7 ms·

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that

They had the first mover advantage, but then Musk lost interest in the company and let it just sit there for the last five years or so without making sure that they have a future-proof product pipeline and that those products are actually being delivered on a reasonable schedule. Now they are increasingly turning into an EV also-ran while their moonshots are unlikely to work out any time soon. Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it.

TacoCommander 8mo ago
The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.
- toomuchtodo 8mo ago
  Indeed. SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026
- burningChrome 8mo ago
  Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    Because it’s boring.
    - alterom 8mo ago
      Not in principle, mind you. It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains). Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
      - ianburrell 8mo ago
        Not to mention that keep getting fined for improper disposal of waste material. Just dumping tunneling fluid into the sewer.
      - scottyah 8mo ago
        Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot. I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?
        stephen_g 8mo ago
        The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out. If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.
        scottyah 8mo ago
        I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers. The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part. It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.
  - TacoCommander 8mo ago
    They just work "underground"
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 8mo ago
  Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?
  - alterom 8mo ago
    Unfortunately, enough for many regular people to be screwed when that stock crashes.
    - scottyah 8mo ago
      What do you base this on?
  - NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine. Their second customer is the Federal government and SpaceX has a monopoly on cheap reliable fast launch services that will overcome most politics. Even EU companies and Amazon and OneWeb have been forced to use them because there is no better option.
- scottyah 8mo ago
  He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).
- habinero 8mo ago
  His entire wealth is basically paper anyways.
jjfoooo4 8mo ago
I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T. Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors. This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally. The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  I think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design. Ford wouldn’t have known about The Innovator’s Dilemma and possibly not about Sunk Cost Fallacy. Deming had to go to Japan to get his ideas taken seriously and it nearly bankrupted American manufacturing that they wouldn’t listen to him.
- yardie 8mo ago
  One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned. The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.
- PolygonSheep 8mo ago
  > they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.
amelius 8mo ago
The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king. (+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.
- MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do
- ultrarunner 8mo ago
  My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane. EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
  - Analemma_ 8mo ago
    I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
    - amluto 8mo ago
preisschild 8mo ago
> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it. Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s (yes, he actually did say that)
1970-01-01 8mo ago
First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.
- lallysingh 8mo ago
  The EV1 gave GM no advantage.
  - 1970-01-01 8mo ago
    It wasn't the first modern EV?
    - lallysingh 8mo ago
      GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.
      - 1970-01-01 8mo ago
        We are in complete agreement here. They wasted their lead.
        NetMageSCW 8mo ago
        They didn’t have a lead. It’s like saying the DC-X was ahead in propulsive landing over F9, or the LG Prada had a lead over the iPhone. Being first isn’t enough to establish a lead. You also have to be in competition, which means selling product.
        1970-01-01 8mo ago
        It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.
hinkley 8mo ago
It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.
- gizzlon 8mo ago
  and drugs
  - hinkley 8mo ago
    I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if Elon made time for his kids instead of whatever the fuck it is he’s been doing.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    He does more than dabble in drugs
113 8mo ago
I don't think the problem was a lack of Elon Musk's involvement.

TacoCommander 8mo ago

The end game is the SpaceX IPO which will make him a trillionaire, and then he doesn't need Tesla any more.

toomuchtodo 8mo ago
Indeed. SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814701 - January 2026
burningChrome 8mo ago
Or the Boring Company which most people have also completely forgotten about.
- hinkley 8mo ago
  Because it’s boring.
  - alterom 8mo ago
    Not in principle, mind you. It's just that the company has stalled every major project they started, and, so far, completed a rather shitty an uninspiring one in Vegas that has no reason to exist in the first place (it's subway but with Teslas instead of trains). Its only purpose is to prevent the money from being spent on viable public transportation projects, and in that sense, it's very interesting that it got so far.
    - ianburrell 8mo ago
      Not to mention that keep getting fined for improper disposal of waste material. Just dumping tunneling fluid into the sewer.
    - scottyah 8mo ago
      Or, digging tunnels is a lot harder than expected and there have been no big technical leaps to change that. The idea is great, but only if the cost goes down and digging speed goes up by a lot. I assume you got a cut of the $23bn my state took with the promise of a high-speed rail, which afaik is the only "viable(?!)" transportation project that could have been affected by this, or you just hate subways/subterranean transportation progress?
      - stephen_g 8mo ago
        The idea isn’t great, tunnels for cars or pods have really low throughput (low occupancy + safety margin headways, even at a high speed). And it hinged on them magically revolutionising an already highly mature field, which surprise, surprise didn’t work out. If it had been possible to speed up and reduce the cost of tunneling, the thing that would most make sense is running regular trains through them. But they never had any real ideas to actually make it cheaper or faster (apart for making it too small for proper emergency egress), just the idea that SV tech guys would be able to find a way to do it.
        scottyah 8mo ago
        I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers. The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part. It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.
- TacoCommander 8mo ago
  They just work "underground"
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rchaud 8mo ago
Regular IPOs usually have commitments from pension funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and other institutional investors secured in advance of going public. How many of those parties would be interested considering that SpaceX really only has one main customer whose business isn't guaranteed considering his political partisanship?
- alterom 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, enough for many regular people to be screwed when that stock crashes.
  - scottyah 8mo ago
    What do you base this on?
- NetMageSCW 8mo ago
  Their main customer is Starlink and it will continue to be cash printing machine. Their second customer is the Federal government and SpaceX has a monopoly on cheap reliable fast launch services that will overcome most politics. Even EU companies and Amazon and OneWeb have been forced to use them because there is no better option.
scottyah 8mo ago
He barely needs Tesla now, pretty much the only thing stopping electric cars from being ubiquitous are people in politics and media. The new mission statement is just to make everything for everyone, which I guess solves the people-on-earth problems he wanted to tackle. Next is a push for Mars (which again is mostly threatened by some politicians at this point).
habinero 8mo ago
His entire wealth is basically paper anyways.

jjfoooo4 8mo ago

I recently read Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, and one of the interesting things it talks about is the path of the Model T. Ford invested heavily in an in-house, highly optimized production pathway for the Model T. Other manufacturers sourced a lot of their parts from vendors. This gave the Model T a great advantage at first, but they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. Ford ended up converging with the rest of the industry in sourcing more of their parts externally. The lack of new Tesla models makes me feel like a similar pivot is what Tesla needs. My suspicion is that they probably need a less terminally distracted Musk to pull it off.

hinkley 8mo ago
I think I read somewhere that the model T went something like 12 years without substantial changes to its design. Ford wouldn’t have known about The Innovator’s Dilemma and possibly not about Sunk Cost Fallacy. Deming had to go to Japan to get his ideas taken seriously and it nearly bankrupted American manufacturing that they wouldn’t listen to him.
yardie 8mo ago
One of the things Jim Farley, Ford CEO, brought up was they have a lot of 3rd party suppliers, and changes take a long time to implement. So a firmware update may require change notifications and responses from dozens of suppliers for something like door locks. This was in response to why Ford couldn't do firmware as fast or as often as Tesla. Vertically integrated means you have 1 big ship to turn around. Modern JIT manufacturing means your ship is built of 100s of cards and each one needs to be turned. The lack of new models from updates I believe comes from the fact the CEO is busy elsewhere and the board is reluctant to address that. They have made the P/E so high that they can only continue to function in one direction, do just enough to bring in more outside investment.
PolygonSheep 8mo ago
> they had a lot more trouble than competitors in coming up with new models. I'd read somewhere that it was mainly because Henry Ford was dogmatic that the Model T was perfect, all the car anyone would ever need forever.

amelius 8mo ago

The problem is that EVs are basically a solved problem. There isn't any technological advantage to be gained, since the technology in an EV is very basic (+) compared to ICE vehicles. So then it comes down to manufacturing, and there China is king. (+) Except for the battery, but that's a very long term battle with very tiny steps.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
Teslas don’t even have HUDs, there’s plenty of work left to do
ultrarunner 8mo ago
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane. EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
- Analemma_ 8mo ago
  I have a 2022 Model 3, and the hilariously tragic part is that the voice assistant was great and basically never gave me any problems until they shoved Grok into it, whereupon it broke completely. I never use it anymore, they effectively removed a feature from my car.
  - amluto 8mo ago

preisschild 8mo ago

> Realistically, he should have put someone else in charge after the launch of the Model 3 to develop the company further, but I don't think his ego allows it. Well he knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive on Earth, so he can't be replaced /s (yes, he actually did say that)

1970-01-01 8mo ago

First mover advantage was GM's EV1. Tesla would not exist if GM didn't go and crush every single EV1 they could find.

lallysingh 8mo ago
The EV1 gave GM no advantage.
- 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  It wasn't the first modern EV?
  - lallysingh 8mo ago
    GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.
    - 1970-01-01 8mo ago
      We are in complete agreement here. They wasted their lead.
      - NetMageSCW 8mo ago
        They didn’t have a lead. It’s like saying the DC-X was ahead in propulsive landing over F9, or the LG Prada had a lead over the iPhone. Being first isn’t enough to establish a lead. You also have to be in competition, which means selling product.
        1970-01-01 8mo ago
        It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.

hinkley 8mo ago

It’s almost as if a company would be better off having a CEO who wasn’t also the CEO of four other companies while also dabbling in geopolitics.

gizzlon 8mo ago
and drugs
- hinkley 8mo ago
  I think we can all agree that the world would be a better place if Elon made time for his kids instead of whatever the fuck it is he’s been doing.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  He does more than dabble in drugs

113 8mo ago

I don't think the problem was a lack of Elon Musk's involvement.