times for EV charging adoption. Killing the goose that lays eggs all day may be justified if the egg supply is exploding.
It's the rational consequences of Tesla failing to turn it's charger network into an network effect creating an monopoly for Tesla.
Essentially the ploy was for Tesla to use the charging network as a loss leader to make Tesla the only/most viable EV brand, and because both roads and electricity grids are well regulated utilities that failed so from here on the only source of money for Tesla is going to be the company revenue/profit, as it's phase as a buy an monopoly startup is over.
There are a crazy number of charging companies out there. They literally just install a charger at any parking spot anywhere and connect electricity. It’s the simplest thing in the world, there is no ploy to be a monopoly in the space. The issue is there is not enough EVs on the road. Think cell towers in the middle of no where, sure you wish they were there but they just are not useful or profitable to many people.
This. I think because NACS is becoming the standard is exactly why they don't want to invest in EV Charging. When Superchargers were Tesla-only, they were a way to promote and market Tesla cars. Now that every car will be able to use them, that's gone. Let someone else run EV charging networks.
Additionally, EV Charging is not going to be a high-margin, disruptive industry that is a darling of wall street. Can you imagine investors getting excited about investing in the largest operator of Gas Stations? I don't think so. It's going to end up being a tight, competitive business where people pick where to charge based on prices down to the penny. No one's going to end up as a billionaire running that business.
Elon is very interesting guy, on one side he complains about birth rate, on the other side impacts people's mind to not have a kid, because they're not safe in their workplace and expects they must dedicate large part of their lives to his companies
Your comment elevates him to godlike status… you expect him to be managing humanity’s birthrate with his corporate decisions? He’s just running a company here, and by all indications, he’s struggling at it.
It would be a violation of his job responsibilities, and get him in trouble with shareholders if he was doing anything other than trying to make the company succeed.
Moreover, this is the basic challenge of running a business: if you are you afraid to make hard decisions, the company will collapse and every employee will be out of a job.
It's curious that you remain a fan despite being able to see his hypocrisy. I wonder why you haven't made the logical leap that it isn't worth being a fan of a hypocrite like this.
I mean, it's completely fair to downvote that comment, because it's not entirely productive. That said, it's an interesting point.
Musk makes no secret about how he feels people should be having more children, but at the same time he runs his companies in a way that makes it hard for people to prioritize their families. He intentionally pressures his teams to choose his business over the families that he insists people have.
Honestly, it seems like a cognitive dissonance of the entire right wing in the US these days; they expect people to work ever harder to produce more and more GDP while they lament that people are having fewer children. In the end, there are only so many hours in a week and at some point people burn out.
If you work for Elon chances are you aren't interested in sexual activity (too busy working 110+ hours per week, no libido or time) or you live in an area where childcare is difficult to accommodate.
In Europe they are. All new chargers in Europe use the CCS2 standard, and teslas have a CCS2 socket. NACS is not suitable for Europe, because of three phase AC charging (which makes home charging much easier/faster than in the US).
I think all of the V3/V4 superchargers are open to all cars, otherwise Tesla wouldn't get government funding for expanding the charging network (at least in the EU, maybe UK changed that after brexit).
Interestingly it's still mostly teslas charging there, although superchargers are one of the cheapest options to charge.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadAlso, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.
Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...
I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.
Musk’s value add is as the celebrity CEO; the Jobsian ideal taken to its natural conclusion. He’s supposed to be this forward-looking visionary and having him at the helm of your company is supposed to make it forward-looking by proxy.
This is all well and good until the celebrity CEO fries his brain with Special K and builds a bubble of yes-men around him. Then it becomes a massive liability.
[1]: https://cbonds.com/bonds/1504323/
At the same time tho: remember https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive
if the media reaction to that had been "tesla ceo pulls private driving detail in attempt to discredit journalist" it would have formed a much more obvious through-line with the Top Gear "tesla ceo pulls battery telemetry to sue comedy show" from years prior and "tesla employees can watch you have sex in your car" from years later.
See Also the ongoing excuse of "autopilot was not engaged when the crash happened" or Tesla's insurance charging more if you drive at night. https://electrek.co/2023/09/15/musk-wanted-to-use-tesla-came... Things add up to: Elon Musk does not believe in any sort of right to your privacy.
Like in general while his public persona has gotten less reasonable over the years there's a lot of things that could/should be reported as "patterns of behavior" that, in the early days got reported as if they happened in a vacuum which let it seem reasonable at the time.
So now that media is interested in Elon the question is what changed. Did Elon lapse on marketing? More likely is that he is giving off similar messaging but the media receiving it has decided to focus on other things.
No?
Then maybe you can't blame the media.
Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.
To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:
• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)
• To manufacture the charging equipment
• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.
• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.
• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc
• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.
• To provide customer support.
If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.
I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.
I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.
I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.
Customer support would likely be Tesla.
If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.
Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.
Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:
1. Locations 2. Quantity of locations 3. Quality (high charging rates) 4. User experience / design of hardware - software 5. Realtime reporting and navigation 6. Uptime of network
The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.
Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.
Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.
I doubt Tesla is going to abandon Superchargers anytime soon.
(Sorry, I'll show myself out the door.)
I'm not sure Musk passes that test.
Musk is detached from reality. He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success and Tesla, a car manufacturing company, needs to do the same. Also that cost cutting and performance reviews only apply to others, just like in Twitter and elsewhere free speech means his speech not critics.
I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.
I think SpaceX is one disaster away from suffering the same fate, to be honest. Like, if the next Starship doesn't make it as far as the previous attempt (for example, if it blows up on the way up), Elon is going to come in like a wrecking ball.
The pressure on the SpaceX team must be immense.
immaterial: "the worst" here is elon destroying the engineering culture & with it their ability to keep improving on what they've done so far. not going bankrupt (by way of a bailout or otherwise) is a necessary condition for avoiding the worst (boeing syndrome), but it's not sufficient
fedgov can pour money into the military industrial complex, but it can't do a whole lot more, and that only goes so far
Knowing that I'm guaranteed enough income to stay minimally solvent does not mean I have no reason to care about losing additional income streams that enable me to have things like vacations and dinners at nice restaurants and digital watches.
Similarly, the relative security of the ~1/3 of Boeing's revenue that comes from government contracts is probably small consolation to its shareholders. They do that business more-or-less at cost; essentially 100% of their profits come from other sources.
Aren't all govt contracts cost plus?
Buying COTS products; probably not.
If you're buying AWS compute through GSA I bet the rate is more than AWS's costs + 10/15%.
Or if you purchase say post-it notes from Staples; I bet they're going to be way more than the cost of paper+glue*1.15.
[1]: https://www.acquisition.gov/far/15.404-4#FAR_15_404_4__d941e...
Meaning that, like for Elon's other companies, they might be in an incredibly vulnerable position, financially speaking. A disaster could sink the company. But simply failing to have some of these risky bets pay off could be just as damaging. For example, even if everything in the plan works on a technical level, if there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser.
Not entirely unlike how we're seeing signs that Tesla may not be a sustainable business, not necessarily because of anything fundamentally wrong with their core business, but because they made some over-aggressive assumptions about how many golden eggs their goose would lay.
I'm wouldn't worry too much. Uncle Sam probably wants those capabilities anyway for the SDA to ramp up the NDSA now that the Russian nuclear threat is renewed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
Also that amount was from a contract made in 2018.
Sometimes I feel like the person watching the parade and wondering why nobody else is confused by the emperor's choice of attire.
So that’s why it was worth paying Elon that much. The current sales position is tremendous.
Worldwide BEV sales 2023:
VW Group - 742k
Tesla - 1,808k
That's 2.5x, how did you get 8-16x?
Despite being the 11th biggest by revenue.
It's true that high-end carmakers seem to get a lot of goodwill valuation simply for being high-end carmakers. But normally not that much.
investors buy stocks.
customers buy cars.
silicon valley's product is stock.
The takeaway for me is that as a fundraiser and hype man, before he ruined his reputation, he was pretty successful, but in all other ways he's a massive self-promoting hack.
The hagification of Musk in the press was on another level, like Steve Jobs, DaVinci and Obama rolled together. That this carefully crafted illusion is falling apart due to his online ramblings and bizarre business decisions is something worthy of study. He and Kanye West share a very similar trajectory in this regard.
I don't think you've ever seen anyone with ketamine habit (keywords: UK k-hole).
Pretty stupid thing to say about someone who has medical prescription for ketamine to treat depression while they work 100hrs per week.
That's over $30,000 for every single car Tesla sold in 2023.
It's a weird situation. It sounds like an unconscionable amount now only because of Musk's success in raising the stock value. Like he's being paid too much because he was too successful.
I'm not a direct shareholder, but if the Deleware court gives me an option not to pay $55 Billion that I thought was committed, I'd strongly consider.
What are the implications of not approving? On the plus side, the company keeps the compensation. On the minus side, Musk will be upset; and there's a trust issue for future compensation. On the neutral side, those receiving future compensation will endeavour to follow an approval process that is likely to stand up in court.
There’s got to be some measurable number of people who are turned off from buying a Tesla because of his association, especially now that alternatives are available.
Put another way, which company is more likely to exist in 10 years: Microsoft or Tesla?
And nobody has a larger interest in Tesla's valuation them Musk himself, the largest shareholder.
He can't walk and any threats to that effect are theatrics. Shareholders would be idiots to re-approve the $55bn.
Musk is arguing that paying him $55B to pump the stock price is better than paying those employees for 40 years.
If you're a shareholder that only cares about the stock price and not the underlying value of the company - that's a decent argument.
I wouldn't buy it. But maybe the shareholders will.
Case in point is AWS. I've been reading they are a PIP factory for the last couple of years. Doesn't seem like they have a major issue hiring (partly due to lack of a competitor who is doing better).
Isn’t it? I use X every day and it seems to be fine now and getting better on a good cadence.
Last I heard he's hemorrhaging paying customers (advertisers) who while publicly say it has to do with <insert popular issue>; privately say it has to do with worsening ROI (targeting).
I’m saying the platform seems to be good and getting better, not worse.
Like the local earthquake tracker on Twitter used to be great, it became unusable after musk mayhem as Twitter intentionally only showed many years old posts to those not signed in.
Nowadays that’s super rare. And I used to remember seeing links to a lot of articles published as like 13 tweets, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one of those. I think some used to be linked form HN.
Twitter is basically a zombie now. It’s way worse for the former user base at large.
It’s true that one groups probably think it’s better, those who were banned and are allowed back for example and those who liked the banned accounts.
1. https://i.postimg.cc/Bbq0yX4J/image.png
We don't really need Tesla or Twitter/X. But we really do need SpaceX. He's already moved it to Texas to shield himself from lawsuits, so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.
why?
Don’t think so, it’s just that he’s focused on another reality - losing the crown of the richest person in the world. And, he’s doing everything to keep that crown, everything else be dammed.
The alleged money he asks for does not exist, it is just shares in Tesla, which are currently owned by the company. It's bizarre how misinformed these Journalists are, the real story is far more interesting then just Musk being greedy.
The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be very high.
It could even threaten the company's survival.
But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven me -- and lots of people who are way smarter than me -- wrong, again and again, over the past two decades. He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight.
The jury is out.
Like Cybertruck?
Tesla Semi?
Full self driving in 2017?
Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it?
Dojo?
Hyperloop?
Solar roofs?
Battery Swap?
Dogecoin?
Tesla Roadster?
Twitter?
They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce
He’s actively sinking Tesla and that’s his cash cow.
I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today.
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So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea.
Well, aside from Optimus I guess.
Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good.
Businesses change, people change, the world changes.
Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
Here are some counter-examples:
* A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.
* A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
* A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined.
* A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt.
* A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts.
* The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M
* Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter).
But the track record is there.
But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided.
What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.)
But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions.
So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.
But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.
Hmm... That's a reasonable conclusion. You could be right.
I'll be a bit more humble and admit that there's a lot I don't know, so for me, the jury is out.
Things may implode at Tesla, or maybe the company will grow 10x. I wouldn't be surprised either way!
Sorry if this turned out to just be a semantic point about word choice. I originally thought that maybe it wasn't, that maybe there's something real here about what it means to have a humble view, but now I think maybe you just did mean something more like "deferential", in which case this was a pointless comment and I apologize :).
That phrase has a precise meaning:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20jury%20is%2...
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[a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211380
> But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because ...
I think we're both agreeing that "the jury is out", but disagreeing about which side of the question that jury is deciding should be the one with the "presumption of innocence" :)
And because I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. That's all "benefit of the doubt" means. "I don't know one way or the other, but this guy has a pretty good track record, so until I know more I won't assume anything bad."
Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel came up with that idea. Elon Musk's contribution was suing them so that he can be called a founder.
> Like a new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
You're literally commenting on an article where the ENTIRE supercharging team was just fired, presumably to save money at Tesla.
> Like Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Dojo is a 7nm design while NVidia's is a 3nm design. It won't keep up at all, despite costing Tesla likely a $Billion+ to produce (between $100M mask costs, large software teams working for multiple years, etc. etc. it wouldn't surprise me to see Dojo's total cost be well in excess of a $Billion).
Oh I'm in shock about that. As I wrote above, "WTF?"
Whatever it is Musk is trying to do at Tesla, I don't get it.
But given his track record, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
From a trend perspective, he's disrupting continuities that don't seem rational to disrupt and shouldn't prevent him from moonshot-ing separately.
It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands
Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....
Theranos was a scam though.
FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.
The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems.
Fit and finish on some models remains subpar.
I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.
I don’t own TSLA, I have owned a Y for 3 years and love it. I have a cybertruck on order knowing it may be my dumbest purchase of my life, but also maybe the best. I think Tesla is an amazing tech company that is needlessly brutal to its employees.
See also: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World by Dan Davies.
Enron got away with as much as they did because of the far more generous accounting rules that were in play back then.
It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.
(To the tune of "Tomorrow" from Annie.)
And he has to make this gamble because Tesla's fundamentals as a car company is going down the drain and its entire valuation hinges on the fact that they are not just a car company. That's why he's constantly announcing new products (robotaxis, humanoid robots) that are nowhere close to materializing, making visits to China to ink HD maps deal with Baidu for FSD and claiming to spend $10B on AI infrastructure this year.
He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.
The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.
Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful.
I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.
There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement.
But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/
It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic.
Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead.
I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!
While sad, mile for mile FSD is better than humans.
For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.
It has a very long way to go before it is better than a human. We won’t know the true stats until it is allowed to operate without supervision.
Source: https://www.teslafsdtracker.com/Main
It's a sad state of affairs - though I imagine its mostly cross-over of younger generations blending in their polarizing reddit politics over here. It is a dilutive process unfortunately.
FSD will be "close to magic" when it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, and it still gets you home.
If FSD didn't work in those conditions, and this encouraged you to wait it out, then it might have just saved your life (or the lives of other road users).
E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something.
I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).
Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.
That's about it.
Hasn't Uber been waiting for the same thing to save it?
August '15: Uber announces its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in Pittsburgh, focusing on self-driving technology research and development.
May '16: Uber begins testing its self-driving Ford Fusion vehicles in Pittsburgh, marking its first public demonstration of autonomous vehicle technology.
August '16: Uber acquires Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineers. This ended up with a lawsuit over stolen IP that was a large setback from what I remember.
Sept. '16: Uber launches its first self-driving ride-hailing service in Pittsburgh, using a fleet of modified Ford Fusion's. Safety drivers are present in each car to take control if needed.
December '16: Uber starts testing its self-driving cars in San Francisco without obtaining the necessary permits from the CA DMV. The DMV revokes the registration of Uber's test vehicles, forcing the company to halt its operations in the city.
March '17: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Arizona, taking advantage of the state's friendly regulations for autonomous vehicle testing.
March '18: A fatal accident occurs in Tempe, Arizona, when an Uber self-driving vehicle strikes and kills a pedestrian. Uber suspends its self-driving testing program across all cities in the aftermath of the incident.
July '18: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Pittsburgh, with additional safety measures and limitations on the vehicles' operating conditions.
March '19: Uber receives a $1 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, Toyota, and DENSO for its self-driving unit, valuing the division at $7.25 billion.
June '19: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in San Francisco, having obtained the necessary permits from the California DMV.
Dec '20: Uber sells its ATG division to Aurora, a self-driving vehicle startup, in a deal valued at $4 billion. As part of the agreement, Uber invests $400 million in Aurora and retains a 26% stake in the combined company.
A lot of companies seem to be gutting everything to the point where their only product is their stock.
I also (personally) know of several non-ML offers that were substantially higher than FAANG. Though even within FAANG only Meta and maybe Google (and Amazon at hogher levels) are very competitive. Meta and Google likely have better growth prospects though with better refreshers, bonuses, stock growth, etc. But up front Tesla AI offers are definitely very strong. Even then I'm not sure its worth the stress.
Security fraud.
Supercharging network is essentially complete from a fundamentals perspective, you can nearly go anywhere with a EV with a bit of planning. The market can fill in the gaps.
The roadster and semi situations are headscratchers, but I guess Tesla doesn’t want to hassle with a “sports car” with the same performance as its biggest sedan. I don’t think the Semi really works purely from an energy density perspective. Diesel-electric hybrids make far more sense for big rigs for current battery tech. The Tesla semi is sorta stuck.
The layoffs make sense in that light. They have implemented the step change in Ev Manufacturing, built the machine to build the machines, are very close with FSD, built the charging network… working to avoid innovators dilemma, perhaps?
Treating employees poorly is no good.
I was trying to highlight the idea that most workers dont have to rely on having a shitty work product to ensure their job security.
This itself is a reaction to the idea that a job offer is a life long commitment akin to marriage. In a healthy labor market, employers would want to retain talent because it is profitable to do so. I don't employers retaining unproductive employees is a desirable state.
They know they can hire more; Anytime they'd post an ad, there'd be millions of applicants. So, the input funnel is not their problem.
https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/much-more...
This means that they can employ more people when it is productive to do so, and let them go when they dont need or want them.
I think this is a good thing in general. I dont think we should structure our expectations or the labor market around the idea that companies should retain unprofitable workers.
https://canadacollege.edu/dreamers/docs/Maslows-Hierarchy-of...
I think, then, that we're saying the same thing?
That, yes, most workers, like heart surgeons, or engineers at a good tech company, don't have to do a shitty job to ensure job security, whereas Musk's employees do, because that means Musk will retain them while firing many workers who do a good job. I don't think either Musk retaining unproductive employees or firing productive employees are desirable, but that seems to be what he's doing, hence the advice spawning this thread.
There are tons of industries where jobs, projects, and labor demands are cyclic that dont resort to cynical employee sabotage.
I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.
In my opinion at least, jobs aren't guaranteed lifelong appointments. They are open ended contracts that either party can terminate any time. Termination from either side isn't a moral transgression in general, but I understand there can be some issues on the margin.
Im genuinely perplexed by others reactions and I think my post was an attempt to get at why so many people see it different
It comes from multiple people in this post, so it might be worth just asking them, if you want to find out. I'm sure the posters are willing to answer a good faith question.
>I guess this is part of a greater pet-peeve where every time a layoff comes up the predominant sentiment is either: 1) that the workers are productive revenue generators and the company is stupid and less informed than random outsiders or 2) employment should not be contingent on the employer ROI.
I have not seen this, but there are assumptions that the employees fired were somehow unprofitable. Perhaps at another company, this might be a safer assumption. In this case, it's more likely the action was irrational, impulsive, and drug- and/or ego-fueled. We'd need some evidence that they were fired because they were worth less than they cost, to make that assumption.
And that's if you treat employees well. Treat them like expendable cogs in the machine and your churn will be higher than industry average and you'll end up being less efficient.
Think of why the body has tons of leukocytes roaming around, just looking for viruses to whack. If your body had to wait for an infection before creating leukocytes, you'd die pretty quickly.
The “electrify road shipping” would go a lot smoother if Tesla was honest about “electric performance + a diesel base load” but I guess Elon doesn’t want to concede the argument? Honestly surprised no one else has moved in this space?? Maybe it just doesn’t work?
I wonder if Tesla is in any breaches of contracts that they may have signed with these companies, and how much Ford/Rivian paid for acccess.
I’m interested to know how many other HNers also hold this belief, or think this is a reasonable way to treat entrepreneurs in America?
I think it’s reasonable not to allow a single employee to be compensated (55b$) more than all the EBITDA the company has ever made.
I think it’s reasonable to question the decision making demonstrated by firing the most successful team at the company and put the major competitive advantage at risk.
I think it’s reasonable to question the constant monkeying with product and design (Cybertruck, removal of loved features like LIDAR or physical wiper blade controls).
I think it’s reasonable to question how the CEO has lost first mover advantage so badly by failing to improve products and introduce new models as the legacy competition and foreign companies quickly have caught up.
I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.
We don't know the full details of the Supercharger team's "firing" yet, so let's not speculate.
Reuters speculated when they reported about the cancellation of the affordable Model 2, and they got that reporting horribly wrong (damaging the stock price with their error).
As for Superchargers being a major competitive advantage, that's no longer the case, as the network is open to cars from other brands.
Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage. Name another American or European carmaker that sells as many EVs as Tesla. BYD briefly caught up in terms of raw sales figures, but that trend quickly reversed when China's economic woes weighed on the company.
As for "failing to improve products," the Model S has been improved in so many meaningful ways, it's practically a new car. The performance (0-60 in 1.99s) is absolutely mind-bending, and Tesla's innovations such as the carbon-wrapped motor are responsible for this.
> I think it’s reasonable to want an engaged, full-time CEO who is not distracted by executive responsibilities at several other ventures, half of which are actively failing as well.
Which ones are failing? SpaceX is untouchable. Neuralink successfully implanted a brain/computer interface in a paraplegic man. X.com delivers features at a greater rate than Twitter 1.0, at lower operational cost, and -more importantly- it is defending free speech. xAI just secured $6bn in funding, with its value soaring to $18bn. All of which was acheived by a man who is "distracted."
And other companies that Musk co-founded (e.g. OpenAI, PayPal), seem to be ticking along nicely also.
Not if the deal had one party misrepresent the information they knew, such as in this case.
1. You want corporations, that already have huge protections, and relatively weak governance to re-domicile in states that offer even less regulations.
2. You assume that Tesla couldn't possibly make a bad decision regarding the Supercharger team and are casting reports of its demise as mere speculation when the leader of that team is terminated, and members of the team are reporting its demise.
3. You're stating that the Model 2 is still alive, and will be here any time soon!
4. That the Supercharger network isn't a competitive advantage.
5. Tesla hasn't lost its first mover advantage when the number of well-financed competitors has increased dramatically over the last 10 years.
6. That the Model S (which sells in minuscule amounts) is indicative of Tesla improving its product line up.
7. That X is succeeding when it's bleeding advertisers, and its value is continually being downgraded by banks.
8. And that OpenAI and PayPal owe their success to Musk who was minimally involved in OpenAI, and Musk hasn't been involved with PayPal for 23+ years.
Who's delusional here?
As Upton Sinclair famously said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
2. That's not what I said. I just said that we need to wait until all the facts and strategy emerges, rather than going on a few statements by individuals who are not (or no longer) involved in Tesla
3. Yes, as confirmed by Musk in the earnings call.
4. It used to be. It's not any more, because it's open to all carmakers, as I said
5. Well financed maybe. Fisker, Nikola, Rivian etc - they all got surprising amounts of financing. That doesn't mean they've displaced Tesla, or come anywhere near displacing Tesla. I'd advise you to read the news about Tesla competitors, both legacy and new - look how many BEVs they're shipping vs Tesla, and look at their margins on each vehicle sold. I think you might be surprised at how far Tesla leads the field
6. I gave the carbon-wrapped motor as an example of Tesla innovations. It's one of many. The refreshed Model 3 is also an example of how Tesla is improving products. You claimed Tesla is "failing" to improve products. There are many counterexamples that refute that statement
7. X bled advertisers yes. But it's still a great social network, and that's all I care about. Elon didn't buy Twitter in order to make money. He bought it because the West needs a platform that prioritises free speech (as far as legally possible). X.com is imperfect but it's an improvement on Twitter. I don't care if it's "downgraded by banks." The whole point of Elon owning Twitter is that it no longer serves the interests of a few powerful people and institutions, and instead is an inclusive platform for people across the political spectrum.
8. Musk co-founded OpenAI. If he was "minimally involved" he wouldn't be listed as a co-founder. PayPal used to be called "X.com" Guess who owned that domain name? It was renamed to "PayPal" when Elon was ousted from the management structure. I'd recommend reading up on the history here. It's very interesting - lots of twists and turns.
2. Statements by THE PEOPLE ON THE TEAM WHO WERE JUST FIRED have a lot more weight than an internet commentator saying "let's wait for the details to arrive."
3. Sure. Musk says a lot of shit that is completely divorced from reality...
4. Competing carmakers have adopted the connector, but will they be able to really leverage the ease of use that Tesla owners have? Plug in and go?
5. I'm talking about companies like VW Group, GM, Ford, Mercedes, Porsche, BYD. Not little startups.
6. The carbon wrapped motor was first discussed in 2016, and is on the Model S, possibly the lowest selling Tesla. If Tesla is going to take 8 years for every "innovation", they're going to be DOA.
7. A great social network, filled with bots, and Nazis. Elon didn't buy Twitter for any free-speech ideals, he was forced to buy Twitter because he couldn't control his impulses and made a stupid purchase offer that he couldn't weasel his way out of. Everything else is spin. And "inclusive" is hardly what most neutral observers would use to describe Twitter.
8. Is Musk still involved with OpenAI? No. Did he do more than spend a few bucks, no. Martin Eberhard has more claim to founding Tesla than Musk does with OpenAI. And you do know that Musk was FIRED because of his stupid idea to rename PayPal and make it into a WeChat clone.
Looks like you're still delusional. That'll happen when you get financially and emotionally invested in a guy like Musk.
2. I don't judge company strategy based on statements by disgruntled ex-employees. It would be naive to do so.
3. Things Musk says in shareholder meetings are SEC audited. So if he says the Model 2 is coming, it will come.
4. The Tesla Supercharger network is great. But it's not a competitive advantage as it's open to other brands.
5. As I said, compare the number of BEVs sold and the margins, whether we're looking at startups or legacy auto. Come back to me when you've found one that comes close to Tesla in Q1 2024 sales and margins.
6. You're arguing in bad faith. As I said, the carbon-wrapped motor is just one example of innovation, and the Model 3 Highland is just one example of product improvement. Your point was that Tesla "failed" to improve their products. That point is easily disproven.
7. X.com is not filled with bots and Nazis in my experience. If it was, I wouldn't use it. What data do you base your argument on?
8. Eberhard hadn't sold a single production vehicle at Tesla. Elon Musk was co-founder, chairman, product architect and the main source of funding when Roadster (Tesla's first car) was designed and produced. He oversaw the design of the Roadster from the beginning. Musk won the Global Green 2006 product design award and the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Roadster. Not Eberhard. Musk. Production of the Roadster started in 2008, a year after Eberhard had been replaced at Tesla.
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Let's not accuse each other of being "delusional" - let's learn from each other and contribute to a healthy conversation.
Put another way, sure, the stock price went above the targets he set for himself. How much did profits go up?
Meme his way into taking the company private at a wildly inflated price per share? That's not a problem, that's a deus ex machina.
That company no longer exists.
I told him this Musk fellow doesn't inspire much confidence in me with his increasingly bizarre antics.
Seems like I dodged a bullet.
https://x.com/fomahun/status/1785333618157527081?s=46&t=LAqP...
Reminds me of Bill Lumbergh in office space, "so if you could just go ahead and [thing Peter Gibbons really didn't want to do]".
Laid off means the role won’t be backfilled. It could also mean the role was renamed, and they wanted to let the employee go but it looks better for everyone to say it was a layoff.
Let go (at least to me) could mean either.
Just because they were fired for cause doesn't mean the company wants to keep that job around afterwards.
That said, it is unusual not to say 'laid off' these days unless the person was fired for cause, but the recently media frenzy around the term might have them saying other things instead.
Laid Off = You were let go for things outside your control (company downsizing, etc)
In the US it seems like you can let people go for at moments notice with little process - in the UK that looks like what we would call “being fired” generally for cause.
“In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.
[…]
The doctrine of at-will employment can be overridden by an express contract or civil service statutes (in the case of government employees). As many as 34% of all U.S. employees apparently enjoy the protection of some kind of "just cause" or objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category, including the 7.5% of unionized private-sector workers, the 0.8% of nonunion private-sector workers protected by union contracts, the 15% of nonunion private-sector workers with individual express contracts that override the at-will doctrine, and the 16% of the total workforce who enjoy civil service protections as public-sector employees.”
OTOH, you could say that a division was “fired” or “laid off” and they’re almost interchangeable. “Fired” might carry the connotation that the specific division was underperforming while “laid off” could mean that it was due to some outside factor (e.g., half of R&D was laid off because manufacturing costs shot up)
Those R&D folks who got laid off are going to go home and complain about getting fired. It doesn't imply it's their fault - it implies that they're angry about it.
Being laid off is also for cause, specifically the cause of "the executives need to juice the stock price".
For example, if you terminate an employee for coming to work late over and over, then the employee was clearly not meeting their expectations and they get terminated due to their own actions, hence they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. Because the state does not have to pay unemployment benefits, the state does not increase the amount of unemployment insurance premiums the employer has to pay.
If you terminate someone to improve cash flow, then the employee is not considered to be terminated due to the employee’s actions, and hence they would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Hence the employer’s unemployment insurance premium probably will go up.
Most people wouldn't say "Greg was laid off for pissing in the water cooler"
More generally, fired is used for anything specific to the individual, whether for cause (they were incompetent) or other reasons (the boss didn't like them). Laid off is for a departure due to company reasons (lack of demand for their product).
If you fire a 500 person team and intend to replace them with new people who do the same thing, it's not really a lay-off, but for legal purposes they probably have to treat it as a lay-off in terms of severance / unemployment compensation because I doubt they can document an actual cause for most of them.
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.
Or should you be able to go to court and sue for breach of contract?
As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.
I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.
Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
[0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
I will almost certainly never hire in Canada. The next company I start will be in Delaware.
More tax and regulation is a moat for larger organizations who can afford to deal with it.
If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.
Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for
The "oh you weren't fired, you were laid off" line is manufactured by HR and is meaningless. If you come in to work one day and your boss decides they don't like the color of your shirt and shows you the door, were you fired or "laid off"?
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What's happening in North America is that everyone will use CCS with Tesla's plug on the end. It's CCS type 3.
Older Teslas will need a retrofit to be able to talk CCS. Tesla chargers will still support Tesla's now dead protocol.
You are making things up and as part of that you are giving an industry standard name a new meaning.
How do you think it works?
Instead the NACS is the proprietary Tesla plug but using the CCS protocol instead of a CAN-based one. Practically this means that all superchargers remain compatible and it also means that all cars with the CCS plug are not compatible (unless the plug is changed or an adapter is used). Therefore your statement is misleading in addition to being plain wrong about „Type 3“. Tesla has, of course, always also supported the CCS outside of the United States, both inside the superchargers and inside the cars.
The Tesla plug is no longer proprietary. It's been standardized as SAE J3400.
CCS won.
> The Tesla plug is no longer proprietary. It's been standardized as SAE J3400.
Of course, that‘s the very meaning of opening up the plug.
But they'll still be using CCS, as you yourself admit.
Tesla's protocol is dead.
And I‘ll leave the „discussion“ at that.
NACS is CCS. It's how it works. It's the third CCS plug whether you like it or not. It's the practical reality.
It's a bizarre hill for you to choose to die on.
CCS doesn't exist as a standards body in and of itself. It's a joint effort by the North American SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) and the European-based IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). The CCS standard is actually sets of interoperable standards defined by both the SAE and the IEC built to work in tandem. There is no actual "CCS standards document" there are only SAE standards and IEC standards, but if the joint CCS work does its job they interlock to form one worldwide mega-standard which we call CCS because it useful to name the combined Voltron form.
The NACS plug is in the final drafting process of becoming a recognized SAE standard. In that SAE standards (help) define the CCS standard, NACS is being standardized as a part of CCS, or at least the part that SAE controls/owns. Whether or not you can name it "CCS" depends on what you think the name CCS stands for. SAE and IEC always had different plug standards, so in that regard NACS isn't new to CCS and is a normal part of CCS because whatever SAE says is the North American standard plug is the CCS plug in North America. On the flipside with naming, is branding and NACS clearly has its own brand name and development history. It was developed for Tesla initially. It was opened under the brand name "NACS" to help sell it to the rest of manufacturing. "North American Charging Standard" was an intentional PR move. Because it wasn't intentionally developed for being called "CCS" and because it has a strong brand name of its own, does that mean you can't call it "CCS"? (A rose by any other name, right?)
When that standard is finalized it will be the third type of plug that has a practical rollout. Does that make it the real "Type 3" as opposed to the older prototype that didn't make it past standards processes? Do we want that to call it "CCS Type 3" in the long run to reduce confusion? If "CCS Type 1" is truly dead, but is also the standardized name for "Plug that North America uses and is SAE standardized" should we refer to it as "CCS Type 1 2.0" or something like that?
Names are one of the hardest problems to solve. But to recap the facts: NACS will be as close to a part of the CCS standard as it gets (because it will be an SAE standard), and is a new type of plug now directly related to the CCS standard. Whether you want to call NACS a part of CCS is a matter of perspective and branding as much as "standards" on the ground.
It's going to be easy for everyone to support it because they support CCS already. Charger manufacturers like that. Charging networks like that. Car manufacturers like that.
All they're changing is the plug.
The CCS support was already there so it won out.
Surely the superchargers can be made to be self sufficient with rates and advertising etc.
Still, I can't see the 4D chess behind this move. It's far beyond my limited understanding.
When I hear about Tesla and the Supercharger network what I hear about most is how easy it was to plan long trips. A road trip on gas is easy, there's a gas station in every town with a few thousand people, fast EV chargers aren't yet as common. So if your routing system understood its range, and where the charging stations where it was pretty seamless. Much better than the stuff from other EV makers.
Less often I'd hear about the chargers working more often. e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07/electric-cars-are-doome...
The other is probably just scale of the parent company in terms of being able to build out and service the network. They tend to have more prominent, nicer locations for their stations.
Standardizing NACS was an interesting win for Tesla because their hardware design won out, but it was also a massive breach in their "moat" putting the other charging networks and other manufacturers on a much more equal footing with the charging story.
On the one hand it makes direct dumb "bottom line" business sense why Tesla would stop investing in its own network with such a massive breach in their "moat" about to spill out and maybe equalize the playing field. Perhaps especially if you think you've already earned enough recognition for your brand that you don't need to maintain it long term, just maintain the facade and PR spin of it. On the other hand, with such a huge first mover advantage and what everyone knows was a respectably huge "moat", you'd think there would be pivots to take advantage of to bulwark other parts of the same moat and still maintain some other advantage along the way to the old adage that "Teslas are the easiest to charge". Gutting the department may truly be a short term gain for shareholder quarterly results traded for a long term mistake and the risk of the loss of that first mover advantage they worked so hard to earn.
It's certainly fascinating to armchair quarterback what other options were in play here.
That's the advantage
The reliability is terrible and perhaps forcing VW to operate a charging network as a punishment does not lead to a good customer experience
Tesla and Rivian network charger locations are usually in better spots than a Walmart. The chargers work the first time, at full speed and availability is always correct in the vehicle display.
Of the dozens of issues that I've had across a few different cities, I think the problem was related to the connector once.
If they'd simply put standard vending machine credit card readers on them and not bothered with apps, they'd have cut their downtime by at least 75%.
For anyone curious, this will be SAE J3400 when finalized:
* https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3400/
* https://driveelectric.gov/charging-connector
Previously the open standard was SAE J1772 / IEC 62196 Type 2:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_2_connector
It's very useful to note that the North American SAE Type 1 "Combo" connector and the European IEC Type 2 connector have surprisingly different form factors with the SAE one being bulkier by quite a bit. That too was a factor in NACS getting fast tracked for standardization. (It's the least bulky of the three hardware designs.)
A chess board is 2D. But, you could technically say it's 4D (3 dimensions + time). You could also technically say it's 1D (a string) if you play by just writing the chess notation.
Essentially the ploy was for Tesla to use the charging network as a loss leader to make Tesla the only/most viable EV brand, and because both roads and electricity grids are well regulated utilities that failed so from here on the only source of money for Tesla is going to be the company revenue/profit, as it's phase as a buy an monopoly startup is over.
Additionally, EV Charging is not going to be a high-margin, disruptive industry that is a darling of wall street. Can you imagine investors getting excited about investing in the largest operator of Gas Stations? I don't think so. It's going to end up being a tight, competitive business where people pick where to charge based on prices down to the penny. No one's going to end up as a billionaire running that business.
It would be a violation of his job responsibilities, and get him in trouble with shareholders if he was doing anything other than trying to make the company succeed.
Moreover, this is the basic challenge of running a business: if you are you afraid to make hard decisions, the company will collapse and every employee will be out of a job.
Musk makes no secret about how he feels people should be having more children, but at the same time he runs his companies in a way that makes it hard for people to prioritize their families. He intentionally pressures his teams to choose his business over the families that he insists people have.
Here's one charging a BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
Another BMW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mox4tL3dR8o
Here's one charging a 400 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yflZN0dLT8s
Here's one not doing a good job charging an 800 volt Kia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ2KtzMeh8
Tesla does need to do better on 800 volt charging. If Alpitronic, Kempower, ABB, EvBox, and friends can all do it then Tesla can do it too.
I think all of the V3/V4 superchargers are open to all cars, otherwise Tesla wouldn't get government funding for expanding the charging network (at least in the EU, maybe UK changed that after brexit).
Interestingly it's still mostly teslas charging there, although superchargers are one of the cheapest options to charge.