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When Tesla announced the initial move they received a huge amount of push back for the environmental concerns. And it didn’t look good for an EV company of all

When Tesla announced the initial move they received a huge amount of push back for the environmental concerns. And it didn’t look good for an EV company of all things. There is a trend I’ve seen of a company making a decison, everyone hating on them for it, then they reverse the decision, and they are still criticised. If a company turns around and reverses a decision citing the very reasons they were criticised for making it, shouldn’t we applaud them for listening? I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage?

alvis 5y ago
& I'd be surprised to know that Musk didn't know the environmental impact of bitcoin before he pushed bitcoin to the sky?
Athas 5y ago
No, because this makes it seem like they are not making the right decisions because they are right, but only because doing the wrong thing made them unpopular. It makes you wonder what other wrong things they do that doesn't elicit enough of a popular response to make them reconsider. It's not like the environmental impact of Bitcoin was a subtle or obscure issue when they first made the decision. They should have known better, and it remains worrying that they did not.
- post_below 5y ago
  For profit companies don't make decisions because they're right. Right and wrong have no meaning in capitalism. Companies make decisions based on profits. We might wish it were different, but it very clearly isn't. The best we can hope for is that public pressure convinces companies that right and profitable overlap.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    That is an absolute statement being applied to a relative world. The idea that a company won't make a right decision ever is patently absurd. The idea that there are good companies and bad companies is likewise absurd. Of course, a large company has to worry about money because their burn rate is so high, to imply otherwise is naive. It doesn't follow that a cash rich company won't decide to sustainably source materials or pay a fair wage for their employees. Whether companies should ever be allowed to get that large is a different discussion.
    - post_below 5y ago
      Hold on, when did anyone introduce the idea that a company won't make a right decision ever? That's a pretty dramatic mischaracterization of my comment. It's so easy to find something 'patently absurd' in a comment if you aren't bound by the actual content of the comment. Maybe there was something confusing in my choice of words, given the downvotes. I don't think HN is naive enough to think that large publicly traded companies genuinely make decisions based on moral concepts like right and wrong. If they do the right thing, they do it because they see an advantage in it. That's how they're designed to function.
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  Is it bad to not want to do something only because public opinion says not to? I think if you think it is bad, then that implies a certain world view about absolute good and evil. The implication is that this is an evil thing, and only an evil person would want to do it, and so if the only reason they won’t do it is because of public opinion then that doesn’t change their inherent evilness. But the other possibility is that the person making the decision believes it’s a good thing, or at worst a neutral thing, but are not willing to pay the cost once they find out how badly everyone reacted to it. Maybe Musk thinks decentralised money is more important than the setback to climate change? Maybe musk thinks that crypto will become green over time and it won’t matter? Or maybe he just wanted to do a pump and dump. There are all sorts of things musk can think, who knows. But either way, people got what they wanted.
  - propertymagnate 5y ago
    In terms of the discussion about it being a neutral thing, some points: 1. Elon Musk is afraid of AI for the reasons of the paperclip apocalypse problem. You would make something and it would consume all of the resource due to it understanding its need to self replicate and not the fact that its use of resources meant a lack of resources for everyone else and potentially the destruction of the society consuming the paperclips. 2. Elon Musk makes the worlds most famous line of environmentally friendly cars. It is believed he does this, or at least he attempts to sell them on the basis of, being environmentally friendly and saving the planet. 3. Elon Musk also then invests hugely in a decentralised currency that, by design, if it becomes popular, will use all available resources at the exclusion of any other ideology, due to it's decentralised design - including saving the climate, etc - so because energy production by and large destroys the climate, it will destroy the climate. You can say this is a neutral choice, but mostly it just seems like a really dumb or contradictory choice. He (Elon) may well believe decentralised currencies are the future - he has also stated that as soon as a rampant unchecked production mechanism gets free, we are doomed. The apparent inability to connect the two is what I find so striking.
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      It's not like figuring out that bitcoin destroys the environment is rocket science. Even if it was, doesn't he have rocket scientists to figure that kind of stuff out for him?
x3sphere 5y ago
Sure, but none of it makes any sense. I have to imagine the decision to buy Bitcoin and accept it as payment was vetted by a lot of people internally, not just Musk himself. And the environmental impacts from mining are well known. Musk isn’t stupid either - he must’ve known this would be an issue for Tesla’s image.
- riffraff 5y ago
  the impact from mining was well know, the PR impact was not. It is hard these days to gauge how bad people will react, if you're lucky something else happens to get people screaming the same week and you can get away with anything.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  It all makes perfect sense if they in fact want to buy more bitcoin at the moment. There has been a whole lot of very, very ugly inflation data released over the last few days. This would explain why they refrained from selling before making an announcement which they surely knew would (and did: -10%) tank the BTC/USD rate.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  In my opinion Musk probably thinks/knows he's like Trump. Whatever they do, they have a bunch of hardcore defenders (like the ones who will burn this comment to the ground). Wake me up when Musk stops selling his carbon offsets. Because for every non-pollution a Tesla car doesn't do, the sold carbon offset means there's another ICE car that's doing it. "Musk cares for the environment". Hah, that's as bullshit as "Trump cares about the working class".
  - smaryjerry 5y ago
    Carbon credits are doing their exact purpose. It is moving profitability into environmentally friendly sectors and out of polluting sectors. This is in order to make polluting more expensive and environmentally friendly cheaper... I’m not sure why you would think selling carbon credits is evil.
asddubs 5y ago
The problem is that you can't really take a company at face value if they reverse course after having already profited from their "lapse in judgement". The parent post lined out potential motivations behind all this that IMO aren't really that outlandish. It's speculation, but it's not some outlandish crackpot theory
- epgui 5y ago
  Sure, but a basic rule of civility is that you should "assume good faith" and give others the benefit of the doubt when the good faith explanation is plausible.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    I think a lot of people feel that the good faith explanation isn't sufficiently plausible in this case, assuming even just the most cursory of research was done before this decision
  - zdkl 5y ago
    That assumption of good faith works (mostly) for individuals. It does or should not extend to for profit corporations.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Please don't think "for profit" is evil. It's just normal. You can find enormous negative things about all financial structures.
    - epgui 5y ago
      It absolutely does. The way I understand all the responses to my comment, it seems a lot of people have the impression that the assumption of good faith makes someone naive... But that's absolutely not the case. The assumption of good faith does not require one to "believe" that any given action is the product of good faith. The only thing it requires is that good faith be the starting point from which you evaluate someone else's (or yes, a for-profit corporation's) actions. All one needs to do is begin by first trying to understand how an action could be explained by factors other than bad faith, or could be compatible with good faith. This is in fact a very weak requirement!
WJW 5y ago
It's better than staying on a wrong course, but it would be even better if they had thought it through before announcing the plan. It's not as though the environmental impacts of bitcoin were a well kept secret that Tesla couldn't have known about.
pinkybanana 5y ago
> There is a trend I’ve seen of a company making a decison, everyone hating on them for it, then they reverse the decision, and they are still criticised. World is a complex place and there are groups who have different opinions on this. Bitcoiners were cheering when Tesla started shilling BTC, now they are booing. Environmentalists are now tipping Tesla but not that much because they still remain sceptical.
alismayilov 5y ago
They could also spend half an hour to google bitcoin before buying them?
- harwoodleon 5y ago
  And they would eventually find https://Nano.org https://Nano.org, a totally green, fast and fee-less alternative to Bitcoin. (Which has seen a price jump of 60% since the announcement).
learnstats2 5y ago
The perfect cover for a pump-and-dump scheme.
serf 5y ago
>I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? I want to encourage 'corporate flexibility and social accountability'. I do not want to encourage market-whale-individuals to attempt one-person pump-and-dumps on small(ish) global markets and further market opportunism & manipulation. Personally I believe that the decision has little to do with environmental impact; I think that the btc opportunity is beginning to dwindle in various ways, so the focus shifts to other *coin markets where they can profit similarly using the same or similar tactics. BTC specifically is made out to be the boogeyman so that the excuse doesn't disallow similar behavior with other coins in the future. I fully expect similar reasoning with DogeCoin when that opportunity dries up and they move to greener pastures for the third time -- inevitably when profit margins are greater elsewhere.
- Isinlor 5y ago
  All crypto I know about is useful !only! for market speculation. Bitcoin is especially broken and useless for anything. Unless you want to pay 100$ transaction cost to by ice-cream at grocery store.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Drugs.
  - block_dagger 5y ago
    BTC maximalists argue that it’s a better store of value than gold due to portability, divisibility, durability, and scarcity. The theory is that it will be used to settle inter-bank transactions once it is widely adopted by institutions.
    - hilios 5y ago
      >The theory is that it will be used to settle inter-bank transactions once it is widely adopted by institutions. Banks have absolutely not need of a proof of work scheme like Bitcoin, them switching to a system with the power requirements of BTC seems highly unlikely.
saiya-jin 5y ago
Not really, since 1) Musk knew environmental impact well before; 2) it took him a lot of time to react, way too much to put it into 'oh now I understand' ; 3) they happily support dogecoin which is basically exactly the same issue Not much respect for Musk for this one, either he is knowingly manipulating market for whatever amoral reasons or his asperger is getting somehow the worst of him
alpaca128 5y ago
> isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? A company manipulating a volatile market for financial gains, then distancing themselves for PR while keeping the profits? I don't see how any part of this should be encouraged. I could imagine a much larger backlash if this wasn't done by Tesla but, say, AT&T or Google.
tester34 5y ago
Yea, because it wasn't known that bitcoin is not the best thing for environment for years, I guess?
Moodles 5y ago
People would take back the criticism of market manipulation if Tesla donated the profits made from BTC to environmental charities.
- karlkloss 5y ago
  That doesn't make it any better, fraud for charity is still fraud.
  - Moodles 5y ago
    It would at least help the narrative that they genuinely had a change of conscious though, as opposed to just keeping the profits.
kaba0 5y ago
I’m fairly sure a company has the resources to ask a few people from the target audience before making a decision. And frankly, it was so obvious that it’s a bad decision, bitcoin is just hyped by a similar group that thinks of Elon highly for some strange reason, and for him, fame is everything.
vmurthy 5y ago
>And it didn’t look good for an EV company of all things Didn't a company filled with really smart people (no, I don't mean it sarcastically) not know that it'll look bad before buying a billion dollars worth bitcoin?
__alexs 5y ago
> If a company turns around and reverses a decision citing the very reasons they were criticised for making it, shouldn’t we applaud them for listening? Making a terrible mistake suggests you might have bad judgement. Fixing it doesn't erase that, it just removes the immediate impact of that bad decision. To recover fully they need to take additional action that demonstrates that actually their judgement has improved now.
tspiteri 5y ago
As long as they profited from the whole thing, I don't think they should be applauded. It's like applauding someone for stealing from the cookie jar for some time and then stopping after an outcry. Sure, it's better than continuing to steal, but I'd only applaud after the cookies have been paid back.
DharmaPolice 5y ago
>I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? Kind of. If I announce I'm going to start beating my wife and then say "After feedback, I've decided not to do this" then I don't expect to be voted man of the year. And yes, this is an extreme example but for the sort of people who get angry on Twitter the issue they're getting mad at is an extreme one (whatever it is). I think reversing a bad decision is admirable when it wasn't already obvious at the time of making it that it was bad. If new information comes to light that they couldn't have reasonably known originally then of course, that's fine. But mostly the new information seems to be "We knew this would piss some people off but we thought we could get away with it."
throwaway4good 5y ago
Elon is clearly driving up the price of proof of work cryptocurrencies. The environmental impact of these is directly related to their price.

alvis 5y ago

& I'd be surprised to know that Musk didn't know the environmental impact of bitcoin before he pushed bitcoin to the sky?

Athas 5y ago

No, because this makes it seem like they are not making the right decisions because they are right, but only because doing the wrong thing made them unpopular. It makes you wonder what other wrong things they do that doesn't elicit enough of a popular response to make them reconsider. It's not like the environmental impact of Bitcoin was a subtle or obscure issue when they first made the decision. They should have known better, and it remains worrying that they did not.

post_below 5y ago
For profit companies don't make decisions because they're right. Right and wrong have no meaning in capitalism. Companies make decisions based on profits. We might wish it were different, but it very clearly isn't. The best we can hope for is that public pressure convinces companies that right and profitable overlap.
- lbriner 5y ago
  That is an absolute statement being applied to a relative world. The idea that a company won't make a right decision ever is patently absurd. The idea that there are good companies and bad companies is likewise absurd. Of course, a large company has to worry about money because their burn rate is so high, to imply otherwise is naive. It doesn't follow that a cash rich company won't decide to sustainably source materials or pay a fair wage for their employees. Whether companies should ever be allowed to get that large is a different discussion.
  - post_below 5y ago
    Hold on, when did anyone introduce the idea that a company won't make a right decision ever? That's a pretty dramatic mischaracterization of my comment. It's so easy to find something 'patently absurd' in a comment if you aren't bound by the actual content of the comment. Maybe there was something confusing in my choice of words, given the downvotes. I don't think HN is naive enough to think that large publicly traded companies genuinely make decisions based on moral concepts like right and wrong. If they do the right thing, they do it because they see an advantage in it. That's how they're designed to function.
Negitivefrags 5y ago
Is it bad to not want to do something only because public opinion says not to? I think if you think it is bad, then that implies a certain world view about absolute good and evil. The implication is that this is an evil thing, and only an evil person would want to do it, and so if the only reason they won’t do it is because of public opinion then that doesn’t change their inherent evilness. But the other possibility is that the person making the decision believes it’s a good thing, or at worst a neutral thing, but are not willing to pay the cost once they find out how badly everyone reacted to it. Maybe Musk thinks decentralised money is more important than the setback to climate change? Maybe musk thinks that crypto will become green over time and it won’t matter? Or maybe he just wanted to do a pump and dump. There are all sorts of things musk can think, who knows. But either way, people got what they wanted.
- propertymagnate 5y ago
  In terms of the discussion about it being a neutral thing, some points: 1. Elon Musk is afraid of AI for the reasons of the paperclip apocalypse problem. You would make something and it would consume all of the resource due to it understanding its need to self replicate and not the fact that its use of resources meant a lack of resources for everyone else and potentially the destruction of the society consuming the paperclips. 2. Elon Musk makes the worlds most famous line of environmentally friendly cars. It is believed he does this, or at least he attempts to sell them on the basis of, being environmentally friendly and saving the planet. 3. Elon Musk also then invests hugely in a decentralised currency that, by design, if it becomes popular, will use all available resources at the exclusion of any other ideology, due to it's decentralised design - including saving the climate, etc - so because energy production by and large destroys the climate, it will destroy the climate. You can say this is a neutral choice, but mostly it just seems like a really dumb or contradictory choice. He (Elon) may well believe decentralised currencies are the future - he has also stated that as soon as a rampant unchecked production mechanism gets free, we are doomed. The apparent inability to connect the two is what I find so striking.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    It's not like figuring out that bitcoin destroys the environment is rocket science. Even if it was, doesn't he have rocket scientists to figure that kind of stuff out for him?

x3sphere 5y ago

Sure, but none of it makes any sense. I have to imagine the decision to buy Bitcoin and accept it as payment was vetted by a lot of people internally, not just Musk himself. And the environmental impacts from mining are well known. Musk isn’t stupid either - he must’ve known this would be an issue for Tesla’s image.

riffraff 5y ago
the impact from mining was well know, the PR impact was not. It is hard these days to gauge how bad people will react, if you're lucky something else happens to get people screaming the same week and you can get away with anything.
KirillPanov 5y ago
It all makes perfect sense if they in fact want to buy more bitcoin at the moment. There has been a whole lot of very, very ugly inflation data released over the last few days. This would explain why they refrained from selling before making an announcement which they surely knew would (and did: -10%) tank the BTC/USD rate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
In my opinion Musk probably thinks/knows he's like Trump. Whatever they do, they have a bunch of hardcore defenders (like the ones who will burn this comment to the ground). Wake me up when Musk stops selling his carbon offsets. Because for every non-pollution a Tesla car doesn't do, the sold carbon offset means there's another ICE car that's doing it. "Musk cares for the environment". Hah, that's as bullshit as "Trump cares about the working class".
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  Carbon credits are doing their exact purpose. It is moving profitability into environmentally friendly sectors and out of polluting sectors. This is in order to make polluting more expensive and environmentally friendly cheaper... I’m not sure why you would think selling carbon credits is evil.

asddubs 5y ago

The problem is that you can't really take a company at face value if they reverse course after having already profited from their "lapse in judgement". The parent post lined out potential motivations behind all this that IMO aren't really that outlandish. It's speculation, but it's not some outlandish crackpot theory

epgui 5y ago
Sure, but a basic rule of civility is that you should "assume good faith" and give others the benefit of the doubt when the good faith explanation is plausible.
- asddubs 5y ago
  I think a lot of people feel that the good faith explanation isn't sufficiently plausible in this case, assuming even just the most cursory of research was done before this decision
- zdkl 5y ago
  That assumption of good faith works (mostly) for individuals. It does or should not extend to for profit corporations.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Please don't think "for profit" is evil. It's just normal. You can find enormous negative things about all financial structures.
  - epgui 5y ago
    It absolutely does. The way I understand all the responses to my comment, it seems a lot of people have the impression that the assumption of good faith makes someone naive... But that's absolutely not the case. The assumption of good faith does not require one to "believe" that any given action is the product of good faith. The only thing it requires is that good faith be the starting point from which you evaluate someone else's (or yes, a for-profit corporation's) actions. All one needs to do is begin by first trying to understand how an action could be explained by factors other than bad faith, or could be compatible with good faith. This is in fact a very weak requirement!

WJW 5y ago

It's better than staying on a wrong course, but it would be even better if they had thought it through before announcing the plan. It's not as though the environmental impacts of bitcoin were a well kept secret that Tesla couldn't have known about.

pinkybanana 5y ago

> There is a trend I’ve seen of a company making a decison, everyone hating on them for it, then they reverse the decision, and they are still criticised. World is a complex place and there are groups who have different opinions on this. Bitcoiners were cheering when Tesla started shilling BTC, now they are booing. Environmentalists are now tipping Tesla but not that much because they still remain sceptical.

alismayilov 5y ago

They could also spend half an hour to google bitcoin before buying them?

harwoodleon 5y ago
And they would eventually find https://Nano.org https://Nano.org, a totally green, fast and fee-less alternative to Bitcoin. (Which has seen a price jump of 60% since the announcement).

learnstats2 5y ago

The perfect cover for a pump-and-dump scheme.

serf 5y ago

>I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? I want to encourage 'corporate flexibility and social accountability'. I do not want to encourage market-whale-individuals to attempt one-person pump-and-dumps on small(ish) global markets and further market opportunism & manipulation. Personally I believe that the decision has little to do with environmental impact; I think that the btc opportunity is beginning to dwindle in various ways, so the focus shifts to other *coin markets where they can profit similarly using the same or similar tactics. BTC specifically is made out to be the boogeyman so that the excuse doesn't disallow similar behavior with other coins in the future. I fully expect similar reasoning with DogeCoin when that opportunity dries up and they move to greener pastures for the third time -- inevitably when profit margins are greater elsewhere.

Isinlor 5y ago
All crypto I know about is useful !only! for market speculation. Bitcoin is especially broken and useless for anything. Unless you want to pay 100$ transaction cost to by ice-cream at grocery store.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Drugs.
- block_dagger 5y ago
  BTC maximalists argue that it’s a better store of value than gold due to portability, divisibility, durability, and scarcity. The theory is that it will be used to settle inter-bank transactions once it is widely adopted by institutions.
  - hilios 5y ago
    >The theory is that it will be used to settle inter-bank transactions once it is widely adopted by institutions. Banks have absolutely not need of a proof of work scheme like Bitcoin, them switching to a system with the power requirements of BTC seems highly unlikely.

saiya-jin 5y ago

Not really, since 1) Musk knew environmental impact well before; 2) it took him a lot of time to react, way too much to put it into 'oh now I understand' ; 3) they happily support dogecoin which is basically exactly the same issue Not much respect for Musk for this one, either he is knowingly manipulating market for whatever amoral reasons or his asperger is getting somehow the worst of him

alpaca128 5y ago

> isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? A company manipulating a volatile market for financial gains, then distancing themselves for PR while keeping the profits? I don't see how any part of this should be encouraged. I could imagine a much larger backlash if this wasn't done by Tesla but, say, AT&T or Google.

tester34 5y ago

Yea, because it wasn't known that bitcoin is not the best thing for environment for years, I guess?

Moodles 5y ago

People would take back the criticism of market manipulation if Tesla donated the profits made from BTC to environmental charities.

karlkloss 5y ago
That doesn't make it any better, fraud for charity is still fraud.
- Moodles 5y ago
  It would at least help the narrative that they genuinely had a change of conscious though, as opposed to just keeping the profits.

kaba0 5y ago

I’m fairly sure a company has the resources to ask a few people from the target audience before making a decision. And frankly, it was so obvious that it’s a bad decision, bitcoin is just hyped by a similar group that thinks of Elon highly for some strange reason, and for him, fame is everything.

vmurthy 5y ago

>And it didn’t look good for an EV company of all things Didn't a company filled with really smart people (no, I don't mean it sarcastically) not know that it'll look bad before buying a billion dollars worth bitcoin?

__alexs 5y ago

> If a company turns around and reverses a decision citing the very reasons they were criticised for making it, shouldn’t we applaud them for listening? Making a terrible mistake suggests you might have bad judgement. Fixing it doesn't erase that, it just removes the immediate impact of that bad decision. To recover fully they need to take additional action that demonstrates that actually their judgement has improved now.

tspiteri 5y ago

As long as they profited from the whole thing, I don't think they should be applauded. It's like applauding someone for stealing from the cookie jar for some time and then stopping after an outcry. Sure, it's better than continuing to steal, but I'd only applaud after the cookies have been paid back.

DharmaPolice 5y ago

>I mean, isn’t this exactly the behaviour we want to encourage? Kind of. If I announce I'm going to start beating my wife and then say "After feedback, I've decided not to do this" then I don't expect to be voted man of the year. And yes, this is an extreme example but for the sort of people who get angry on Twitter the issue they're getting mad at is an extreme one (whatever it is). I think reversing a bad decision is admirable when it wasn't already obvious at the time of making it that it was bad. If new information comes to light that they couldn't have reasonably known originally then of course, that's fine. But mostly the new information seems to be "We knew this would piss some people off but we thought we could get away with it."

throwaway4good 5y ago

Elon is clearly driving up the price of proof of work cryptocurrencies. The environmental impact of these is directly related to their price.