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Seems like another way to avoid the death spiral trap Elon has set up for himself. - Bought Twitter with Tesla stock as collateral - Tesla faces falling EV sa

• neverokay 3y ago
  He’s also concerned about this: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-ceo-musk-chinese-ev-firms-will-demolish-rivals-without-trade-barriers-2024-01-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-... If I could I’d accumulate Tesla starting next year as fed rate cuts kick in.
  • rvz 3y ago
    I would do it now. Even better if TSLA goes 30 - 50% down. Price has to go down before it rises back. The rivals such as Fisker, Rivian and Lucid are the ones which should be worried at this point.
  • deaddodo 3y ago
    Musk just parrots hard free market conservative opinions and uses his "success" helming Tesla as a legitimizer. He's rarely been more than half accurate on any of his economic predictions.
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      > hard free market conservative opinions ... I mean, advocating for protectionism could hardly be described as a "hard free market" position. Protectionism doesn't fit neatly on a left-right scale (both sides have indulged from time to time) but it's clearly not a free-market position.
      • deaddodo 3y ago
        It depends on what you define as a "market". To nationalistic free marketeers, they want the market unimpeded within their boundaries; but "unfair" external influence limited/removed. It's a perfectly compatible mindset.
        • rsynnott 3y ago
          This only really works (for some value of 'works') if you go for external autarky, internal free market. Otherwise, you very much have the government picking winners and losers; banning or heavily tariffing the import of foreign steel, say, will be great for your steel industry, but probably pretty dire for other heavy industry, which consumes steel. Even the autarky option (or somewhat less extreme options like only applying protectionism to end products, rather than raw materials and intermediate products) is only free market if you kind of decide that _end consumers_ are not part of the free market. The car industry in particular has produced many examples of how this goes; look at the East German and Soviet car manufacturing industries, or to some extent the British one prior to European accession. Pumping out shoddy overpriced products which only had a market because people were forced to buy them, and which were utterly unable to compete once imports were finally practical.
          • deaddodo 3y ago
            I didn't say it was a good idea, I was explaining the mentality behind it. It's an outset from a group of people that want to be free from govt regulations but also protected from foreign competitors, who they can't directly influence. They don't care about consumers beyond them buying their product at the highest possible margins.
• abraxas 3y ago
  Despite having means to do so I refuse to buy a Tesla due to Musk's antics. I don't want to bankroll that man-child's descent into Q-Anon level idiocy. There are decent alternatives sprouting all around from traditional car manufacturers.
  • taytus 3y ago
    At different scale, but the same reason why I don’t spend $8 in twitter. I can afford it, but I won’t give than guy any money.
  • aldarisbm 3y ago
    same, before he really spinned off into his antics, I was really considering buying a tesla. I ended up leasing a lexus instead. Next car will be full EV, but will never get a Tesla, and it is 100% because of this man's actions.
    • ckdarby 3y ago
      I've heard the same thing about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tiktok. "I won't ever join those. Those are for kids. Those are weird. Why would I join them." Society rules our lives far more than people are willing to admit to themselves.
      • piva00 3y ago
        Sure but I personally know 3 people in Sweden who got rid of their Teslas and won't ever purchase one again, that is from a very small anecdote but if it has happened within my very low sample size I'd guess that others are sharing a similar sentiment. Two of those are older folks, not even that connected with tech in general (or much of the internet vitriol), if Musk's bad press is reaching them it seems to me a quite generalised issue.
        • astrolx 3y ago
          The bad press is particularly bad in Sweden and was all over the main media, with Musk refusing to sign collective agreements with Tesla employees there, leading to strikes [e.g 1,2]. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/elon-musk-sweden-unions-tesla-labour-car https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/elon-m... [2]: http://www.nordiclabourjournal.org/i-fokus/in-focus-2023/theme-tripartite-negotiations-and-collective-agreements/article.2023-12-05.3752230341 http://www.nordiclabourjournal.org/i-fokus/in-focus-2023/the...
• throwaway63467 3y ago
  Twitter is a sad joke now, I deleted my account and created a placeholder to occasionally read tweets and I get a constant stream of near-identical bot accounts following me. The site is also broken and randomizing tweets for non logged in users further reduced usability for me. There’s still tons of activity there but to me it feels the site is in a death spiral, the team seems to just manage keeping up with bugs so there is very little useful product innovation happening, or at least it seems like that to me.
  • mrighele 3y ago
    To be fair there have been more changes since Musk took over and I think that it is one of the main reasons (together with reduced headcount) for why there are more bugs now. That doesn't mean that all of those changes are a positive, but the pace surely improved.
    • throwaway63467 3y ago
      Yeah but I have the impression it’s mostly about revenue tweaking, not evolving the platform in a way that benefits users. Which I guess is normal as it’s a late stage scale up.
  • nsxwolf 3y ago
    I mostly use Twitter to follow interesting people with interesting hobbies, and those same people are still there and just as interesting as they used to be. The experience hasn't changed for me at all. I wonder how much of the complaining comes from people that primarily used it for politics and culture war shit - their filter bubbles have been popped and they're now seeing things they didn't used to see and therefore it's "gone to hell".
    • tim333 3y ago
      It doesn't seem bad to use to me either. I think people are maybe put off by association with some of the more iffy content elsewhere on the site.
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• suoduandao3 3y ago
  with the gigafactories out and market pressure to build EVs, I feel like Elon has achieved what he set out to do. If he borrows too much and builds too many factories, those factories will still be producing cars after Tesla is liquidated. I can see why he'd be so cavalier with Tesla's survival given what else is happening, the momentum is achieved even if he loses a lot of money. That he'd turn that leverage to X though, I didn't like to see. Even as a Musk fan, it looks like a functional alcoholic buying a bar. Twitter probably does have a lot of military value as a propaganda vector, but it's hard to see how he could be an improvement over Jack Dorsey without ending up in conflict with the military industrial complex that pays for that propaganda.
  • rurp 3y ago
    Given all that we know now, Musk's concern for the environment seems a lot more like good marketing than a deeply held belief. A lot of what he says is nonsense but sounds neat, like pretending that we're close to building a Mars colony. Undermining public transit actively makes the world worse off, but helps him sell more cars. How much of his immense wealth and power has he used to help the environment in ways that don't enrich himself?
    • suoduandao3 3y ago
      Well... whether he's responding to a market need versus creating a market need versus responding to a moral obligation is very hard to untangle. That's part of why nobody's found a better system than capitalism yet - the most self-serving actions are often also the most public serving. I will say from the perspective of someone who specialized in renewable energy all through undergrad, renewable energy is cheap but requires storage. Expensive storage is the reason wind and solar have trouble competing with coal and gas on a dollers per watt basis. Subsidizing the creation of a lot of batteries by bundling them with cars people would buy anyway is the kind of brilliant but dirty growth hacking only a Silicon Valley Techbro would have the audacity to try. I can't comment on his motives, but I don't have a better idea for how to accelerate renewable energy adoption than the path he's pursued. Affordable storage is the keystone that supports that entire structure, in 2009-2014 it was the big unanswered question among my professors. As for enriching himself by helping... I don't think there's a perfect solution there. The Rockefeller-Gates system of making money in one industry and funding purely philanthropic ventures in another comes with its own moral hazards. For profit work in a field of public interest comes with different ones. Both are preferable to taking no interest in the public good IMHO. Personally, if I was a billionaire I'd try to fund ventures that are in the public interest and also have paying customers, it promotes a certain kind of honesty that would be important to me, but I think any oligarch that claims to be trying to help should be given the benefit of the doubt, societal incentives are just so much more aligned that way.
• jonnat 3y ago
  > Elon is Tesla's marketing driver so we can't kick him out I confess that when he started the downward spiral, I thought it might be part of some marketing strategy: they had to bring the other half of the population who think global warming is a hoax/unimportant to EVs in order to be truly successful. It became clear very quickly that he's just losing his sanity.
  • ta1243 3y ago
    It's amazing. You can argue how much input he's had into Tesla and SpaceX over the years, but it's clear that both companies did amazing things. Then he starts his drunken/high/unwise posts and memes, both libelous ("pedo guy"), and financial ("Taking Tesla private") etc, he came out angry about people protecting themselves from covid, and of course his circle, just like people on social media, shifted, and egged him on more and more. His descent spiraled and eventually the lawyers and accountants couldn't get him out of it when it came to Twitter. It's destroyed his finances, lost his reputation, sucked his time, and he entered the spiral of conspiracy and hatred. We've all read about people who have committed career suicide on twitter, or at least caused themselves major problems (Justine Sacco comes to mind, but James Gunn too), but Musk is a category on his own. I look forward to a detailed biography.
• rurp 3y ago
  Elon's brand has become toxic enough that firing him might be the right move, but there's no way it happens with a board made up of sycophants and drug buddies. It's bizarre how far that guy has fallen after being one of the greatest corporate fundraisers and hype men of all time. I guess some personalities don't respond well to being an unaccountable mega billionare.
• chipdart 3y ago
  > Unionisation pressures (...) It boggles the mind how basic mechanisms to protect workers from health and safety issues and overall abuses are often mindlessly parroted as contributing to a company's problems. Listen, if you are incapable of treating employees as people or even lookout for their own personal safety, the problems are not caused by workers getting together to do something to save themselves. If your company fails at this fundamental level, the failure lies in the way your company is managed. You are the problem if you want workers to work nights and weekends. You are the problem if you depend on workers sleeping in the office or factory floors to meet arbitrary deadlines. If your managers try to argue their company can cease to exist if it can no longer subject workers to all kinds of abuse, your company should not exist at all, and the world will be a much better place without it.
  • RealityVoid 3y ago
    I mean, sure, I get your point, but unionization problems _can_ contribute to the company's problems. Or at least lack of them do not surface problems that already exist.