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I feel like we’re going to look back in a couple years and mark this as the beginning of the collapse of Tesla. Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocus

I feel like we’re going to look back in a couple years and mark this as the beginning of the collapse of Tesla. Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris.

marban 5y ago
Imagine Tim Cook were to take a loan on his Apple stock to take over Whole Foods because he doesn't like their avocados.
- sixQuarks 5y ago
  Cant imagine Tim Cook doing that, but sure sounds like something Steve Jobs would do
  - marban 5y ago
    Since Avocados are fruits you're technically correct
- natch 5y ago
  Free speech, avocados… slight difference, wouldn’t you say?
typeofhuman 5y ago
How could you possibly know the personal limits of another person? How do you know he's unfocused and undisciplined?
sixQuarks 5y ago
So are you admitting that Elon musk is solely responsible for Tesla’s success? Because whenever Tesla has a huge accomplishment, people always come out of the woodwork and claim Elon is Not the founder and all he does is take credit for everyone else’s work.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  He is almost certainly responsible for Tesla not having filed for chapter 11 yet, but they have gotten close a few times. Every time they get close, he does something in the media that raises the stock price by 200% so they can quietly sell shares to cover the shortfall. I personally wouldn't give him credit for the great engineering done at tesla. It seems like he is good at hiring decent people, and when he gets out of their way, great things happen. When he gets involved (like with the absurd touchscreen console, no-LIDAR self-driving, and the "lights-off" factory idea) it goes wrong. Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    > Every time they get close, he does something in the media that raises the stock price by 200% This is not really the case at all. Why are you just making stuff up? Go look at between 2016 and 2018, by far the closest Tesla came to bankruptcy then at any time sine 2008. So I'm looking at that data and there is no magical 200% stock price raise based on media. What actually happened it Tesla managed to execute and bring a mass market vehicle market successfully. > like with the absurd touchscreen console Man somebody should have told the 1.5 million vehicles they will sell this year for 30% magin how stupid that is. > no-LIDAR self-driving That's why you can now anywhere in the US can jump on a self-driving LIDAR tax and buy a LIDAR self-driving car at your local dealer. > and the "lights-off" factory idea And now Tesla has some of the most advanced factories in the car industry where literally the CEO of VW said that VW was not able to produce vehicles as fast. What an idiot he is ... > Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work. That is literally the opposite impression you get when you actually investigate anything other then twitter opinion. Pretty much everybody who got to spend any time at Tesla or SpaceX comes away with the opposite impression. Musk literally spends the waste majority of his time in detailed engineering review meetings. Tesla had a gigantic amount of negative press, more then any other company I can think of. But Musk made the company successful with marketing? What are you even talking about, what marketing? His twitter account and a TED interview or something every could of months? The viewer numbers on those things are far to low to explain Tesla value.
4eleven7 5y ago
Was The Washington Post the tipping point where Amazon started to collapse? I think we're approaching a point in the lifespan of Tesla where is can stand on its own merit and no longer requires Musk to continue making a ridiculous amount of money. However, Musk is integral to the continued innovation and success, the same as Steve Jobs was to Apple. Under Tim Cook, Apple continued to thrive, albeit in a different way. Regardless, no way will Musk run Twitter on a day-to-day basis, he'll remove the board, replace the CEO with someone he trusts, likely get Jack involved again, and a lot of developers will leave, leaving the company in a better position financially. Musk will likely just guide functionality and policy decisions from afar.
- f38zf5vdt 5y ago
  Kind of, yeah? A few years later I deleted my Amazon account because Amazon became the new AliExpress and I could usually find everything for cheaper on eBay.
  - chii 5y ago
    your one anecdotal situation is in no way indicative of amazon's business. They are much bigger today than it was before!
  - stupidcar 5y ago
    I hate to tell you, but that momentous setback has not yet caused Amazon to collapse.
    - f38zf5vdt 5y ago
      Yes, of course. But that's when Amazon died for me, as a product.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
      - stupidcar 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thehappypm 5y ago
I doubt it because Twitter is so fundamentally simpler than companies like Tesla or SpaceX this won’t be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  If you view it as a pure engineering problem, sure, but the problem with managing social media companies hasn't been "we can't figure out how to store and display 280 character messages at high scale" in a long, long time. How to properly moderate social media to control some of its worst tendencies has been a very visible and very difficult issue for pretty much every social media company for the past 10 years.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Musk brings a highly ideological approach to this already, giving it a de facto resolution.
    - ryanbrunner 5y ago
      There's a resolution, but any resolution will bring additional problems. If Musk's approach brings increased radicalization along with it, that's not a solved problem, even if you don't particularly care about radicalization (since the media definitely will and you're painting a bullseye on yourself).
  - pyronik19 5y ago
    >How to properly moderate social media to control some of its worst tendencies has been a very visible and very difficult issue for pretty much every social media company for the past 10 years. Define "worst tendencies", because most people agree that "doxxing" and calls to violence are unacceptable but the left has just labeled all speech that they disagree with as "violence" or "misinformation" and just banned it all. I think musk has a good pulse on the dividing line that is most appropriate and that having the wrong opinion on the definition of a man, who won the last presidential election, and whether or not a vaccine is "safe or effective" have no business being censored by the cretins currently running twitter.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
I doubt it. Tesla is so established at this point that it is successful regardless what Musk does in his free time.
- chii 5y ago
  in fact, the less Musk interferes with Tesla, the more successful it would be!
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Depends on how you define success. Market share very likely, the stock price is probably going to crater without him and hype bullshit...
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Are you basing this 'analysis' on anything other then 'I don't like Musk'. Literally what is this based on. Tesla was going straight into the shitter, Musk took over and now its a trillion $ company. How do you explain that?
leesec 5y ago
Twitter is not "irrelevant" in any sense of the word. Also they have no direction from the current leadership as is.
mike_hearn 5y ago
He may have someone in mind who he will appoint CEO. Fundamentally, his beef with Twitter seems to be around their speech policies and maybe some missing site features. He doesn't need to be even close to full time to resolve those. He just has to find a tech CEO who agrees with his values and who can execute when given a clear mission. There are plenty of those kicking around the Bay Area.
incomingpain 5y ago
Elon is already rather uninvolved with tesla because of the fight with the SEC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm They also have over 100,000 employees. How much can Musk really be involved in? Tesla is pretty much on full self driving now, it's basically blue chip and not going anywhere. Yes the trillion $ market cap is due in large part to him. >Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris. I couldn't disagree more. He's the richest person in the world, he's so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He's basically the world's first trillionaire. He has had how many doubters along the way and he's right every time? I get why he's buying twitter and it's not about it being a hobby. Sure babylon bee was a catalyst but basically he sees the societal value of twitter. He sees the damage that twitter is doing through their political censorship. By fixing these problems it will provide tremendous value to twitter. He's going to benefit greatly with the purchase.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > He's basically the world's first trillionaire. What?
  - incomingpain 5y ago
    Latest figures put him around $270 billion USD. That's mainly based on him owning ~20% of tesla. Whose market cap is around a trillion. That figure doesn't include spacex/starlink, boring company, etc. Spacex has gross revenues in the billions, 12,000 employees. Not to mention... ISS basically is Russian or Spacex launches to get there and back. With Ukraine... that makes Spacex the only option? What's the intrinsic value there? What valuation would you give SpaceX? Their only real competitor right now is Russia and people dislike them.
    - bidirectional 5y ago
      His Tesla stake is worth ~190bn and the rest of his estimated net worth is comprised of SpaceX etc. Not sure why you think that is his Tesla equity only.
panick21_ 5y ago
> now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined A guy who has managed to lead multiple startup companies to huge companies for literally decades threw multiple economic crisis. He is one of the longest running CEO in the auto industry. Its just amazing to me how people focus so much on 'omg look at how he manages social media' compared to 'simple looking at the actual record of the companies he leads'. People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company. And yet neither SpaceX nor Tesla have suffered. That said, I'm against it too. I just think that the idea that this will collapse Tesla is not realistic.
- hef19898 5y ago
  >> People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company And both failed.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    I don't think they did fail just yet, but even if they did Tesla is still well and alive. It's actually doing better than ever I think. The point was that this is not the beginning of the end for Tesla or SpaceX, just like it wasn't when he started doing those other projects too.
  - belval 5y ago
    If you standard for successful moonshot entrepreneurs is "no failures", it's probably hard to find any. Risky businesses are risky.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      This person is just making up his own facts. They didn't fail.
  - 4eleven7 5y ago
    How has Neurolink failed? They've successfully implanted within a chimp, allowing the animal to control a game (pong) via its brain. They're now moving onto human trials before the end of the year. How has Boring Company failed? They've successfully opened the Vegas loop, have a pitch to open a similar project in (I believe) Miami? And now they're looking at building a Hyperloop 'in the coming years'.
supernt 5y ago
Pressure groups will whip up a tesla boycott on the basis that Elon's not censoring things they don't like.
bequanna 5y ago
I think “collapse” is a bit dramatic. We’re not talking about WeWork here. Revenue will continue to increase, but at a slowing rate. Stock price correction != company collapse.

marban 5y ago

Imagine Tim Cook were to take a loan on his Apple stock to take over Whole Foods because he doesn't like their avocados.

sixQuarks 5y ago
Cant imagine Tim Cook doing that, but sure sounds like something Steve Jobs would do
- marban 5y ago
  Since Avocados are fruits you're technically correct
natch 5y ago
Free speech, avocados… slight difference, wouldn’t you say?

typeofhuman 5y ago

How could you possibly know the personal limits of another person? How do you know he's unfocused and undisciplined?

sixQuarks 5y ago

So are you admitting that Elon musk is solely responsible for Tesla’s success? Because whenever Tesla has a huge accomplishment, people always come out of the woodwork and claim Elon is Not the founder and all he does is take credit for everyone else’s work.

pclmulqdq 5y ago
He is almost certainly responsible for Tesla not having filed for chapter 11 yet, but they have gotten close a few times. Every time they get close, he does something in the media that raises the stock price by 200% so they can quietly sell shares to cover the shortfall. I personally wouldn't give him credit for the great engineering done at tesla. It seems like he is good at hiring decent people, and when he gets out of their way, great things happen. When he gets involved (like with the absurd touchscreen console, no-LIDAR self-driving, and the "lights-off" factory idea) it goes wrong. Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  > Every time they get close, he does something in the media that raises the stock price by 200% This is not really the case at all. Why are you just making stuff up? Go look at between 2016 and 2018, by far the closest Tesla came to bankruptcy then at any time sine 2008. So I'm looking at that data and there is no magical 200% stock price raise based on media. What actually happened it Tesla managed to execute and bring a mass market vehicle market successfully. > like with the absurd touchscreen console Man somebody should have told the 1.5 million vehicles they will sell this year for 30% magin how stupid that is. > no-LIDAR self-driving That's why you can now anywhere in the US can jump on a self-driving LIDAR tax and buy a LIDAR self-driving car at your local dealer. > and the "lights-off" factory idea And now Tesla has some of the most advanced factories in the car industry where literally the CEO of VW said that VW was not able to produce vehicles as fast. What an idiot he is ... > Musk is an amazing marketer and he deserves credit for that, but not for engineering work. That is literally the opposite impression you get when you actually investigate anything other then twitter opinion. Pretty much everybody who got to spend any time at Tesla or SpaceX comes away with the opposite impression. Musk literally spends the waste majority of his time in detailed engineering review meetings. Tesla had a gigantic amount of negative press, more then any other company I can think of. But Musk made the company successful with marketing? What are you even talking about, what marketing? His twitter account and a TED interview or something every could of months? The viewer numbers on those things are far to low to explain Tesla value.

4eleven7 5y ago

Was The Washington Post the tipping point where Amazon started to collapse? I think we're approaching a point in the lifespan of Tesla where is can stand on its own merit and no longer requires Musk to continue making a ridiculous amount of money. However, Musk is integral to the continued innovation and success, the same as Steve Jobs was to Apple. Under Tim Cook, Apple continued to thrive, albeit in a different way. Regardless, no way will Musk run Twitter on a day-to-day basis, he'll remove the board, replace the CEO with someone he trusts, likely get Jack involved again, and a lot of developers will leave, leaving the company in a better position financially. Musk will likely just guide functionality and policy decisions from afar.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago
Kind of, yeah? A few years later I deleted my Amazon account because Amazon became the new AliExpress and I could usually find everything for cheaper on eBay.
- chii 5y ago
  your one anecdotal situation is in no way indicative of amazon's business. They are much bigger today than it was before!
- stupidcar 5y ago
  I hate to tell you, but that momentous setback has not yet caused Amazon to collapse.
  - f38zf5vdt 5y ago
    Yes, of course. But that's when Amazon died for me, as a product.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
    - stupidcar 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

thehappypm 5y ago

I doubt it because Twitter is so fundamentally simpler than companies like Tesla or SpaceX this won’t be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

ryanbrunner 5y ago
If you view it as a pure engineering problem, sure, but the problem with managing social media companies hasn't been "we can't figure out how to store and display 280 character messages at high scale" in a long, long time. How to properly moderate social media to control some of its worst tendencies has been a very visible and very difficult issue for pretty much every social media company for the past 10 years.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Musk brings a highly ideological approach to this already, giving it a de facto resolution.
  - ryanbrunner 5y ago
    There's a resolution, but any resolution will bring additional problems. If Musk's approach brings increased radicalization along with it, that's not a solved problem, even if you don't particularly care about radicalization (since the media definitely will and you're painting a bullseye on yourself).
- pyronik19 5y ago
  >How to properly moderate social media to control some of its worst tendencies has been a very visible and very difficult issue for pretty much every social media company for the past 10 years. Define "worst tendencies", because most people agree that "doxxing" and calls to violence are unacceptable but the left has just labeled all speech that they disagree with as "violence" or "misinformation" and just banned it all. I think musk has a good pulse on the dividing line that is most appropriate and that having the wrong opinion on the definition of a man, who won the last presidential election, and whether or not a vaccine is "safe or effective" have no business being censored by the cretins currently running twitter.

_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago

I doubt it. Tesla is so established at this point that it is successful regardless what Musk does in his free time.

chii 5y ago
in fact, the less Musk interferes with Tesla, the more successful it would be!
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Depends on how you define success. Market share very likely, the stock price is probably going to crater without him and hype bullshit...
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Are you basing this 'analysis' on anything other then 'I don't like Musk'. Literally what is this based on. Tesla was going straight into the shitter, Musk took over and now its a trillion $ company. How do you explain that?

leesec 5y ago

Twitter is not "irrelevant" in any sense of the word. Also they have no direction from the current leadership as is.

mike_hearn 5y ago

He may have someone in mind who he will appoint CEO. Fundamentally, his beef with Twitter seems to be around their speech policies and maybe some missing site features. He doesn't need to be even close to full time to resolve those. He just has to find a tech CEO who agrees with his values and who can execute when given a clear mission. There are plenty of those kicking around the Bay Area.

incomingpain 5y ago

Elon is already rather uninvolved with tesla because of the fight with the SEC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Denholm They also have over 100,000 employees. How much can Musk really be involved in? Tesla is pretty much on full self driving now, it's basically blue chip and not going anywhere. Yes the trillion $ market cap is due in large part to him. >Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris. I couldn't disagree more. He's the richest person in the world, he's so tremendously successful whatever attributes that you want to apply to him is literally only something to learn from. Hubris? Overconfidence? He's basically the world's first trillionaire. He has had how many doubters along the way and he's right every time? I get why he's buying twitter and it's not about it being a hobby. Sure babylon bee was a catalyst but basically he sees the societal value of twitter. He sees the damage that twitter is doing through their political censorship. By fixing these problems it will provide tremendous value to twitter. He's going to benefit greatly with the purchase.

endisneigh 5y ago
> He's basically the world's first trillionaire. What?
- incomingpain 5y ago
  Latest figures put him around $270 billion USD. That's mainly based on him owning ~20% of tesla. Whose market cap is around a trillion. That figure doesn't include spacex/starlink, boring company, etc. Spacex has gross revenues in the billions, 12,000 employees. Not to mention... ISS basically is Russian or Spacex launches to get there and back. With Ukraine... that makes Spacex the only option? What's the intrinsic value there? What valuation would you give SpaceX? Their only real competitor right now is Russia and people dislike them.
  - bidirectional 5y ago
    His Tesla stake is worth ~190bn and the rest of his estimated net worth is comprised of SpaceX etc. Not sure why you think that is his Tesla equity only.

panick21_ 5y ago

> now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined A guy who has managed to lead multiple startup companies to huge companies for literally decades threw multiple economic crisis. He is one of the longest running CEO in the auto industry. Its just amazing to me how people focus so much on 'omg look at how he manages social media' compared to 'simple looking at the actual record of the companies he leads'. People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company. And yet neither SpaceX nor Tesla have suffered. That said, I'm against it too. I just think that the idea that this will collapse Tesla is not realistic.

hef19898 5y ago
>> People said the same thing about Neurolink and the Boring Company And both failed.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  I don't think they did fail just yet, but even if they did Tesla is still well and alive. It's actually doing better than ever I think. The point was that this is not the beginning of the end for Tesla or SpaceX, just like it wasn't when he started doing those other projects too.
- belval 5y ago
  If you standard for successful moonshot entrepreneurs is "no failures", it's probably hard to find any. Risky businesses are risky.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    This person is just making up his own facts. They didn't fail.
- 4eleven7 5y ago
  How has Neurolink failed? They've successfully implanted within a chimp, allowing the animal to control a game (pong) via its brain. They're now moving onto human trials before the end of the year. How has Boring Company failed? They've successfully opened the Vegas loop, have a pitch to open a similar project in (I believe) Miami? And now they're looking at building a Hyperloop 'in the coming years'.

supernt 5y ago

Pressure groups will whip up a tesla boycott on the basis that Elon's not censoring things they don't like.

bequanna 5y ago

I think “collapse” is a bit dramatic. We’re not talking about WeWork here. Revenue will continue to increase, but at a slowing rate. Stock price correction != company collapse.