People are skeptical of Tesla because people are skeptical of Elon. His dozens of misleading statements and half-truths over the years have caught up with him.
This narrative doesn't resonate with me. Forward looking statements are speculative, especially when you're innovating new technologies.
I personally trust Elon Musk and I am a large investor. I don't expect him to hit all his targets, but I trust him to only raise money on the heels of good news.
> I don't know what he's done to earn my trust, or any investor's.
The ~20x ROI since IPO has made many people trust him. Tesla itself is a marvelous success, with no established car maker able to match them yet. It is far more likely that your personal dislike of him is making you see a distorted reality.
> It is far more likely that your personal dislike of him is making you see a distorted reality.
Certainly possible. I personally think he's acting like a buffoon and I haven't been shy about stating it.
However, as I told another commenter in this thread, I think the relatively objective argument is that while Musk was necessary initially to get Tesla into existence and functioning, he's now more of a liability than an asset. It's not that he was never valuable or never deserved any trust - rather that he doesn't deserve it now.
Put another way: At what point does the goodwill he's earned expire?
True, but Elon Musk led their series A, which is also when he joined the company along with J.B. Yes Martin and Marc created the company, but it would not be where it is today without Elon Musk.
It doesn't always matter who initially created the company. For example one of the co-founders of Apple was Ronald Wayne, whom the vast majority of people have never heard of. He left Apple very early and sold all his shares back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800.
> with no established car maker able to match them yet.
The Hyundai Kona EV is cheaper, has good range, and outperforms new model Teslas in 24-hour efficiency (interestingly finishing second to the original Tesla Roadster):
Teslas are among the least reliable cars you can buy. If you want high reliability and low maintenance costs, you're best off with a sensible Toyota today:
Right now the primary reason to buy a Tesla is the novelty of buying a battery electric. But when all manufacturers are producing battery electrics, why am I buying a Tesla?
Kona will only be available in a small number of U.S. states and global regions, in limited quantities.
It is a compliance car, to reduce the emissions overall of the fleet they sell allowing them to sell more high profit ICE cars. They are likely losing money on each sale as well.
I think the Kona is a great start and wish it would have a better chance, but it is crippled from the beginning.
So you're arguing that Hyundai beats Tesla on price and efficiency even when Hyundai's not really trying? What will happen to Tesla when Hyundai really tries?
The last time this came up, many people said that the primary reason to buy a Tesla was for Autopilot, which I have not yet heard of another manufacturer with an equivalent product.
I think another advantage Tesla has is the Supercharger station access.
I'd agree with you on autopilot. Though, I think all that most people want is good crash avoidance plus lane keeping and traffic-aware cruise on the freeway. A lot of other car companies are there as well, and I'm starting to believe that true level 5 is a decade off or totally impossible.
Supercharger access is becoming less of an exclusive as well. Electrify America is putting in a lot of stations (there's a couple near me right now, with about a dozen more planned) that support 150kW now (30 more than a Supercharger), and 350kW as soon as there's a car that can take it.
Agreed, these are both killer apps for Tesla.
I've got a 3 and have driven my car with Autopilot and a few Model S with autopilot, and it's crazy tech. To me, it's not worth the money, so I didn't order it, but to others, it's the entire reason to buy the car.
Even though I've only used superchargers 4 times in 6 months, it absolutely solves the EV roadtrip FUD in a way that nobody else has figured out yet.
Tesla just sold 63K Model 3s in a single quarter. Despite availability of Leaf and Bolt [both are cheaper]. None of the vehicles you have listed are true competitors to Tesla at this time. True competition will be something like an electric 3 series or C-class
If bluster results in the first truly desirable EV cars and the first autonomous reusable rocket then more bluster please. The rage machine against Elon here is preposterous. At the end of the day , is he making the world a better place ?. No amount of contrived answers involving Twitter can change the vehement "Yes" to that question.
> At the end of the day, is he making the world a better place?
With rare exception, I don't subscribe to the idea of "key men" in general, and especially not in this case. Even if I did, I don't think that Musk is acting in a way that makes him an asset.
I agree that Tesla, for instance, is doing good and important work. However, I think attributing Tesla's success, and net impact on the world to Musk alone is unsupported by evidence. That's because aside from initial investment/PR, and sufficient cult of personality to inspire people to work for him at the start, I don't see what Elon Musk is contributing to the company's work at this point. In fact, I see him as a liability and I think Tesla would be better off without him.
Candidly, I also believe that if Musk was less driven by his own ego, as he appears to be, he'd see that and step aside.
I would say that his contribution to Tesla is mostly a sense of urgency and direction. Certainly some more “normal” CEO could come in and make the company more profitable, but it’d come with steep cost: the company would also become very stagnant and very boring. That’d be great for Wall Street but it’d bum me out pretty badly.
Of course, the success of Tesla isn't based on Musk alone. There are thousands of Tesla employees contributing to it. Be it in engineering or production. However, Musk is the glue which ties all of this together. He set the direction, contributed quite a lot of his personal money in the beginning and is at the steering wheel.
I think there is another way to make this comparison:
If Musk did not exist, and Tesla as a company did not exist, then all the engineers, expertise, effort, and capital that is currently with Tesla would be placed elsewhere.
Would all those people and resources do more good with all the other companies?
Tesla is one of many companies making mass market electric cars. Piling on luxury touches isn't making the world a better place. Tesla's $35K car (when if ever shows shows up) isn't better than anyone else's. He's just coming down from higher price points on fancier cars while others are improving at the same price point.
Landing rockets on autonomous drone barges, coming out with a sedan that beats a Lamborghini Aventador in 0-60 acceleration at 1/6th the cost, thereby pushing the state of the art across the entire car industry. Seems like a guy I would trust.
Elon has not lied to the SEC. Please provide link or other evidence. He settled a claim that he manipulated the stock without admitting guilt, in order to avoid damaging the company, but that is completely different.
he said "funding secured" and didn't have any funding secured. The SEC was lenient in allowing the settlement without an admission of guilt, but that does not mean he was not guilty. I'm a huge fan of most of the things he has done, but this was a boneheaded move only surpassed by his embarrassing pedophilia comments.
Technically he was lying to his investors, not the SEC.
Of course then in that 60 Minutes interview he all but declared he wouldn't honor his side of the settlement, but we'll see if he follows through on that.
His pitch on the solar tiles that would cost* at or less a typical shingled roof had me incredibly sold, but it seems that has taken a back seat as of late in his endeavors. Yeah, would love an electric car, but until they hit the $35k price point, it isn't happening anytime soon for me. But a fairly priced solar setup for home? Sign me up.
* not sure if it was initial cost or cost over the life of plus the energy savings, I don't remember nor really care. Either is fine by me.
> Forward looking statements are speculative, especially when you're innovating new technologies
The innovation comes purely from the battery and associated electronics. The rest of the car is pretty standard and it's in this area where they are having problems.
There are plenty of car companies with electric cars today e.g. Jaguar, BMW, Nissan, GM and in 2019/2020 everyone else is jumping onboard e.g. Audi, Landrover etc. And they have managed to hit their targets.
musk isn’t the only reason i dislike tesla. they are overhyped by their customer base because the cars are “cool”, but i personally find the overall design and fit and finish to be lacking. they don’t feel like the expensive cars they are. tesla also has a feature called auto-pilot, which has killed people using it in non-insane scenarios given the name and marketing. i distrust their safety ratings.
tesla also acts like they are the only game in town. they aren’t even the largest electric vehicle maker in the world.
I don’t really see the problem with the pot smoking honestly, why is anyone wound up about that? Do you care if he drinks or smokes cigarettes? What about his workout routine?
I don't have a problem with drinking and am sure most CEOs drink at networking events considered part of their job, but I'd think a CEO showing off by downing a couple of shots on a comedian's podcast was a bit of a liability, even if it wasn't his idea. More so if their leadership was already under scrutiny and one of their businesses was entirely reliant on the patronage of an abstinence-obsessed government that wouldn't let their contractors' staff anywhere near their projects if they'd been known to have touched alcohol recently. And there's no defending the lame 420 joke which fits in the same bracket (the sort of joke that was a pretty pathetic way of getting lunchtime detention as a teenager, never mind a hefty fine and stripped of a measure of control of one of your companies). You can be 100% pro legalisation and in favour of CEOs smoking pot every day if it works for them and still think Musk's acted like an absolute idiot over it.
>I'd think a CEO showing off by downing a couple of shots on a comedian's podcast was a bit of a liability.
You need to lighten up. Musk doesn't owe anything to anyone, if anything he garnered interest for selling more cars to the 18 million people that watched that podcast. If the CEO of <any fortune 500 company> was on the same podcast, do you think it would have been anywhere close to as entertaining?
> Musk doesn't owe anything to anyone, if anything he garnered interest for selling more cars to the 18 million people that watched that podcast
He owes a lot to his shareholders, and wiped 9% off the value of Tesla with that podcast. If he has to be entertaining as well as reassuring them he's also laser focused on solving production challenges - and CEO of an engineering company is definitely a job description where being dull is no disadvantage - there were certainly better ways of doing it.
No he doesn't owe anything much to the stock holders either. They put in money knowing he was at the helm now if they have problem with how he behaves they can take out their money or buy enough voting shares that they can remove him.
More relevant to SpaceX: It was notable that the CEO of a defense contractor publicly uses drugs, since that sector is fairly strict about these things. Smoking weed is a problem for security clearances etc?
Even though the acts themselves aren't that different, smoking a cigarette on camera doesn't potentially cause him to lose his security clearance (which could make him less effective at his job).
Regardless of how you feel about smoking pot the CEO of a publicly traded company is expected to be prudent enough to avoid doing things that are federally illegal on camera with the beforehand knowledge that the footage will be made public.
I personally don't care what Elon, or anyone does in his spare time but smoking pot on TV (or podcast, basically the same thing since both are going to be broadcast to viewers) shows a willingness to take risks with the wrong amount of upsides relative to their downsides and wall street doesn't like that.
The part of it in discussion was, because of its content.
Everything that is recorded and available outside of a narrowly controlled group is effectively national TV, in that if you do something that would be newsworthy, that's where it's going to end up.
Anyone in a PR-sensitive role, including any CEO, ought to be aware of that.
The comment I replied to was edited after I replied. Musk didn’t smoke weed on a national broadcast but I agree he should be aware his actions anywhere could be reported at a national level.
Perhaps the coke/stripper parties and Insider Trading on Wall ST would have been a better approach. I'm sure the SEC would have found that more appropriate and acceptable.
I personally trust Elon Musk and I am a large investor. I don't expect him to hit all his targets, but I trust him to only raise money on the heels of good news.