5 ms·

WTF? This is utterly bananas. I don't get it. The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be

by cs702 2y ago

WTF? This is utterly bananas. I don't get it. The long-term cost of treating longtime, loyal, talented employees like Rebecca Tinucci as... disposable could be very high. It could even threaten the company's survival. But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because he has proven me -- and lots of people who are way smarter than me -- wrong, again and again, over the past two decades. He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight. The jury is out.

dragontamer 2y ago
> He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight. Like Cybertruck? Tesla Semi? Full self driving in 2017? Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it? Dojo? Hyperloop? Solar roofs? Battery Swap? Dogecoin? Tesla Roadster? Twitter?
- thejazzman 2y ago
  That snake was bad ass I heard Elon designed and built it himself in his garage They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce
  - potatochup 2y ago
    Definitely not true. Source: I worked at Tesla at the time of the Snake robot.
    - dragontamer 2y ago
      The above post looks like carefully constructed satire, mostly there to make fun of people who hero-worship Elon Musk into thinking that Elon Musk personally handled all tasks at Tesla like Tony Stark / Ironman.
      - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
        Poe's law strikes again
  - orwin 2y ago
    People really believe that? He seems he would have troubles changing a tire, but maybe he's a great mechanic?
- treme 2y ago
  Tesla and SpaceX alone gives him enough credibilty for life as CEO
  - TheCleric 2y ago
    For the immense returns that he's been getting for over 40 years, that alone gives Bernie Madoff credibility for life in investing.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      "The 8 years of the Bill Cosby show alone give Bill Cosby enough credibility for life as a wholesome family man."
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    SpaceX, maybe. He’s actively sinking Tesla and that’s his cash cow.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    What decision did Elon make at Tesla was good for Tesla in the last 10 years? I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today. ------ So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea. Well, aside from Optimus I guess.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    This is, frankly, a very silly way of thinking. Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good. Businesses change, people change, the world changes.
- Avshalom 2y ago
  Oh on the battery swap note I heard recently that may have been a ... scam? Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
- cs702 2y ago
  Thank you for that. It made me chuckle! Here are some counter-examples: * A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW. * A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost. * A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined. * A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt. * A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts. * The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M * Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/IR/TSLA-Q1-2024-Update.pdf https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving. Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter). But the track record is there.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    It is an impressive track record. And something that does frustrate me is people who want to entirely dismiss his track record in order to bolster their current criticisms of him. I think that is motivated reasoning. But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided. What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.) But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions. So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Are you saying he isn't allowed to have some failures on his very long list of ideas? SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
  - browningstreet 2y ago
    Except when you factor in timelines.. his successes are from before, not lately. From a trend perspective, he's disrupting continuities that don't seem rational to disrupt and shouldn't prevent him from moonshot-ing separately.
- Fricken 2y ago
  Also, the "Alien Dreadnaught", a fully automated Model 3 production line with robots that move so fast you won't even be able to see them! It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
- JojoFatsani 2y ago
  Don’t forget the boring company! Let’s invent the subway but worse
yifanl 2y ago
Past performance is not indicative of future returns.
- autonomousErwin 2y ago
  I really wonder how true/untrue this is? For example, if you've founded and exited a company before I'm guessing you're more likely to do it again (this is gut feeling - I don't have data so happy for someone to disprove this with a study) but is that only because people think you're more likely to succeed and therefore give you more resources (capital, employees joining, customers paying etc.) improving your chances thus perpetuating this idea. It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.
thejazzman 2y ago
Lots of famous scams became insanely huge before collapsing under their facade. Enron, Theranos, etc. You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....
- ethagknight 2y ago
  Enron and theranos were actual scams though
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Enron had a decent core business (market making) that was run by absolute psychopaths. Theranos was a scam though.
    - ethagknight 2y ago
      I mean… sure… it was also propagating a massive, institutional scale accounting fraud that brought down a “Big Five” accounting firm. Comparing these two companies to Tesla is insincere. FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        I'm not sure I'd limit it to FSD. The CyberTruck has several very glaring flaws that would not have happened had someone at Tesla talked Elon into accepting just a bit of conventional wisdom from the automotive industry. Things like "provide a protective layer of paint over the sheetmetal of the vehicle's body to prevent rust." The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems. Fit and finish on some models remains subpar. I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.
sanderjd 2y ago
What are some recent examples of things that turned out to be crazy-brilliant that people have been proven wrong about?

by cs702 2y ago

dragontamer 2y ago

> He has a long track record of making bets that look crazy-stupid in the moment but turn out to be crazy-brilliant in hindsight. Like Cybertruck? Tesla Semi? Full self driving in 2017? Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it? Dojo? Hyperloop? Solar roofs? Battery Swap? Dogecoin? Tesla Roadster? Twitter?

thejazzman 2y ago
That snake was bad ass I heard Elon designed and built it himself in his garage They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce
- potatochup 2y ago
  Definitely not true. Source: I worked at Tesla at the time of the Snake robot.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    The above post looks like carefully constructed satire, mostly there to make fun of people who hero-worship Elon Musk into thinking that Elon Musk personally handled all tasks at Tesla like Tony Stark / Ironman.
    - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      Poe's law strikes again
- orwin 2y ago
  People really believe that? He seems he would have troubles changing a tire, but maybe he's a great mechanic?
treme 2y ago
Tesla and SpaceX alone gives him enough credibilty for life as CEO
- TheCleric 2y ago
  For the immense returns that he's been getting for over 40 years, that alone gives Bernie Madoff credibility for life in investing.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    "The 8 years of the Bill Cosby show alone give Bill Cosby enough credibility for life as a wholesome family man."
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  SpaceX, maybe. He’s actively sinking Tesla and that’s his cash cow.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  What decision did Elon make at Tesla was good for Tesla in the last 10 years? I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today. ------ So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea. Well, aside from Optimus I guess.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  This is, frankly, a very silly way of thinking. Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good. Businesses change, people change, the world changes.
Avshalom 2y ago
Oh on the battery swap note I heard recently that may have been a ... scam? Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
cs702 2y ago
Thank you for that. It made me chuckle! Here are some counter-examples: * A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW. * A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost. * A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined. * A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt. * A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts. * The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M * Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/IR/TSLA-Q1-2024-Update.pdf https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving. Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter). But the track record is there.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  It is an impressive track record. And something that does frustrate me is people who want to entirely dismiss his track record in order to bolster their current criticisms of him. I think that is motivated reasoning. But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided. What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.) But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions. So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.
1970-01-01 2y ago
Are you saying he isn't allowed to have some failures on his very long list of ideas? SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
- browningstreet 2y ago
  Except when you factor in timelines.. his successes are from before, not lately. From a trend perspective, he's disrupting continuities that don't seem rational to disrupt and shouldn't prevent him from moonshot-ing separately.
Fricken 2y ago
Also, the "Alien Dreadnaught", a fully automated Model 3 production line with robots that move so fast you won't even be able to see them! It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
JojoFatsani 2y ago
Don’t forget the boring company! Let’s invent the subway but worse

yifanl 2y ago

Past performance is not indicative of future returns.

autonomousErwin 2y ago
I really wonder how true/untrue this is? For example, if you've founded and exited a company before I'm guessing you're more likely to do it again (this is gut feeling - I don't have data so happy for someone to disprove this with a study) but is that only because people think you're more likely to succeed and therefore give you more resources (capital, employees joining, customers paying etc.) improving your chances thus perpetuating this idea. It's like some kind of twisted Hot Hand fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand) that bends in on itself actually making it not a fallacy if everyone believes it.

thejazzman 2y ago

Lots of famous scams became insanely huge before collapsing under their facade. Enron, Theranos, etc. You rarely see any evidence that Elon does anything but pay (...sometimes...), threaten and scare people into delivering on his demands Everything is about first principles. You know, the most basic simple starting blocks. They teach it to high school kids. People act like that's magic....

ethagknight 2y ago
Enron and theranos were actual scams though
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Enron had a decent core business (market making) that was run by absolute psychopaths. Theranos was a scam though.
  - ethagknight 2y ago
    I mean… sure… it was also propagating a massive, institutional scale accounting fraud that brought down a “Big Five” accounting firm. Comparing these two companies to Tesla is insincere. FSD is really the only product sold by Tesla that’s been a true let down for years vs the marketing hype, but they have not given up on it, and are now delivering on the hype. The rest of their main line products are industry leading.
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      I'm not sure I'd limit it to FSD. The CyberTruck has several very glaring flaws that would not have happened had someone at Tesla talked Elon into accepting just a bit of conventional wisdom from the automotive industry. Things like "provide a protective layer of paint over the sheetmetal of the vehicle's body to prevent rust." The new Tesla Roadster and Semis for commercial customers are either way off their timetable or facing further production problems. Fit and finish on some models remains subpar. I don't think it's enough to sink the company in the near-term, particularly in the US, but it's proof that charisma and vision doesn't solve issues with industrial capacity.

sanderjd 2y ago

What are some recent examples of things that turned out to be crazy-brilliant that people have been proven wrong about?