5 ms·
Er, why is asking for something fundamental to running a business (i.e. "How much money do you have/need?") a partly boring/boneheaded/uncool question?
by danso 9y ago
Er, why is asking for something fundamental to running a business (i.e. "How much money do you have/need?") a partly boring/boneheaded/uncool question?
- kneel 9y agoBecause he's Elon Musk and he doesn't care about investor returns, he wants to build rockets, cars, tunnels, and explore space. No matter what he does he'll more than likely be fine on the money side.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> he's Elon Musk and he doesn't care about investor returns Then he shouldn't be the CEO of a public company which continues to sell stock and debt to investors on the promise of a return. Also, Elon Musk very much does care about returns. He has a great track record in that department. He's just learned it's not something that's healthy to focus on in the short-term. Unfortunately, running out of cash forces the compression of time horizons. The latter is what investors are rightfully worried about.
- kneel 9y agoI think what he did is awesome. Who cares what wall street thinks? They're mostly a bunch of leeches passing around paper and overreacting to news articles. Tesla will be fine.
- danso 9y agoWall Street's money pays Tesla's bills.
- kneel 9y agoTesla is a public company. Wall Street acts as a leaky pipe funneling money between investors and Tesla.
- danso 9y agoWall Street sounds pretty terrible. So why isn't Tesla using a non-leaky money pipe?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> So why isn't Tesla using a non-leaky money pipe? If such a thing existed that would bring in the amount of money to Tesla that it has needed, it would.
- danso 9y agoIf it seems Musk/Tesla have conceded to working with Wall Street in order to achieve its long term goals, then isn't it reasonable to assume Musk/Tesla does care about what Wall Street thinks?
- kpil 9y agoYour pension fund, rather...
- propman 9y agoAs an investor, I do...they get 4 chances a year to ask questions. Considering Elon lies with every 3rd breath he takes, wanting concrete factual numbers not sky high goals let's me know whether to get out or not. I love Elon's vision, but I think he made a downright idiotic nepotism filled move buying solar city when Tesla was already burdened with so much debt. He had the same attitude then, ignoring and dismissing all dissent and now Tesla is just straddled with debt.
- IncRnd 9y agoTesla wouldn't have grown if it weren't for Wall Street and investors. There are elderly people with their futures invested, pension funds that will pay people's bills, etc. Tesla really should answer the questions of its owners.
- xkjkls 9y agoThe west coast bias in Hacker News is always shocking. The capital markets exist for a reason, and the people he's mocking on this conference call are the ones that he's going to need to be begging for billions if things don't deliver in Q3 or Q4.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoIt shoudn't shock you. It should be expected based on the demographics of the people who read HN.
- xkjkls 9y agoGoldman Sachs has more developers than Facebook. It's not like Wall Street isn't filled with software people.
- sotojuan 9y agoThose people don't go on HN. This is a forum mostly comprised of college students, web developers with <5 years experience, Silicon Valley startup/tech company developers, and a few experts that have stuck around.
- xkjkls 9y agoHacker News has been a repository of software/tech news long enough that I would bet the audience is more diverse than you think.
- kalms 9y agoMaybe he knows something you don’t.
- praneshp 9y agoWhenever I see a ridiculous reaction on HN (like on the Signal/AWS article a few days ago), I just wait and watch how the same folks bend over backwards to defend Musk.
- 9y ago
- pwinnski 9y agoElon Musk cares what Wall St thinks when they supply the billion-per-quarter Tesla burns through. He just doesn't want to answer the questions that come with the money. Tesla may survive, as there seems to be no end of people bad at math, but a company doesn't burn through a billion per quarter for too long before "fine" is no longer the correct word.
- mcguire 9y agoAccording to Investopedia, Musk is worth $20B. As a first-order estimate, at last year's spend rate, he could fund Tesla for 10 years. But, those leaches are why he's worth $20B and the results of this call probably lopped a goodly chunk out of that $20B. Tesla may not be fine. One ought not to go out of one's way to bite the hand that feeds one.
- danso 9y agoWas he not CEO when Tesla went public in 2010?
- pbreit 9y agoGuy has been instrumental in a couple hundred billion $$ in market value and you’re suggesting he doesn’t care about investor returns? Wow.
- jacquesm 9y agoI'm not sure I'm following you. Creating market value and returning money to the investors as an ROI are not the same things. An earnings call is an opportunity to tell shareholders when - and if - they can expect some of their money back by giving them a more complete picture about how the company is doing. It is part of the role of a CEO in a publicly traded company to continue to inspire investor confidence. Value creation is the easy part, value capture the hard part and without that second bit Tesla's stock will implode. So he will have to talk to those investors to address their worries or the stock value will drop rapidly. A crazy high valuation is no guarantee that a company can not go bust at some point, though in Tesla's case if they run out of money all that will likely happen is that their next round will be one at a lower valuation and with a group of investors that cares less about the short term. Elon made the decision to play on Wall Street, that decision comes with some responsibilities and it is downright strange to see him literally bite the hand that feeds him. Without the cash he picked up through the IPO Tesla would be in a completely different position. He's made a couple of boneheaded moves (such as rolling Solar City in with Tesla), which have so far been accepted because of the halo and the promises. But there is a limit to how far that will stretch and I'm confused why he would stretch that on purpose if he has other alternatives (such as simply answering the questions). If he doesn't have any answers, which is one way to interpret his refusal, then Tesla is already in trouble.
- txsh 9y agoHe doesn’t want to do those things. He wants people to give him billions of dollars on the promise to do those things. Musk survives on putting in a minimal ammount of effort and having a great marketing team. The guy is a fraud.
- ltdanimal 9y agoHa. Pretty weak attach. The dude literally sleeps at work at times, and his companies have produced things that have never been done before. Stuff that you can't really do as a weekend warrior, like rockets and the fastest/longest range EVs that people wait in line to buy
- dang 9y agoPlease don't do personal attacks here. It damages the community, regardless of what you think about Musk. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- s2g 9y agoThen he should be fired because he doesn't care about his job. I am so sick of the cult of Elon. There is no defending his behaviour here.
- bdamm 9y agoYou've been downvoted but I don't know why. It's clearly true. He wants the power that comes with CEO, but not the levelheadedness to run what is now a large company making large promises. What he's done is remarkable. But he should step down, assign himself a founder/chief scientist title, and move forward with "fixing" his company. No fear of ejection; I suspect he's a major shareholder.
- pbreit 9y agoBeen running it fine for 10 years. Does sound boring.
- danso 9y agoBut time is a factor, especially in relation to milestones. I think everyone would agree that Tesla's Autopilot and full-self-driving aspirations were going extremely well in 2016 [0], and we can safely assume that progress is still being made into 2018. The more relevant part, though, is the amount of progress relative to Tesla's earlier assumptions [1], and of course, compared to its competitors' progress. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/799908000689336320 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/799908000689336320 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768?lang=...
- Animats 9y agoTesla barely talks about self-driving any more. Their no-LIDAR approach didn't work.
- xkjkls 9y agoHas he? They still deliver less cars than Henry Ford did in the 1930s.
- freeopinion 9y agoThat's interesting. In 2017 Trek manufactured more than 350 different models of bicyle[0]. I'm not sure how that reflects on Tesla. Tesla is not manufacturing bicycles. Nor are they manufacturing Model As in the 1930s automobile market. [0] https://archive.trekbikes.com/us/en/2017 https://archive.trekbikes.com/us/en/2017
- xkjkls 9y agoWhy should Tesla not be compared to historical parallels?
- historylurker 9y ago>Er, why is asking for something fundamental to running a business (i.e. "How much money do you have/need?") a partly boring/boneheaded/uncool question? Some people on HN think Musk is doing us all a favour by allowing us to participate in his projects. Evidence of this is the inevitable, "Elon should take the company private" that seems to surface in these threads. As if going public is a favour from Musk, as opposed to a way to raise capital. The company is public and the CEO is accountable to the shareholders. Period. The hubris with this company is shocking.
- xkjkls 9y agoAlso, TSLA is basically the kind of company that couldn't even exist as a private company. Access to the broad capital and debt markets is the only reason they still exist.