7 ms·

Is it? USA regulatory agencies are only getting weaker, especially in last 5 years. And it pays off to fight with them. Look at Elon Musk and his companies.

LightG 5y ago
Hence why I will never buy a Tesla (among other reasons). n=1 ... and you may be right in general.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Depends on the agency. Nobody is going to not buy a Tesla because Musk angered the SEC, because the SEC protects an abstract public good. It’s a wildly different case when you get into a fight with an agency that protects public safety in an easy to understand way; even if you win the legal fight consumers might decide that your product is dangerous and to be avoided, a Pyrrhic victory. Someone else here mentioned Tylenol, which is a good counter example. Aggressive and transparent moves in the direction of consumer safety can both save a company in a PR crisis, and actually turn it into a boon for brand good will and loyalty.
- panarky 5y ago
  He also blatantly defied Alameda County covid shutdown orders to reopen a Tesla factory. Tesla promised workers that they could stay home if they didn't feel comfortable breaking the law. Workers who stayed home then received termination notices. Hundreds of people who returned to work at Tesla were then sickened by the disease. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundreds-covid-cases-reported-tesla-plant-following-musks-defiant-reopening-county-data-shows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...
  - enriquec 5y ago
    That was an unconstitutional order.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    Consumers are for the most part ignorant of or indifferent to worker abuses. "This may kill you" is both an easier story to sell in the media and more compelling to consumers.
  - ghufran_syed 5y ago
    hundreds of people who didn’t work at tesla were also “sickened by the disease” - was there a difference in the rate of infection between tesla workers and other people in the community?
    - posterboy 5y ago
      yes. those stayed at home are the ones to compare to.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Honestly, I don't have strong feelings about fighting over the covid shutdown (telling employees they could stay home and then firing them is bad though, and significantly worse than ignoring the county order). IMHO, fighting with the SEC over stupid shit reflects poorly on Elon and the board who refuse to supervise him, but not so much on the company. Fighting with the NTSB has a bad look. Throwing shade on people who died using your product, is also a bad look.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      Imagine having - in your job description - the responsibility of supervising Elon Musk. Dear lord.
  - rebuilder 5y ago
    That still falls into the category of "not my problem" for the buyer. They're not likely to catch SARS-CoV-2 from a new Tesla.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    > Workers who stayed home then received termination notices. 2 people received notices. 10,000 people work at the plant. This might be the single most shockingly and blatantly manipulative article I've read in a long time. Let me list the number of ways that The Post tried to obfuscate the truth. 1. They publish an article in June 2020 titled "Tesla gave workers permission to stay home rather than risk getting covid-19. Then it sent termination notices." The title is entirely disconnected from the body of the article - in the body they specify they are talking about 2 out of 10,000 people, but the title doesn't reflect that even in the slightest. 2. In March 2020, they publish another negative article about Tesla, in which they once again use a more outrageous and misleading language, citing their previous article but not linking to it so that nobody can actually catch the fact that we're talking about 2 out of 10,000 people. Let me remind you that The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is a sworn enemy of Elon Musk. And then the media complains that there's so much push back on their reporting?
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I refuse to buy Tesla cars because of Elon and his background of profiting from the mining of emeralds in apartheid Zambia. Elon has worked hard to erase his origin from the minds of potential customers but I could never forget. Elon is also the reason no company will buy Tesla. Elon would have to be all the way out of the picture.
  - gamegoblin 5y ago
    I've seen this "Elon comes from stolen emerald money" story a lot, but as best I can tell, the following is true: - Elon's father claims in the mid-80s he bought a partial stake in an emerald mine in Zambia. There is no paper trail of this ownership, so we are taking his dad at his word here. - Zambia was already independent at the time and in no way an apartheid state. The ruling party was ideologically socialist and African nationalist. - This partial ownership of the mine obviously did not make Elon a super wealthy kid, as he moved to Canada for university, gradudated with $100K in student debt, and according to roommates and friends at the time, he was notoriously frugal. So it seems like even if Elon's father is telling the truth here and the mine even existed, that wealth didn't seem to be significant enough to give Elon a huge boost when he came to North America. There are definitely a ton of things to criticize Elon for, but I am not sure the emeralds is one of them.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      Why is this downvoted? Please comment.
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      White colonizers from Africa with a history of mineral extraction... that’s not going to leave any impression on your morality. Suuure.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    Are you saying Elon himself used apartheid to his favor?
  - FredPret 5y ago
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Yup. Many federal agency's budgets continue to swell every year, yet they get more and more sickly and toothless. What the hell are they fucking doing? Not protecting the people, that's for sure.
nr2x 5y ago
Hard disagree. US agencies don’t have the resources to pursue many actions, so they are very conservative and really only go after slam-dunks. By the time you get contacted you’re already fucked and need to get with the new program - fast.
elliekelly 5y ago
Even taking every potential legal/regulatory consequence out of the equation I think it was a terrible strategy. Their target market is healthy, wealthy millennial/Gen X people who don’t have a lot of free time. Parents don’t have a lot of free time and wealthy people who aren’t parents usually have pets. I would venture to guess 95% of their customers have a child, a pet, or both. To risk being seen as a company that plays fast and loose with the one thing their customers love more than anything else in the world is foolish.
bko 5y ago
That's not true. Why do people think this? Because Elon Musk can tweets dumb memes? The size and scope of regulatory agencies has vastly increased over the years. And fines paid out are gigantic. Take banks for instance: > Financial institutions have been hit with $10.4 billion in global fines and penalties related to anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), data privacy, and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) regulations in 2020, bringing the total to $46.4 billion for those types of breaches since 2008. https://www.complianceweek.com/surveys-and-benchmarking/report-fines-against-financial-institutions-hit-104b-in-2020/29869.article https://www.complianceweek.com/surveys-and-benchmarking/repo...
- bigfudge 5y ago
  But both could be true: agencies getting weaker but corporations becoming more instrumental in rule breaking and accepting fines as cost of business. Perhaps the behaviour is getting worse?
- verall 5y ago
  That's across the whole globe, in the US it was only $4.3B, and it's a record year because of the 1MDB settlement. This is the government clawing back dimes on the dollar from banks that profited massively by aiding illegal enterprises. For the size and scope of regulatory agencies to increase, their budgets would have to increase faster than inflation of wages in their relevant markets. We don't see that in finance (SEC) nor in technology (FCC). The regulators are paid comparative peanuts.
  - bko 5y ago
    Do you have a source? Here's a source that suggests SEC budget has increased 82% over 10 years https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reforming-the-securities-and-exchange-commission https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reform...
    - verall 5y ago
      Hard to tell if you're arguing in good faith with a heritage foundation link, but the stats there are fine. A 82% budget increase from 2008-2018. But only a 31% increase in employees since 2004. Markets have gotten much larger with many more trades over the same time period. Certainly technology helps handle the increase but there is an orders of magnitude difference between a 2004 market and a 2021 market. Crypto is a good example. It didn't used to exist. SEC is the only US regulatory body for it.
slg 5y ago
>And it pays off to fight with them. Look at Elon Musk and his companies. What benefit has Musk or Tesla received from fighting with regulators? Whether it is spats over securities, unions, or safety it doesn't appear that any punishments handed to Musk or Tesla are lenient when compared with what others have received in similar circumstances. Meanwhile these fights have been a consistent drag on his and Tesla's public reputations. Like with most things Tesla, odds are the company would have been better off if Musk knew when to keep his mouth shut.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  > What benefit has Musk or Tesla received from fighting with regulators? Same as Peloton. Let's say there are two kinds of people. People who open Robinhood and buy shares at ask, and everyone else. As long as there are more of the former than the latter, and as long as those Robinhood users like spats, then obviously giant company CEOs will keep getting into them. Buying at ask is as direct as it gets! You don't need this some complicated socioeconomic mechanical theory. It's so frustrating to hear about these indirect effects - how the news might cause an analyst to write something negative months later, that maybe some institution may trade on one month, that goes through a big committee... If many Robinhood users read Elon Musk tweets, open Robinhood, buy at ask, price goes up! Like this is the same energy that got a lot of politicians elected these last few elections. The same energy that's making TikTok personalities real celebrities. VIPs have their hands almost directly on the levers of popularity contests nowadays, through social media and direct to consumer finance, e-commerce and subscription apps. If your theory about regulation and capitalism and economics or whatever does not incorporate "more guys buy at ask than guys sell in spread," nowadays, it might not be wrong, but it's mediocre.
  - bigfudge 5y ago
    Can you Eli5 why buy at ask is the wrong thing to do if you want to buy shares? What is the alternative? Do you mean you should wait/ time buying based on price?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
chaostheory 5y ago
> Look at Elon Musk and his companies. The SEC is the only financial regulatory body that is a real public institution. Isn't everything else just private corporations who only give the impression that they're public regulatory bodies? Given Wall Street's lobbying power, the regulatory bodies for Wall Street has always been weak. I don't foresee this changing for the same reason.
Animats 5y ago
Here's what the head of the CPSC has to say about that. "But CPSC faces a nearly insurmountable hurdle each and every time the agency wants to warn the public about a hazardous product.Under the gag order of Section6(b)of our statute,the agency must negotiate with companies—often for weeks—before issuing any kind of safety warning."[1] The CPSC can issue a mandatory recall, but that's subject to challenge in court. They rarely do that. But if they do, it looks really bad for the seller. For one thing, it means the recall notice comes from the U.S. Government, not the seller, which looks really bad. [1] https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Statement%20of%20Acting%20Chairman%20Robert%20Adler%20on%20the%20Recall%20of%20the%20Peloton%20Tread%20Plus%20and%20Tread%20Treadmills.pdf https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Statement%20of%20Acting%20C...

LightG 5y ago

Hence why I will never buy a Tesla (among other reasons). n=1 ... and you may be right in general.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Depends on the agency. Nobody is going to not buy a Tesla because Musk angered the SEC, because the SEC protects an abstract public good. It’s a wildly different case when you get into a fight with an agency that protects public safety in an easy to understand way; even if you win the legal fight consumers might decide that your product is dangerous and to be avoided, a Pyrrhic victory. Someone else here mentioned Tylenol, which is a good counter example. Aggressive and transparent moves in the direction of consumer safety can both save a company in a PR crisis, and actually turn it into a boon for brand good will and loyalty.

panarky 5y ago
He also blatantly defied Alameda County covid shutdown orders to reopen a Tesla factory. Tesla promised workers that they could stay home if they didn't feel comfortable breaking the law. Workers who stayed home then received termination notices. Hundreds of people who returned to work at Tesla were then sickened by the disease. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundreds-covid-cases-reported-tesla-plant-following-musks-defiant-reopening-county-data-shows/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...
- enriquec 5y ago
  That was an unconstitutional order.
- kadoban 5y ago
  Consumers are for the most part ignorant of or indifferent to worker abuses. "This may kill you" is both an easier story to sell in the media and more compelling to consumers.
- ghufran_syed 5y ago
  hundreds of people who didn’t work at tesla were also “sickened by the disease” - was there a difference in the rate of infection between tesla workers and other people in the community?
  - posterboy 5y ago
    yes. those stayed at home are the ones to compare to.
- toast0 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't have strong feelings about fighting over the covid shutdown (telling employees they could stay home and then firing them is bad though, and significantly worse than ignoring the county order). IMHO, fighting with the SEC over stupid shit reflects poorly on Elon and the board who refuse to supervise him, but not so much on the company. Fighting with the NTSB has a bad look. Throwing shade on people who died using your product, is also a bad look.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Imagine having - in your job description - the responsibility of supervising Elon Musk. Dear lord.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  That still falls into the category of "not my problem" for the buyer. They're not likely to catch SARS-CoV-2 from a new Tesla.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  > Workers who stayed home then received termination notices. 2 people received notices. 10,000 people work at the plant. This might be the single most shockingly and blatantly manipulative article I've read in a long time. Let me list the number of ways that The Post tried to obfuscate the truth. 1. They publish an article in June 2020 titled "Tesla gave workers permission to stay home rather than risk getting covid-19. Then it sent termination notices." The title is entirely disconnected from the body of the article - in the body they specify they are talking about 2 out of 10,000 people, but the title doesn't reflect that even in the slightest. 2. In March 2020, they publish another negative article about Tesla, in which they once again use a more outrageous and misleading language, citing their previous article but not linking to it so that nobody can actually catch the fact that we're talking about 2 out of 10,000 people. Let me remind you that The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is a sworn enemy of Elon Musk. And then the media complains that there's so much push back on their reporting?
birdyrooster 5y ago
I refuse to buy Tesla cars because of Elon and his background of profiting from the mining of emeralds in apartheid Zambia. Elon has worked hard to erase his origin from the minds of potential customers but I could never forget. Elon is also the reason no company will buy Tesla. Elon would have to be all the way out of the picture.
- gamegoblin 5y ago
  I've seen this "Elon comes from stolen emerald money" story a lot, but as best I can tell, the following is true: - Elon's father claims in the mid-80s he bought a partial stake in an emerald mine in Zambia. There is no paper trail of this ownership, so we are taking his dad at his word here. - Zambia was already independent at the time and in no way an apartheid state. The ruling party was ideologically socialist and African nationalist. - This partial ownership of the mine obviously did not make Elon a super wealthy kid, as he moved to Canada for university, gradudated with $100K in student debt, and according to roommates and friends at the time, he was notoriously frugal. So it seems like even if Elon's father is telling the truth here and the mine even existed, that wealth didn't seem to be significant enough to give Elon a huge boost when he came to North America. There are definitely a ton of things to criticize Elon for, but I am not sure the emeralds is one of them.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Why is this downvoted? Please comment.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    White colonizers from Africa with a history of mineral extraction... that’s not going to leave any impression on your morality. Suuure.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Are you saying Elon himself used apartheid to his favor?
- FredPret 5y ago

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Yup. Many federal agency's budgets continue to swell every year, yet they get more and more sickly and toothless. What the hell are they fucking doing? Not protecting the people, that's for sure.

nr2x 5y ago

Hard disagree. US agencies don’t have the resources to pursue many actions, so they are very conservative and really only go after slam-dunks. By the time you get contacted you’re already fucked and need to get with the new program - fast.

elliekelly 5y ago

Even taking every potential legal/regulatory consequence out of the equation I think it was a terrible strategy. Their target market is healthy, wealthy millennial/Gen X people who don’t have a lot of free time. Parents don’t have a lot of free time and wealthy people who aren’t parents usually have pets. I would venture to guess 95% of their customers have a child, a pet, or both. To risk being seen as a company that plays fast and loose with the one thing their customers love more than anything else in the world is foolish.

bko 5y ago

That's not true. Why do people think this? Because Elon Musk can tweets dumb memes? The size and scope of regulatory agencies has vastly increased over the years. And fines paid out are gigantic. Take banks for instance: > Financial institutions have been hit with $10.4 billion in global fines and penalties related to anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), data privacy, and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) regulations in 2020, bringing the total to $46.4 billion for those types of breaches since 2008. https://www.complianceweek.com/surveys-and-benchmarking/report-fines-against-financial-institutions-hit-104b-in-2020/29869.article https://www.complianceweek.com/surveys-and-benchmarking/repo...

bigfudge 5y ago
But both could be true: agencies getting weaker but corporations becoming more instrumental in rule breaking and accepting fines as cost of business. Perhaps the behaviour is getting worse?
verall 5y ago
That's across the whole globe, in the US it was only $4.3B, and it's a record year because of the 1MDB settlement. This is the government clawing back dimes on the dollar from banks that profited massively by aiding illegal enterprises. For the size and scope of regulatory agencies to increase, their budgets would have to increase faster than inflation of wages in their relevant markets. We don't see that in finance (SEC) nor in technology (FCC). The regulators are paid comparative peanuts.
- bko 5y ago
  Do you have a source? Here's a source that suggests SEC budget has increased 82% over 10 years https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reforming-the-securities-and-exchange-commission https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/reform...
  - verall 5y ago
    Hard to tell if you're arguing in good faith with a heritage foundation link, but the stats there are fine. A 82% budget increase from 2008-2018. But only a 31% increase in employees since 2004. Markets have gotten much larger with many more trades over the same time period. Certainly technology helps handle the increase but there is an orders of magnitude difference between a 2004 market and a 2021 market. Crypto is a good example. It didn't used to exist. SEC is the only US regulatory body for it.

slg 5y ago

>And it pays off to fight with them. Look at Elon Musk and his companies. What benefit has Musk or Tesla received from fighting with regulators? Whether it is spats over securities, unions, or safety it doesn't appear that any punishments handed to Musk or Tesla are lenient when compared with what others have received in similar circumstances. Meanwhile these fights have been a consistent drag on his and Tesla's public reputations. Like with most things Tesla, odds are the company would have been better off if Musk knew when to keep his mouth shut.

an_opabinia 5y ago
> What benefit has Musk or Tesla received from fighting with regulators? Same as Peloton. Let's say there are two kinds of people. People who open Robinhood and buy shares at ask, and everyone else. As long as there are more of the former than the latter, and as long as those Robinhood users like spats, then obviously giant company CEOs will keep getting into them. Buying at ask is as direct as it gets! You don't need this some complicated socioeconomic mechanical theory. It's so frustrating to hear about these indirect effects - how the news might cause an analyst to write something negative months later, that maybe some institution may trade on one month, that goes through a big committee... If many Robinhood users read Elon Musk tweets, open Robinhood, buy at ask, price goes up! Like this is the same energy that got a lot of politicians elected these last few elections. The same energy that's making TikTok personalities real celebrities. VIPs have their hands almost directly on the levers of popularity contests nowadays, through social media and direct to consumer finance, e-commerce and subscription apps. If your theory about regulation and capitalism and economics or whatever does not incorporate "more guys buy at ask than guys sell in spread," nowadays, it might not be wrong, but it's mediocre.
- bigfudge 5y ago
  Can you Eli5 why buy at ask is the wrong thing to do if you want to buy shares? What is the alternative? Do you mean you should wait/ time buying based on price?
  - sokoloff 5y ago

chaostheory 5y ago

> Look at Elon Musk and his companies. The SEC is the only financial regulatory body that is a real public institution. Isn't everything else just private corporations who only give the impression that they're public regulatory bodies? Given Wall Street's lobbying power, the regulatory bodies for Wall Street has always been weak. I don't foresee this changing for the same reason.

Animats 5y ago

Here's what the head of the CPSC has to say about that. "But CPSC faces a nearly insurmountable hurdle each and every time the agency wants to warn the public about a hazardous product.Under the gag order of Section6(b)of our statute,the agency must negotiate with companies—often for weeks—before issuing any kind of safety warning."[1] The CPSC can issue a mandatory recall, but that's subject to challenge in court. They rarely do that. But if they do, it looks really bad for the seller. For one thing, it means the recall notice comes from the U.S. Government, not the seller, which looks really bad. [1] https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Statement%20of%20Acting%20Chairman%20Robert%20Adler%20on%20the%20Recall%20of%20the%20Peloton%20Tread%20Plus%20and%20Tread%20Treadmills.pdf https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/Statement%20of%20Acting%20C...