SpaceX is doing well, Tesla has pulled itself back from the brink and may actually become a profitable car company.
All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights....
EDIT one thing I should point out is that some people have questioned if the tweet had any adverse affect at all on the shorts, given that the stock is down now.
The answer is hell yes and the fact that the stock ash gone down since the tweet only strengthens the shorts case.
The reason is that when you are short the biggest issue you have is that the stock could go against you, in this case that means it could go up. So to guard against that you generally have a price level in which you would exit the trade.
So when Elon tweeted, a whole whack of shorts got stopped out, intentional or by their risk limits. Infact there is a lawsuit already filed by Citron due to this. That momentary bump, while short lived was more than enough to close out some short positions.
If he's found to be in the wrong here by the SEC, then it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to find him guilty in the coming lawsuits.
I'd hope the company itself would be fine. I really hate this idea of the grand visionary. A good friend of mine who is a mechanical engineer despises Musk.
I listened to a bit of his Joe Regan interview and when Regan asked him how he has the time to do all of the things he does, there are smoke jokes about him being an alien, but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
He made it sound like he just constantly engineers things, but I find it hard to believe that at any point he's sitting down with CAD and fluid dynamic applications and mapping out experiments for rocket prototypes. I don't doubt he's capable of doing that with his background (or learning how to do it) but it's much more likely there is a whole team of really dedicated experts that he just leaves uncredited.
Are Apple products different now that Jobs are gone? One could argue that, but the core people that make and design all their overpriced, planned obsolescence devices are still there, often uncredited, while everyone else likes to focus on the captain of a ship.
I don't know whether he's using CAD but Musk did learn a lot of rocket science. According to aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell, one of his early hires, Musk essentially memorized several textbooks on rocket science, learned more from experts he talked with, and holds his own in engineering discussions.
He's more knowledgeable than the prototypical PHB. However, engineering work requires some form of design analysis (ultimately numerical) to prove that the end result will most likely function. He hasn't done that and no book smarts will instantly make you an engineer. He doesn't need to do that either and is just as important an asset by being a well-informed manager.
He can't. He lied. There are many people saying untrue things in this thread. Not all of them are as obvious.
I hope to God the auto industry doesn't lose the competition which scares them into changing themselves more rapidly than the coming fires and floods. The whitehouse is no friend to the renewable energy industry, advocating for the reduction of the price of oil.
You just said that Musk memorized several textbooks... Idk what kind of source can bail you out of that one. Probably discredits the source if anything.
I work for the guy, and I don't think anyone who has worked closely with him would believe that SpaceX or Tesla would be anywhere near what they are without him. He is an extraordinary leader who is deeply involved with all of the engineering decisions that happen at both companies. You'd be very surprised at how much impact he has on fairly low level decisions.
There is a phase in every company when that is a crucial thing to have, the earlier in a companies life cycle the more important it is. And then comes the point where such deep involvement of the CEO / founder is less important and even turns into a liability at one point.
At least for Tesla, I have the impression that this is, indeed, becoming a liability at the moment.
When the very top has a measurable impact on low level discisions it is a) eating up attention from the top level b) delaying even small decisions waiting for top level involvement and c) carrying the risk of bad decisions as the top level is, by definition, missing the detailed knowledge necessary for the majority of low level decisions. Not even to speak what that does to innovation and the flow of ideas and corporate culture in the long run.
Other famous examples of where this can end are VW and, at a smaller seriousness level, Bezo's deep involvement with the Fire phone.
Automotive mass production is, from a certain perspective, more complex than launching stuff to space. It is also a very well understood domain, first and foremost from established car manufacturers. So it would have made sense to also memorize some books covering that topic and than getting experts onboard. It doesn't help that an EV is less complex to build compared to traditional cars, so in that regard traditional manufacturers actually do have an advantage. I don't remember when he said it exactly (I think around the time Tesla bought this German manufacturing equipment supplier), but Musk stating that he also wants to revolutionize the way cars are manufactured. Why would you do that when your primary goal, one you are on very good track to accomplish, is revolutionizing mobility?
The company won't be fine because it'll be trading at $20 per share.
(Yes, $20 is hyperbole, now read the rest)
The real issue will be the 2019 bondholder covenants. Tesla won't have the cash to pay them, Tesla won't have the buying interest to absorb dilution, and Tesla will still need money.
Basically with a lower and lower share price Tesla has fewer and fewer ways to service its debt and do further fundraising. They can, it just won't be good for shareholders. This is called a death spiral.
For a healthy company, a low share price has nothing to do with anything. For example, Tesla without debt and positive revenues would be a healthy company at $20 per share, it would even be undervalued and hurray you are the only person that noticed! But thats not the case for Tesla. Tesla is not a healthy company. And its going to become toxic.
Tesla's debt servicing cost 600 million yearly (Bill Cunningham estimates). It is producing Model 3s at a pace of 4k weekly (according to Bloomberg). Each represents 15kUSD in gross profit (according to Munro). It takes ten weeks to service the yearly debt using current Model 3 sales.
If these numbers are right, once Tesla proved to be able to produce Model 3s, it became financially stable. It will easily be able to roll-over bonds.
Good point. It's a different number, but a relevant datapoint anyhow. The last filing shows a gross profit margin of 15%.
It's a different number because it includes cost of the sale infrastructure. Unfortunately, it's for the quarter ending in June, so the volume of model 3 is still not very relevant against the other models.
Tesla would almost assuredly not be a fraction as valuable with bondholders running it as they would with Musk at the helm. The company's fortunes are inextricably bound up with the founder. The only thing the bondholders are likely to do with the business if they find themselves owning it outright is liquidate. A fact that is quite likely being taken into account in the current market brinksmanship imbroglio.
My take from the Joe Rogan interview was that Elon is preoccupied/passionate when it comes to technology and engineering. Not pointing out that he obviously has a great team doesn't seem like much of an oversight to me. He didn't attempt to hide behind a facade, playing the super-CEO role, full of faux self deprecation and verbal gold stars for his team.
Perhaps I'm a little more generous in my interpretation of the interview, but to me, he just seemed like an awkward guy, who wanted to work on engineering cool stuff.
I suppose the unfortunate thing is, that isn't his role. He can still do engineering work when he has the time, but me, the SEC, and most other humans understand the CEO of a public company has actual responsibility towards operations. Part of that means, he might not being doing his job great if he works his employees 90 hours a week and pretends they don't exist when he wants to brag on the radio. Being kind and generous with well deserved praise costs nothing and actually benefits both the company and the humans making the company work.
> but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
He says it all-the-time. And sometimes without any prompt.
Musk told Stanton that he had "one of the world's best engineering teams who normally design spaceships and spacesuits working on this thing 24 hours a day."[1]
If Musk never happened rockets would still be expendable, the US would still lack a Shuttle replacement, and EVs would be rare or nonexistent. We would still be talking about how personal mobility is doomed when oil is depleted, if not all of modern civilization.
Prove me wrong. Who else was doing this stuff before SpaceX and Tesla? On space launch you had nothing serious except the SLS which is 70s tech. On EVs you had a few boutique and niche vehicles but nothing pushing to break into any mass market. I doubt conventional car companies would ever have done it without a law to force them or monster incentives since most of that industry is full of ICE heads who hate EVs. They are now, but that's because of Tesla. I'm worried that if Tesla fails all these other EV projects will be scaled back since the ICE and oil crowd will leap on it to push an EVs have failed narrative.
Elon seems to have fucked up with this one, but I dont think it diminishes what he has accomplished.
Normally the only way to smash a mediocre Nash equilibrium is with the power of government-- either big government spending or legislation (regulation, anti trust, etc). It's normally the only hammer big enough. I have a lot of respect for anyone in the private sector who is able to pull it off. Musk and the teams he assembled broke two. That's just insane. Hell maybe it is literally insane. Maybe he's nuts.
A agree wizh you on the Tesla part, there Musk really forced very positive development. One could argue of course if that development wouldn't have taken place as well without Tesla. But even then it is clear that Musk / Tesla moved things along a lot faster.
SpaceX is an incredible achievement. The reusable rockets are a point I really need to dig deeper into, especially the financial aspects of it. Because there a pretty convincing argument is that peivate SpaceX launches are subsidized by government launches. I really have to go hunting for some numbers there more I think about it. And even then, building competitive rockets, not just one, in a private endevour is incredible.
I'm just wondering if Musk is not getting to much credit and hype. Not that he would need it, even the smallest common ground regarding Musk's achievements is more than enough for a lifetime. Unless he throwing all of it away over some paranoid obsession about short sellers and a loose Twitter finger...
I think Musk sometimes does get too much credit, but the opposite -- that he deserves none and is a fraud -- is equally ridiculous.
Gwynne Shotwell deserves a lot of credit for leading SpaceX in its day-to-day operations. Without her I doubt it would be working as well. Everyone else on these teams also deserves a great deal of credit. They are teams, of course.
On SpaceX being government funded -- yes, that's true to an extent, though they have made a lot of money off private satellite launches too. The fact is that the entire aerospace industry has been deeply embedded with the military and other government agencies since its inception. It's a very heavily subsidized and regulated industry.
But team building and capital raising is a skill, and Musk seems good at it -- at least at the beginning. He's great at getting things off the ground (pun intended?) and breaking through barriers of technological learned helplessness. I do get the sense though that he's less of an effective leader as things get more established. Tesla's problems are too boring for him at this point.
Nissan Altran EV, sold in California and fleet-tested, 1998. Nissan Garbage Collecting Truck, mainly sold to the Yokohama city government, 1988. Just saying.
Well let's just put it this way after trying out new MBP I just bought my first non Apple notebook since 2006. I also have 0 intention of buying any iPhone models with notch. On space X a son of a friend who actually works at Space X as eng. mentioned that Musk gets pretty involved on eng. side of things (obviously pretty anecdotal evidence). I also seen many times Musk praising a team at Space X and Tesla so drawing far reaching conclusion from a single interview of a dude who is obviously under a ton of pressure and is physically and mentally exhausted is a bit strange.
I said it before, but: ever read War and Peace? I think you could easily adapt Tolstoy's thesis to business: executives are mostly there to ratify the decisions their subordinates made on the spot. Tolstoy stakes out the most extreme position, but I think we could at least say executive control is more attenuated than executives would like to believe.
> I don't doubt he's capable of doing that with his background
Which background is that? He has an undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.
I respect the guy but he clearly puts a lot into managing his image. As a relevant example, he used to claim to have been in the Ph.D. program at Stanford, but had to retract that (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find that on Google).
I met Elon just after he raised $3M for Zip2[1]. He had moved to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford, but then got sidetracked into Zip2 (later sold for $300M+). The company was about 8 people in one small room at the time.
>undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.
I'm in the UK my understanding is a bachelor's is a synonym for an undergraduate degree; so why did you use the different terms here?
Ah, I think I see it: you copied from Wikipedia; wherein it says he did a bachelors degree in Economics (BA?) and a further bachelors in physics (BS/BSc) whilst he was a graduate. Two undergraduate degrees.
Other sources suggest he did the degrees coterminously:
>"Musk graduated from UPenn in 1994, with double bachelor degrees in Physics (from the College of Arts and Sciences) and Economics (from the Wharton School)." (http://studyadvantage.co/elon-musk-education-study/)
I remember reading in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future something that Elon had been formally admitted to the PhD program at Stanford, but dropped out after three days. Vance contacted the Registrar's Office (or the graduate department itself?, I cannot remember) and received the confirmation that he was admitted.
Mostly right :). He actually thought it better to be involved in creating an internet company. This led to the founding of Zip2 (a kind of precursor to Yelp whose pivots ended up trying to help newspapers get online). The money from that led to the founding of X (think, transaction), which later took over and ultimately merged with its competitor, PayPal.
I second the recommendation of watching the interview. There is way too much misinformation surrounding Tesla and Elon Musk.
My guess would be that you aren't technically in the PhD program until you've passed your qualifying exam. Until that point, you're a graduate student but not a PhD student. After you pass your preliminary exam, you're a PhD/Doctoral candidate.
Also, it's a moot point. There are no bragging rights to be found in simply being admitted to a PhD program. Plenty of very intelligent people fail to complete a PhD program (usually, IME, because of personality issues/conflict with the advisor (sadly extremely common), inflexibility of the advisor and/or department, or personal reasons (economic, social, health)).
(to be clear, Musk didn't brag that he was admitted to Stanford - he suggested that he felt dropping out was more useful than continuing. His fans often hold up being admitted to a PhD program as evidence of his engineering background)
In the USA, this is how it typically works. People who are enrolled in PhD programs are called "PhD students." Once they pass their advancement to candidacy exam, they are called "PhD Candidates." In both cases, they are enrolled in a PhD program. Typically people are accepted directly to PhD programs and they are not just admitted as generic graduate students.
The biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance talks about this. Which I recommend everybody read. I don't remember the details but I think he was admitted but not enrolled. He ended up not going because he thought pursuing an internet company in Silicon Valley was more valuable than research work at the time.
>It’s really— it’s quite a trip, working for Elon. It’s different every day [laughter] because it all depends on what mood he’s in [laughter] — they think he’s joking> You know, he’s been in a great mood lately; we’ve been very successful, and Tesla’s been doing quite well. So it’s been good recently. Um, he still; he’s still extremely demanding. One thing I tell people often is that— I’ve seen this happen quite a few times in the fifteen years I’ve worked for him. We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics.
Which is amusing in the case of Musk. As I've said over and over, his approach is to find an industry where most or all of the hard, expensive fundamental R&D has already been done (and paid for) by someone else, and then start a company to incrementally improve it and promise vast cost reductions from economies of scale.
That's what SpaceX is. That's what Tesla is. There's not really staggering heart-breaking Copernican-revolution work being done at either company. They're just applying incremental improvement and economies of scale to problems where the hard fundamental work was already done. The idea that it requires some special sort of unbelievable genius to come up with that plan, or that it's impossible to do without this specific (alleged) genius, is baffling to me.
He does what any good businessman would do. He looks for money on the table. In this case its areas where research has been done but it hasn't been operationalized.
That being said I dont mean to minimize what Musk or the teams he has assembled have done. The first 90% of the work toward a new innovation is 90% of the work, then the last 10% is 90% of the work.
SpaceX basically finished the Delta Clipper project.
If it's that easy why didn't you do it then? We should have plenty of competitors to SpaceX and Tesla with loads of reusable rockets and amazing self driving cars RIGHT NOW if everything seems so trivial in your opinion. Any dumbass can do it, including you! Time to get dirty and stack up on those millions of $ since things are so easy to pull off.
That's why Elon sleeps under the desk and works 18 hours a day because it's all very very easy.
I almost forgot how easy it was to sit on the sideline and critique someone else's work :) It's cute.
"This is not the revolutionary act of genius people portray it as"
and
"This is so trivially easy anyone could do it"
Tesla and SpaceX are trying to do things that have potential utility. Things which will advance the state of their respective arts even if they fail. There is no shame in "merely" doing that! There's also no need to inflate it into something it isn't.
What is baffling to me is the length that some HN commenters will go to to tear down people like Elon and Steve Jobs.
Maybe you don't like him, maybe you don't like how much attention and praise he gets. But to be so dismissive of what those companies have accomplished with him at the helm, to me is just unwarranted bitter negativity.
In your mind, what companies are doing staggering heart-breaking Copernican-revolution work? What bar must be reached to not be "just applying incremental improvement and economies of scale?" Pretty bleak outlook if pushing the bleeding edge of rocket technology forward is humdrum small potatoes.
the length that some HN commenters will go to to tear down people like Elon
I suppose if you read literally anything other than absolutely fawning worship of Elon Musk as history's most titanic genius as a "tear down", I could see that.
But... it is absolutely true that his business model is incremental improvements + economies of scale. Tesla and SpaceX aren't in the business of inventing fundamentally new things. They're in the business of making improvements to already-invented things, and mass-producing them to try to bring costs down. This is only a troubling thing to read if you're deeply invested in his cult of personality.
We're clearly talking past each other and we may have to agree to disagree. You didn't address my question at all, just restated your comment and implied that I'm a fanboy if I disagree.
"Absolutely fawning worship" is unnecessary hyperbole, there is a vast amount of middle ground between that and your position. But I suppose if you can't make a reasoned argument, you have to resort to that (and we're off to the ad hominem races!).
"Most titanic genius" is more telling hyperbole, reiterated from your first post apropos of nothing. I didn't say anything about him or his genius, but you continue to mock and, yes, tear down.
When you say "Tesla is just [this]. SpaceX is just [that]," that's a tear down. You're reducing and diminishing companies that have undoubtedly made real impact, but why? Forget about Elon the Magnificent for a second, I would guess that you have similar things to say about Google, Apple, and the rest.
So I ask again, what company is doing things worthy of your respect? You're very good at reducing big things to nothing, but can you prop anything up? Can you support something? Maybe you're afraid to, because you know I can reduce and diminish it. That's easy, anyone can do it. But there's nothing interesting about it, there's no value, all it does is reveal insecurity.
Would you agree that SpaceX and Tesla are not inventing any fundamentally new technology? That they are engaged in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, work?
One can say "this is not a revolutionary thing" without simultaneously saying "this is utterly worthless". Avoiding the hero worship and the personality cult does not require throwing out any idea of useful things coming from SpaceX or Tesla.
Totally agree. He makes it sound like he is the guy who figures out all that stuff in his basement. It's hard to imagine that a CEO of two companies that size has the time to do any real engineering. He seems more the type who has good memory and can repeat what the engineered are telling him. My VP is like that. He immediately comprehends and remembers what you tell him but he is not doing any development work.
So you want to say if you can understand, can discuss with engineer leeds, can make a decision and accept or decline a solutions to the problem which your company is making, you're not involved in the development work?
> I really hate this idea of the grand visionary. ... I listened to a bit of his Joe Regan interview and when Regan asked him how he has the time to do all of the things he does, there are smoke jokes about him being an alien, but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
I think Elon's active perpetuation of the myth is kind of a red herring.
Promoting Elon Musk as a grand visionary is how Tesla will maximize its brand value, and contribute to a self-sustaining lore around their founder 50 years from now. It's the same story for Apple and Steve Jobs, and thousands of other companies (tech and otherwise).
People aren't capable of idolizing 200 mechanical engineers. They are very capable of idolizing a single visionary. A story with 200 protagonists would be far less compelling, which is why most stories only have 1. If you want to be as competitive as possible, and you have a leader capable of exploiting that aspect of human nature, then that's what your company should do.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
I think what's really at issue is the aspect of human nature that it's exploiting.
I think it's closely tied to hierarchy and pecking order instincts observed in all mammals. We always need to be identifying and reacting to an alpha, and using that to inform our choices and behaviors so we can stay competitive on a biological level. The same instinct might also be what causes people to immediately perceive this as an issue of Elon's individual behavior, and makes them feel so strongly about it.
I have to completely disagree with you on Elon not giving credit to others. If you have closely followed Elon Musk, ( please check his videos on youtube) even during unveiling Tesla’s new models you will find irrefutable evidence on how he credits his other team members , especially reiterating that people just think its just him but there are many others behind him who do the amazing stuff.
Insightful post. Musk has successfully built a cult around his personal brand,for the specific reason of super-charging his ability to raise capital. A poster above provides news coverage about him memorizing rocket science books. I suspect this was part of a well-orchestrated PR campaign and unlikely. I find it difficult to believe that anyone could or want to do this, let alone achieve it. Particular when that person later makes a schoolboy error exposing himself to fraud which could result in him going to prison, presumably.
That said, and being an entrepreneur and having spent time in negotiations with entrepreneurs, when people start talking about money, everyone hears what they want to hear regardless of what is said. Which is why lawyers can charge what they do. And why - in this - Musk looked a bit inexperienced IMHO.
Yes. Elon is not naive and no one thinks that Joe Rogan is just some secret thing that nobody watches. He went on Rogan with the intention to spread a specific message.
Practically the entire value of Musk projects is based on the myth that Elon is a mystical being bringing advanced technology to humanity. Going on Rogan and doing something to harm that belief, like diverting all credit to his "amazing team of engineers", would be far more damaging than anything else he's done.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
Plus he clearly lives for it, and when anyone makes even reasonable points against him, he loses his mind on a Twitter. That is after all what happened with “pedo guy” re the Thai cave rescue. Musk made an ass of himself by trying to inject himself into a potential tragedy for some PR and a man who actually helped to save the day called him on it.
I’m also not sure that it would be hard to idolize a group, people manage it for sports teams. Maybe if Musk put the effort he spends into grooming his ego into promoting his team he wouldn’t need to be the center of a cult of e-sychophants.
>>A good friend of mine who is a mechanical engineer despises Musk.
A lot of people despise Musk.
Its because the society in general hates these kind of successful non-conformist. No one likes to see a hugely successful anti-pattern to their whole life.
> Its because the society in general hates these kind of successful non-conformist. No one likes to see a hugely successful anti-pattern to their whole life.
This is just wrong. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Musk that have nothing to do with him being a "successful noncomforist", whatever that means.
I'm in the same camp. I'm going to be happy if at the end of this we've managed to get a better (cleaner, safer, more reliable, cheaper) car or a better rocket or whatever, but I don't buy the whole "rocket jesus" worshipping, like I don't buy the whole guru worshipping in startup culture in general.
I don’t understand what’s so unusual that there would be Jesuses walking around. Like a billion people are trying to imitate Jesus. Also we have the benefit of centuries of reflection in his teachings.
I would expect there to be dozens of Jesuses. Rocket Jesus. Pizza Jesus. Star Wars Jesus. Etc.
I think that Apple products have gotten noticeably buggier since Jobs has gone, I honestly think the horror of getting a 3am call from him about your feature was a legitimate fear engineers had at Apple and drove quality up. Not advocating for that work environment but I definitely think it had an effect.
Sour comment for whatever reason... It's actually pretty simple - imagine the world that is and probably will be with him, and then one without him.
We underdogs hate to be not credited for the hard work we do, but his positive impact on mankind as a whole is quite substantial, and as time goes by it will be only magnified. Hard to argue with this. SpaceX and Tesla are really a bit more than just a sum of all the engineers (and other folks) involved.
If you like to pick negative things on people, then there are no heroes, there are no ideals to look up to. Every single great person in history had a dark side, like it or not. I guess that's part of what makes us humans.
Personally, I like him. With all the warts, emotions and whatnot. Results matter, rest are details for pub discussion after 5th beer. World generally thinks similarly on this topic.
The world with him, is a whole lot like the world without him though.
I mean, I did the thought experiment, and I honestly don't see many things that would be different?
Are you arguing that without Musk, we wouldn't have commercial space companies, or electric cars? If so, I find that a bit difficult to believe.
The part of your comment about no one being a hero is correct. None of us are any better than anyone else, that's for sure. (It's the main reason I try never to point fingers in life actually.) But the idea that we would be worse off without Musk is just a bridge too far.
Even a world absent Steve Jobs, would have created PCs and smart phones. And, with respect to impact, Musk is no Steve Jobs.
I, living in Germany and having worked with and for our car companies, am completely convinced that without him we wouldn't have the electric shift we're seeing right now. We'd have another two decades of half hearted attempts at all kinds of technologies, especially bio fuels but no real progress. Tesla changed the game and I can only imagine it's the same with SpaceX.
Thank God for that. I don't mean anything bad about Germany when I say that. It's just that I don't think people realize how important it is to have good incentives. Getting rich on the basis of successfully electrifying the world is a very good incentive to have. Legacy automakers have to fight their own incentives. As a consequence, they can't quite manage to make the full turn. Regulation has helped curb this a little, but Elon Musk founded the company without the corrupted incentives. Their market capitalization in the electrical energy sector is a direct consequence of this. Anyone who knows about climate science ought to be happy with his accomplishments.
There is a causal link between Elon Musk putting all his money into SpaceX and Tesla and their successes. This is true from the obvious way (they were literally close to death with his last infusion), but its a truth that is more than superficial.
Tesla completely changed the public perception of electric cars, from slow eco-friendly compacts to high-performance sports cars. Without Tesla I doubt that Mercedes would be spending $12 billion on electric cars, or Porsche would be releasing an electric car next year with a 0-60 time of 3.5 seconds and a nationwide fast charging network in the U.S. Tesla proved that it's possible and that there's demand for it.
SpaceX significantly lowered launch costs even before achieving reusability, and with reusability is changing the game completely. However, Jeff Bezos isn't that far behind with Blue Origin, and probably wasn't inspired by SpaceX; he started a long time ago and was a space nut from an early age. Still, it's better to have two great companies with cheap reusable rockets, rather than just one, and the two companies have somewhat different long-term goals.
Well, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin is so far behind that they haven't launched anything to the Low Earth Orbit yet, and as far as I know they don't have plans to launch to LEO for the next few years.
So wrg to reusable launch vehicles, so far SpaceX is the only game in town.
OTOH, Jeff Bezos has more money and can speed things up if he wants.
Sure, I'm just saying that without Musk we'd still get reusable launch, just a few years later. Blue Origin is definitely behind but they've been focusing on advanced engines, and just licensed one to ULA, which is flying it in 2020. And of course BO is planning to fly suborbital passengers next year. Suborbital is way easier the LEO, but flying passengers at all is something SpaceX hasn't gotten to yet.
I'm a huge SpaceX fan and until recently I kinda scoffed at Blue Origin, but after seeing more about it I was more impressed. (On the other hand, the New Glenn is only first-stage reusable, so they might need to get that flying well before the BFR is ready.)
SpaceX is the only serious private company. And without government launches they would have a hard time as well. In the de-facto public sector you have the Russians, Ariane, the Chinese, the Indians... It's not that there wouldn't be anything in space without SpaceX. The thing I love about SpaceX is how they showed what can be done without the over abundance of bureaucracy you see elsewhere. Not that programs like Ariane would have learned the smallest bit from it.
What's really different about SpaceX is the cost of launch. Governments and their contractors are happy to launch your stuff into space for thousands of dollars per pound, but nobody was putting significant work into reusable rockets. Just a reusable first stage drops the cost by about 80%, and the BFR is supposed to take the cost down to about $50/lb once it's flying at high volume. That completely changes what we're able to do in space.
Refcently I stumbled over an article regarding SpaceX cost structure raising the theory that commercial launches are subsidized by government launches. Also that reusing stages is not such a relevant cost driver. I simply don't know enough about rocket technology and costs to actually judge the validity of these points, but they seemd plausible. As this point is coming up regularly I really have to take a deper look SpaceX costs and launch costs in general.
There's a reason we don't throw away a 747 after one flight.
Fuel is only a couple percent of the cost of a rocket launch. Rockets are expensive, and on the Falcon 9 the first stage is 80% of the cost of the rocket.
In the early days of SpaceX I saw claims that expendables were more economical because you could build them cheaper, but then SpaceX went and build reusable rockets that are also cheap; their rockets cost less than competitors even without reuse.
They're getting government business because they charge the government less than their competitors charge. The subsidy argument doesn't make sense unless it's only the commercial launches that are cheap.
There are a lot of vested interests in this industry that are strongly incentivized to say reusable rockets are no big deal. I think they'll continue to say that until the BFR flies and SpaceX drops their rates to levels far below what disposables could ever achieve.
Well, one point made in the article I mentioned above was that thermal stress limits the life time of a reusable rocket. Plus the lost payload as you need fuel to land the rocket again. Also, and at least that part I can confirm, a missile is tube is not a lot more than a aluminium tube. So, there is my home work for the weekend: rocket science and LEO launch economics!
There's also the rocket engine, which is a lot more than a tube. Disposables throw that away too. You can just look at the cost of the rocket to see how much expensive stuff is getting thrown away.
SpaceX does still use the Falcon 9 as a disposable for extra-heavy payloads. That doesn't mean you have to throw your rocket away for all payloads, and the capacity difference isn't dramatic. And there won't be that many payloads too big for the BFR in reusable mode.
It's true that the rocket wears out eventually. SpaceX is aiming for about ten reuses initially, thus lowering hardware costs by 90%. They hope to do much better than that later.
We agree on the hardware cost side. The missing step now is to compare these saved hardware costs against the lost payload and the revenue value of that payload. Averages will be fine I think.
Just looking at the hardware side without opportunity cost aonewhat misses the point. A really thorough cost analysis would need to factor in the impact on reliability, the risk of failed launches due to reused rocket stages. I assume these numbers are impossible to come by.
One other data point would be, if that's the case, how much premium SpaceX is asking for the use of virgin rockets as compared to reused ones. This would allow a rough estimation of the increase risk for failure and other costs. Again, I don't expect these numbers to be available.
Jeff Bezos has more money and can speed things up if he wants.
The first part is obviously true. The latter, I’m not so sure —- Blue’s budget has increased dramatically over the past few years, but New Glenn flights remain rare, and New Shepard remains well in the future.
It’s interesting to ponder where Blue would have gone if SpaceX (which was founded later) hadn’t happened. I think there’s a very real chance they’d still be thrashing, talking up bits and pieces of technology but without any complete vehicles (even of New Glenn size).
As far as I remember he was laughed at for just thinking to build reusable rockets or to sell electric cars.
Either I or you have very serious memory problems.
But I’m pretty confident that I can link several sources to corroborate my recalling of the events, can you do the same? If you can prove that the people that were laughing at him would have brought the electric car mainstream and would have invented reusable rockets without him than you are right. I’m eagerly waiting for your ironclad proof.
It's hard to not admire somebody who get all those laughs and delivered in very short time span. Not only that, we don't only have reusable rockets, we have freakin' vertical landing! Thought to be unrealistic by proper NASA engineers. For a very long time people didn't have that WOW experience for space technologies, and this one delivered.
Mankind needs people like him - with all ecological doom and gloom slowly unfolding, next mandatory frontier is clearly space. Also, disrupting entrenched monopolies/oligopolies that got just too comfortable milking people of their money for very minor improvements of their products.
I was thinking the same when I listened to Joe Rogan podcast. And the topic came up multiple times where he could have said he has a great team to support him. I was really disappointed in Musk.
What I recall is that Jobs tasked Apple to create a phone and had a bake-off between the iPod guy (Tony something) and Federighi, and the iPod side of the firm created a device with a click wheel, Federighi's team created a device with a touch screen and Jobs made the call to go with the touch screen. It'd be weird if it went from that to Jobs having to be begged to launch it, especially as it was clearly awesome and Jobs himself had been so deeply involved in the design.
Are Apple products different now that Jobs are gone?
Yes. Jobs as local despot acted as a curb to bad decisions. Jobs had a vision which acted as a countervailing force to keep Apple from being completely sucked into being a money grubbing luxury goods company.
the core people that make and design all their overpriced, planned obsolescence devices are still there, often uncredited, while everyone else likes to focus on the captain of a ship.
We know from the historical record that Jobs had quite good judgement, even in technical fields, and we know that he countermanded and convinced executives and managers to steer them in the right direction. I suspect that the Apple of today is descending into being just a money-grubbing luxury goods company.
This is just revisionist history and completely wrong.
Steve Jobs pretty much set Apple on the premium goods track when he returned. The iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone were all developed under his watch and all were premium priced.
Apple has pushed the margins higher but that's only because the market can absorb it. Computing is more central to people's lives and they are willing to pay a premium for a good experience.
This is just revisionist history and completely wrong.
Steve Jobs pretty much set Apple on the premium goods track when he returned
You are revising what I actually said, and about that you are completely wrong. I never denied that Jobs set Apple on the premium goods track. However, he was one of the major forces keeping it from devolving into being only a peddler of luxury goods.
Tech innovation does better with good margins, and good margins come easier for more upscale products. But doing that is better as an adjunct which increases your margins, and winds up empty as an end to itself.
People responding in this thread are failing to realize that there are two types of luxury goods (to obviously oversimplify): luxuries built on hype, and luxuries built on quality/craftsmanship. (Said craftsmanship can be innovative or traditional, but there's the sense of pride in the work that carries through in both situations.) One (though not all) of the nuances that the parent post evokes is that Jobs challenged the company to be more than just a hype machine.
I've heard the difference is between luxury goods, and premium goods. A luxury good is a swarovski crystal encrusted anything. It's only expensive because for some reason, people think glass should be expensive. A premium good costs more because it's actually better.
Of course, if you never use premium features, then it's a luxury good.
Apple produces better products than google and microsoft, get over it.
It sounds like you're the one who needs to get over something.
For the record, I've been an iPhone user since the 2nd iPhone. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, and I bought the 1st unibody Macbook. I've developed iPhone apps and I've been an Apple user since 1980.
Yes, Apple produces better products for now. However, as the years pass, those products might remain recognizably luxury, but become increasingly irrelevant, like a watch fob. Apple now is to Apple in the several years before Steve Jobs died as Pixar now is to Pixar in the days when they came out with Toy Story and Up.
The market decided. Here's the thing. It never stops deciding.
I've started to think Apple is more competitive on laptops than it looks from the price.
Every time I've priced out a laptop with similar configuration to my MBP (including a good-quality display, NvME SSD, good battery life), it always ends up costing about the same as an MBP. And then Apple's customer service definitely tips in their favor (I've been spoiled by fast, convenient, competent repair service at the Apple store).
So either everyone is making big margins on well-configured laptops, or the perception of over-priced MBP's is misplaced.
I was just commenting to my wife how remarkable I find it that my 2012 Macbook Pro 15 Retina is meeting all my needs as a software consultant. I used to think 3 years, maybe 4, was the useful lifespan of a high-end machine for daily professional use. In a few months it'll be 7 (seven) years old. It has 3 or 4 dead pixels, but everything else about it is working flawlessly. Maybe they don't make em like they used to, but man have I gotten my money's worth out of this one.
That's mostly a function of the general slowdown in the hardware cycle (for most applications).
I have both a Mac and a PC laptop of that vintage and they're both still perfectly suitable for anything short of current gaming or other extreme tasks.
I still have iMacs from 2007 that are being used by my kids. I only upgraded the HDD to SSD a couple of years ago and they work flawlessly. No viruses, no tech support needed for 10 years.
That is just amazing hardware, but on the other hand, I have a pair of AirPods that just can't autoconnect to my MacBook unless I fiddle with the Bluetooth and speaker icons in the toolbar every time. And AirPods were fucking expensive and both are produced by Apple. What gives? How can they be so incompetent in making a wireless device connect to another wireless device?
I'm still using my mid-2012 Asus laptop that was like €1300 at the time.
I did buy a few upgrades since then (16GB RAM, bigger SSD, new battery) but given that I don't do any gaming, there is very little that a new purschase would get me.
Tim Cook was in charge of this sort of logistics when Steve was alive. There are worse people to be left in charge.
When I bought a Cinema Display I figured out that a display with the same response time and color gamut would run about $75 cheaper and have a plastic case.
$75 for aluminum, more ports and being able to pick it up that day was more than fair.
This has been true for me until the last generation (Touchbar) Macbooks came out in 2016. They seem to be vastly more expensive than the older generation was and are usually quite a bit more than a comparable non-Apple Laptop. A well equipped 15" used to be around 2500 EUR, nowadays it's 600+ EUR more.
Yeah the touchbar really drives up the price, it's basically an apple watch built into a macbook (big oled screen, fingerprint reader and the apple watch's chip, plus all the interconnects required). So adding the price of an apple watch to a macbook pro makes sense.
This depends a lot where you live. Possibly in the US this is true but currently here in Australia to get an MBP that matches the top spec Dell XPS15 would cost at least $1k aud more. And still not have the touchscreen the dell has.
That didn't always used to be the case. Previously at launch an MBP was often quite keenly priced for the specs. But the last couple of generations have been badly overpriced.
No problem for me - I only buy used MacBooks lately. They work just as well and are cheap and you can always find one. As a side benefit, I prefer to prop up the second hand market today than the producer. I only have a new MacBook at work and I hate its keyboard and lack of varied ports (I always need to use a fugly dongle with it). Unfortunately the company can't buy second hand :-(
> the last couple of generations have been badly overpriced.
Which ties back into the earlier comment on this thread that after Jobs died, the company has gradually devolved into a 'premium cost for not quite as premium hardware' tech company. Previously MacBooks were well priced for what you got (Australian here also), nowadays they are more expensive that equivalent laptops which have more connectivity, touch screen etc.
> Every time I've priced out a laptop with similar configuration to my MBP
Which one is that? Until this past July, they were consistently a CPU generation behind every other brand on the market.
I paid $800 (I think it was $899 retail) for my current 13" Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. It has an i7/DDR4 RAM vs the i5/DDR3 in the MBP, but given the slower hard drive, let's call it even.
The comparable MBP is $600 more at $1,499.00. The display is no doubt better, but I don't know that it justifies that much more money.
This has been true for at least as long as I've been buying apple laptops (over a decade).
If you want something with a similar form factor (light and thin) then anything with similar hardware specs from another company has always been around the same price, or more expensive.
I think the perception of over priced laptops is misplaced because people look at base specs, but ignore form factor. And, yes you could argue that you don't need something so thin and light, and maybe that's true for some people, but if it's a feature you want then apple laptops are competitively priced.
I like Apple too - writing this on a 2013 rMBP. Works flawlessly (touch wood).
But the new Pro series is just not pro enough for me. Why the hell should I buy a dongle for everything? It's supposed to be pro - you shouldn't have to basically carry a whole bunch of dongles to get stuff done. I don't know, maybe I am technophobe, but sometimes taking away the stuff which works and useful to shave a mm in height is just stupid from my perspective. If I want a super light laptop without the need for ports etc. I would go for an Air.
Dunno what's going to happen but will stick to my 2013 till it literally won't work anymore.
Apple's long been a proponent of doing things wirelessly; the main problem is that both power and displays aren't yet wireless. I wouldn't mind if Apple came out with a new display or 'docking station', I think they would need only one cable to connect the screen + provide power. USB-C is really versatile like that.
A shame they got rid of the SD card slot though, and I will be very upset if they get rid of the 3.5mm as well.
If one of the three or four configurations Apple sells is exactly the one you want, there isn't much or any premium. But if you make a fair comparison by picking a configuration at random (or e.g. pick a particular program that you want to run) then you can easily end up paying 50-100% more to get an Apple that does what you need.
Out of curiosity, I specc'd out a Thinkpad T480 as close as I could to the base model MBP, and they are reasonably similar in price (the Thinkpad is $2100 to the MBP's $2400).
Thing is, if you drop a few upgrades, such as dropping the CPU speed by a few percent, dropping the dGPU, going to a 1080P screen, and using a SATA instead of NVME drive, you're down to $1400 for largely minor decreases in performance and capability (none of those things would affect my use cases appreciably, you might be different). Apple doesn't give you those options in a MBP, and the standard MacBook is pretty outdated, topping out at an old dual core i7.
I’m sorry but dropping to a 1080p after using a Retina display or even a 2K dell screen is absolutely horrible. If you’re a programmer you spend your day looking at screens - make it nice.
Also, the difference between a SATA SSD and NVMe is night and day.
A similar model to the base MBP is ~$300 (~12%) cheaper, but by also dropping some other features they didn't feel were important for their use case, they could get the price close to $1400 (40% cheaper), but Apple doesn't even offer those options.
The point is not to say that a $1400 laptop is equivalent to the base MBP, but that a $2100 laptop is, and a cheaper MBP might be possible if apple was willing to offer some lower end/dated features. But they aren't.
FWIW I specced out a T480s and I got something that in terms of RAM wasn't even available on macs at the time (24 GB), weights under 1.5kg, has HDMI, ethernet USB and USB-C, a matte HIDPI display and a proper keyboard (and it came out costing like a top of the line MBP).
And I would add that although some people see Apple's recent lack of innovation as proof that you need an asshole dictator at the top, I take it as proof that putting abusive people on top harms those under them, preventing people from really owning what they're doing or learning to innovate collaboratively.
It's basically "après moi, le déluge" as self-fulfilling prophecy. Real leaders create something that lasts beyond their deaths. Contrast this to George Washington, who could have ended up king but worked hard to make America about institutions, not men. Or, in business we can look at places like Toyota, which have remarkable cultural consistency and continuing innovation across the decades.
Can a premium priced goods be different than luxury goods? Yes. Prime example is an iPhone vs a name brand hand bag. The utility difference is massive.
> With only seven million iPhones sold in China during the second quarter of 2018, Apple's market share in the country dropped by 12.5 percent year on year to 6.7 percent, according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC)
> If you head over to Xiaomi China’s official store (via XDA-Developers) you’ll see three new bundles unsubtly named the XS, XS Max, and XR sets. Included in each bundle is a new Xiaomi phone — either the Mi Mix 2S, Mi 8, or Mi 8 SE, respectively — a Xiaomi Notebook, a Mi Band 3, and a Bluetooth earpiece/earphones, all for the same price as their namesake iPhones.
I don’t think Apple products are any different without Jobs, the problem is they’re nothing new either. With Jobs you knew he loved and lived technology and was always looking for cool new things to do with it. Most of his product launches did just that and brought some excitement about possibilities.
Current Apple products are meticulously, exactingly designed and built, but they’re losing the excitement and expectation of something truly new and original that Jobs brought. That’s the big difference I think a visionary leader can make.
Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars and space. Tesla and SpaceX could survive without him for a time, and since they’re very different industries than consumer electronics, maybe even thrive under a Tim Cook-like operator par excellence. But no guarantee.
>Current Apple products are meticulously, exactingly designed and built, ...
I disagree. Look at the MBP keyboard issues, or the declining quality of OS X.
Under Jobs that shit wouldn't fly. Other roles aside, one of Jobs' most important functions was that of acting as a sanity check to ensure that the constiuent parts of any given product came together as a cohesive whole.
Did you ever use the first 3 versions of OSX ? Because I did. And the quality was pretty unacceptable compared to OS9 or Windows. On the hardware side how long did Apple stick with the coffee puck mouse. Or how about the iPhone 1 never even having 3G or MMS or how about all of the issues with the GPU.
But yet Steve Jobs still shipped it all. Why ? Because his slogan was always "real artists ship".
Mac OS 9 didn’t even have memory protection, what are you talking about? The problem with early versions of Mac OS X were feature completeness, software support, and performance, not quality.
Yeah, it would have flown, and did. Remember when the MacBook first came out and every 5th it 6th white one had a dark yellow film? Or how the touch pads had waves and wobbles in them? The MacBook Pro exploding and misshapen batteries? The MacBook Pro thermal paste issues and how they ran at up to 100C and shut themselves down? Every time some big new production change happens there are teething problems no matter who’s in charge.
From what I understand Ives was distracted during this design cycle. Now that the headquarters are built I’m waiting to see if all of this crap is fixed in the next iteration.
But it’s getting easier and easier to skip a generation of laptop these days. My old machine is just starting to get slow enough that I notice. That’s a big problem for manufacturers.
You’re just listing things that have been described as product failures since Jobs died. Sure. But anyone can also make such a list from when Jobs was CEO.
Why would you say that for example the Apple Watch is "nothing new"?
Or: what is the difference between jumping from an iPhone to an iPad (considered as genius by Jobs) and jumping from a fingerprint ID to a 3D face recognition.
Yes it wasn't new per se, they didn't created first mobile phone with a touchscreen, but you can't deny that this one device single handedly shifted direction of entire industry.
Similar things, just not in that scale is happening with watch. In reality no other smartwatch is even close to the Apple Watch. There is no competition. Same as with an iPad or the iPods before that.
but they’re losing the excitement and expectation of something truly new and original
It's just the technology which has matured. The innovation slows and becomes more incremental so certainly the excitement goes down. Jobs wouldn't have been able to change that. Maybe the quality of new Macs would be better or maybe he would have pushed his engineers more to make more elegant way to solve the notch problem, but that's it.
Don't make a mistake, he was insightful executive, not the miraculous engineer inventing new technologies. At this stage of the company he would probably just pushed more to the services and content deals.
Your argument is fundamentally unconvincing because you're using unsubstantiated, subjective claims that anyone can disagree with and thereby nullify.
While you say that Jobs curbed "bad" decisions, and that now the company is "money grubbing," and that he alone kept Apple going in the "right" direction, you don't explain why you think so.
Someone could say the opposite (I don't have an opinion).
For example, far more people choose to purchase iPhones for far more money than they did during Steve Jobs' tenure, so there is some evidence that "bad" product decisions from your perspective are actually good product decisions in the eyes of Apple's customers.
Likewise, Apple's efforts to emphasize ethics and responsibility with respect to the environment, diversity and privacy are mostly new to the post-Jobs era. It may prove hard to argue that spending so much money on those priorities amounts to "money-grubbing," but I can't say for sure because you haven't really tried to argue anything at all.
so there is some evidence that "bad" product decisions from your perspective are actually good product decisions in the eyes of Apple's customers.
Where did I ever say that being luxury was a bad product decision? I never did. It raises margins. That's a very good thing for a company. However, it's empty and hollow as a driver of new product innovation.
I never thought of Apple as the GE (and GE Capital) of the tech world, but the "do more of the thing that makes us the most money, at all costs" metaphor is starting to fit.
The NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable.
What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.[1]
Apple leads in recycling, renewable energy use and privacy as well.
I don’t buy that Apple products or Apple as a company is worse off in any measurable way. I’m sure the there are some people who dislike decisions that happened after Jobs, but Apple and their products seem to be doing fine.
I knew everything was going down hill the second I seen that they weren't going to call it the Apple iWatch.
Like do they not know how important that lower case "i" is for their award winning and trend setting formula!
And I am being serious right now. My ocd is going nuts just thinking about the lost uniformity of the branding. Especially when they still insist on us calling their other products "my iphone, my ipod, my imac, and now we also have to say "my apple watch"?
How do you even tell somebody to pass you your phone, tablet, and watch all at the same time. "Hey man, can you pass me my iphone and ipad. Oh and my APPLE watch. Like do you not realize how much of my life you are wasting when you force me to say one more syllable.
I think Apple products are actually better, maybe not so much because of Apple but because their competitors suck.
Android is terrible, I mean, it’s looking more and more like iOS, but it’s still not iOS and it has no privacy if you want to use the official play store (which you want, because all the apps that actually make your phone smart, only live there). Android phones still die after a few years, my iPhone 5s is still a beast.
Laptops, well the surface book is arguably a great device, but it’s also more expensive than a MacBook Pro and doesn’t come with a thunderbolt port. The XPS is decent, but it’s build quality is Dell terrible. Lenovo might make good laptops, but working for the government, I’m not allowed to own one.
Apple has the only working Bluetooth devices on the planet. The magic keyboard and especially the AirPods always work, I can’t say that about anything else.
Plug and play egpu, who else has one?
I think the only place Apple isn’t actually best at what they do is in competition on software services like AI. Siri is terrible, Apple maps are terrible (why aren’t they just using OSM at this point? I’m sure OSM and Apple could find a way to benefit from each other, and OSM is currently better than google maps).
I may sound like an Apple fanboy, and I am, but I’ve become that way because their shit always works right out the damn box. And I’ve never had a piece quit on me by it’s own. I bought a MacBook Pro 2018 edition to work with the egpu, but my old 2013 macbook still runs perfectly fine. I can’t say I’ve ever tried any thing similar, except for thinkpads, and I’m not allowed to own one of those. Meanwhile my 1 year old work laptop from Dell is literally falling apart. The keyboard rattles, the battery lock is breaking and the screen can’t keep itself up. It cost almost as much as my MacBook, and it’s just complete shit. You may wonder why I care about cost of my work machine, but I’m a manager, I still pay for it.
As far as OSes go, Linux is still Linux, if you don’t mind spending half your life configuring it to your needs and then doing it every time it breaks then Linux is still awesome. Windows, the only plug and play option, however, has become atrociously bad. I like Microsoft, we use Azure a lot and stuff like AD and ADFS is heaven sent when you operate 500 different IT systems from as many suppliers, but windows 10 is one of the worst OSes I’ve ever operated. So again, Apple has managed to be great at OSes, mainly because their competitors suck.
I do think not having an iPhone SE is a mistake, but I also thought losing the headphone jack was a mistake, and sales have since proved it wasn’t, so who knows.
I hate having to go to Google for everything as much as the next guy, but I just can't bring myself to use OSM over Google Maps. GMpas are just.. better in every case.
I’m Danish, OSM is updated a lot faster than gmaps. Obviously google is better at routing and traffic, but routing doesn’t work if a road is closed for construction and google doesn’t know.
I get what you mean - but Musk isn't always like that. Not like Jobs.
If you look at the recent BFR video on the SpaceX channel, early on he gives an update on the technology, and there's a part where he takes much longer than the audience cares for to praise the job SpaceX' propulsion engineering team did on the new engine. And you can very easily tell it's genuine respect and gratitude (probably because he had to be more hands-off due to time constraints), not marketing fluff. He's certainly not above crediting people at his company.
Totally agree with the sentiment. I don't despise Musk, I rather like him a lot for all of his work.
BUT I also thought it was weird that, in the podcast, he didn't mention and never has mentioned (of all the appearances I've seen) the entire team of people helping him to the success. Specially in the podcast, because one question that was repeated several times by Joe was like "how do you manage to do all the stuff you do?". I do not like this way of portraying one guy as some sort of alien that does all this when in reality he does very little if you compare it to the work that is done by his employees.
Leadership that goes in the direction that Musk does is really good and very valuable but it's not what creates actual worth.
>but not once did he say, "Well I have an amazing team of engineers" and credit all the thousands of people in his organizations that actually do the work.
Engineers are a dime a dozen. They are responsible for the success of these companies in the same way cells are responsible for the formation of a human being.
Why couldn't all those engineers build a cost effective reusable rocket system before Musk came along? Or how about an electric car that could go 400 miles on a battery charge?
Your point seemed to be that engineers are "a dime a dozen," yet I doubt any "dime-a-dozen" engineer or group of engineers could have accomplished what Tesla's or SpaceX's engineers have.
But let's answer a question you posed in your comment: Why couldn't all those engineers build a cost effective reusable rocket system before Musk came along? Or how about an electric car that could go 400 miles on a battery charge?
They could have, because obviously, they did. Their collective expertise is what made that possible. Elon Musk didn't just draw up all the plans and send it to them to make happen. Elon Musk, however, could never in a million years have done it alone.
So I didn't miss your point, I disregarded it. Those dime a dozen engineers are far more important than Elon.
> Nobody walks around thanking their skin cells for existing.
Well, skin cells are not human beings, so comparing human beings to skin cells is... disturbing at best.
I think OP's point is to credit Musk for the agency in organizing those fine engineers around tackling these problems. Together they had the ability to achieve these things, but that state of togetherness does not arise accidentally. Entirely seperate from his contributions to the engineering going on, building a company is an act.
> All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights....
You know what, this could be said about a lot of people, including the freaking President. I'm beginning to wonder if the real problem is Twitter. Specifically the most fundamental aspect of its design -- the ability to blast off brief messages to thousands of people any time, anywhere.
Maybe we're learning that that this design leads people, even smart, well-meaning people, to publish crap. No one is crafting well thought out, quality content in 280 characters on their phone. The vast majority of Tweets and RTs are going to be total junk, lizard brain stuff. Sure enough Twitter has become the abuse hub of the Internet.
Sure, people love to use it. They love to use cocaine too once they get a taste. And drinking socially is fine, but booze too hard and the nicest person can turn into a monster. Maybe we just shouldn't have what Twitter provides.
I completely agree with you that Twitter is playing a casual role in the degradation of discourse within our society.
Go to the popular Twitter feeds and there are very obvious bot posts trying to scam and manipulate people. Twitter has not managed to stop them. Elon Musk's twitter feed is a great example of this. It even has the bots pretending to be him.
Here, if you want to appear popular and have greater ability to manipulate people, you can buy some followers: https://devumi.com/twitter-followers/ Now regardless of your worthiness you have social proof! Advocate for the lack of existence of a round earth to your hearts content, now with greater effectiveness.
The spread property of news on Twitter favors falsehood over truth: https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-study-fake-news-spreads-... This fact when combined with medium as message https://www.litcharts.com/lit/amusing-ourselves-to-death/cha... leads to a system which actively promotes the wrong sort of content. Clickbait is a reality, because clickbait gets clicks, so people write clickbait titles. The existence of the rules like those Hacker News has are a fight against these forces. This community was built in part with an understanding that these forces are real and harmful to discourse.
Twitter meanwhile has better engagement metrics by not solving these problems. So don't expect them to change, without any effort on their part. Fighting your own incentives is very hard. Twitter is basically addicted to harming discourse. Obviously, no ill will on its part, since this stuff wasn't obvious early on.
It has benefits too though. Like getting to hear the perspective of the people in question, without intermediary.
>Specifically the most fundamental aspect of its design
One of my favorite hacker news comments is:
>Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started.
Wut. The problem isn't twitter (well, not in this case, not that twitter haven't destroyed their product with the non-chronological feed...), it's infants who can't control themselves on it. Addicts and occasional users exist for most things (the possible exception being strong opiates).
1 to many communications is useful. Many to many communications (email) is useful. Push comms are useful.
People are responsible for what they do, and what they say. Be it drugs or (I can't believe I'm saying this), Twitter.
The most interesting thing is that many would blame Trump more for his Twitter mis-use than people who mis-use substances. And, conversely, many blame drug abusers but excuse Trump.
In the end, we are either responsible for our actions or we are not. I believe the former is a crucial piece for functioning society; it needs to be tempered with a non-judgemental attitude and treated as a public health issue if it spreads too far.
Being unconstrained by reality? You might actually be onto something there; I know a few people who are similarly unconstrained and they end up bringing just the right mix of crazy and sweat together to make something novel. It also has a serious downside in this particular case, however.
Not wanting to make this political, but one could say the same about the current US president. Based on his social media output it seemed he was downright batshit insane when he got elected (some might say even still, although he seems to have calmed down a bit). He seems to be achieving things though and we didn't end up with WW3 as a lot of people predicted.
Perhaps the world needs these crazy people occasionally to come in and stir up the pot?
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the guy and not being from the US my opinion doesn't really matter, but thought I'd give me $0.02 so to speak)
I guess there's a difference between "head of a large public company" and "founder of a large public company".
His track record at the latter speaks for itself. But the fact that someone who founded a company isn't necessarily the best person to run it long term is uncomfortable. Especially on a website like this one, with so many aspiring founders.
Why is that uncomfortable? I don't think anybody takes issue with the idea that some engineers are great at being engineers but not great at being managers, and so it's important to have a career track for senior engineers to continue doing the engineering work that they're great at instead of forcing them into a role that's not fulfilling.
That idea shouldn't be more uncomfortable just because the engineer is a founder. It should be reasonable for a founding engineer to let somebody else come in and do the boring management work that a CEO has to perform while the engineer continues doing the work that got them to where they are.
People keep saying this, and it makes very little sense. The Tesla that he "didn't found" was a boutique outfit formed to modify another company's obscure sports car to make it run on batteries. That company no longer exists in any sense beyond the name on the business license. The Tesla that exists now is indisputably there because of Musk's ambition, willpower, and engineering instincts, for better or worse.
By "another company's obscure sports car" I assume you're referring to the Lotus Elise - arguably one of the world's better known and more successful sports cars.
I'm British so I also take offense to this (how very dare you!) but I'm assuming this was written from a US-centric point of view. The Elise and Exige may have been fairly common this side of the pond but I get the impression they're very rare outside of the UK.
Lotus's best sales year in the US was 2007, with about 3,000 sold across all models including the Elise. That year, the Corvette alone sold 33000 units.
Just taking a shot in the dark here. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had more information to base his decisions on than is available to you from a 'Tweet' and a couple of lines in a media article.
Musk-ites will be saying the same thing even if he's eventually ousted from Tesla and banned from running another public company --- an outcome that is now explicitly on the table thanks to how he managed Tesla over the past 3 months.
This kind of thinking makes sense (Musk is smart, he must make decisions rationally) but it is sort of empirically denied. If Musk was so smart he wouldn't have called a random guy a pedo or violated securities law in public. After all, he has more information/advice available to him on securities law than you or I do.
Don't you find something off that you need to reference things that have yet to be resolved to find instances of him acting unjustifiably irrational? Neither statement he made has yet been shown to not be a statement of fact. If he was simply making up things in either case then he will pay, quite literally. If he wasn't then instead this will end up just being yet another 'sky is falling' moment that people will quickly forget before moving onto the next one.
>Tesla has pulled itself back from the brink and may actually become a profitable car company
This is a very very generous assessment of the dire financial situation TSLA is in. At best they have hit their production at the expense of quality which will only temporarily offset their costs. Any sustainable mid-term profitability is a very big question mark at this point.
Tesla Model 3 is the most efficient and best quality electric vehicle I've seen. I've owned one for over 6 months now, and early on it was glitchy and needed a lot of software updates, but for the last 3 months it has been extremely rock solid stable, and I'm pretty certain this car will have great longevity. Not to mention, perfect 5 star ratings in safety from NHTSA.
First, I don't like Autosteer (autopilot), as I think it is a little too sloppy because highway lane paintings are not very good in some places. It does much better when tracking a vehicle in front, but I prefer to be in control because it gets a little scary for me personally when I'm traveling 1 foot away from adjacent vehicles and going around a curve and expecting the car to steer for me... This is mostly a personal thing for me - I prefer to be in control of my own fate... you might feel differently.
That being said, I love the Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC) - it's light years ahead of any other manufacturer, as it uses the Tesla computer vision system.
What it does that is really amazing is that you can set the speed to +10 (which is what I do) and with one flick of the steering wheel paddle once you get on the freeway it will set your maximum speed to 75mph (in a 65mph zone; +10) and it uses the computer vision system to determine when it needs to slow you down due to a vehicle or obstacle in front of you.
The amazing thing is that because it uses a computer vision system, it is smart enough to not brake when a vehicle is directly in front of you but you are going around a curve so you will never actually hit the vehicle. In other words, it keeps your maximum speed, with safe following distance, no matter what type of strange curve or oncoming traffic might normally fool it into emergency braking.
On a percentage basis of test scores, Tesla is in the top 1% of test scores and was rumored to be in contention for the very best test score with their newest model.
The glowing review by the actual owner is justified by empirical data.
I thought the narrative was they just need to get through the short term before production stabilizes and is able to meet demand.
I do feel there is a difference between Tesla the car, and Tesla the company. Tesla the car is still the most desirable electric on the market. Tesla the company is a different story altogether.
The narrative shifts constantly because the narrative is anti-Tesla. So it has to shift, whenever they make it past another hurdle. It started with them being ridiculous for even trying to make an electric car. Then it became that they couldn't mass produce. Now they are being mass produced. It sometimes shifts towards their safety, but it isn't a preferred avenue of attack because the stats show that the cars are safer than other vehicles, which produces cognitive dissonance in people who are mislead as to the true nature of the news they are hearing about Tesla.
That perspective would be a refreshing one, but the short interests which are pushing the current narratives are oftentimes not the ones who hope to see your car delivered. Their profits are maximized, not by the delivery of your car, but by volatility in the Tesla stock produced by negative news about a story stock.
I'll give an example. An often repeated story about Tesla is that they are not making a profit off any vehicle they make. It's a false narrative of a very particular type with a very particular goal: it generates confusion about the benefit of infrastructure investment.
It's clearly a false narrative. Investment in infrastructure is obviously a wise move for a company with ambitions as vast as Tesla. So why do you hear this false narrative? It comes down to the company being valued according to the assumption that the company will make these infrastructure investments. There is a causal link between the stock price and the infrastructure investment. If confusion and doubt exist about the value of that infrastructure investment, then it produces volatility which can generate money for the short position.
In truth, these people should be disregarded. However, unfortunately, negative news tends to get more attention than positive news. So the news tends to end up favoring these short-interest fueled stories as a consequence. Plenty of people realize that climate change is real and that we all stand to benefit from Tesla succeeding in its mission. Many people don't realize that the majority of news about Tesla is being fueled by interests who stand to profit from causing harm to the company.
The submarine of the ICE industry pieces on Tesla at least I think people are savvy enough to grasp fairly easily. They tend to have a more obvious structure, with the way a rival auto-industry expert will be brought on to breathlessly talk about how their competitor in Elon Musk is so crazy that he ought to be removed from leading the company or how electric vehicles are impossible or not ready or some other nonsense. Anything to harm their competition. They're just acting according to their own self-interest.
But the amplification of confusion generated by short interests? It was much harder for me at least to understand where that was coming from. I thought the people saying it were idiots up until I got so annoyed with it I downloaded the analysis of Tesla by a firm that was shorting it in which they laid out the way Tesla was a story stock and explained its subsequent volatility. It was really eye opening, because I had expected them to be idiots saying things that were false because they truly believed them, rather than explaining that they figured Tesla would do well, but that their was potential to profit off volatility. It helped me understand the strangeness of the news. The pieces amplifying confusion have more to do with the profit model of news and its relationship with attention, rather than value creation, and some people being clever enough to abuse that.
It's what motivated some of the interest Elon Musk had in going private. These things haven't been done under a rock. The Tesla board has called out the news for their amplification of these lies. Elon Musk has called it out. Plenty of green sector focused news have been calling it out. It's pretty sad that people are struggling to understand it. When tangentially related subjects have been brought up on Hacker News in the past, it was described as paranoia on Elon Musk's part. I guess its easy for Hacker News to understand the submarine that Paul Graham wrote about, since people read his writing, and harder for it to figure it out the rest of the bias, because someone didn't lay out the forces clearly enough. I'm not as good a writer as Paul Graham. I can't get across what I've noticed with as much eloquence. Hopefully people like him continue to be thoughtful and share their thoughts, so that everyone can benefit.
Tesla is the most shorted stock on the stock market. Tesla is a leading player in electrification of transportation. Climate change is leading nations to ban ICE vehicles. Something about these three statements, taken together, is odd. People point to Elon Musk being a fraud, but meanwhile he was so effective in his role at SpaceX that the superpower of Russia can no longer compete with his company in the sector that it is focused on. People say he is incompetent to reduce dissonance, meanwhile his friends and engineers insist otherwise even in the discussions in this news item and even on topics related to engineering rather than business.
Don't think that's the case -- did you listen to the latest earnings call? They're forecasting a cashflow positive Q3 with 15% gross margin on the Model 3s, and have sustained 5,000 M3 and 2,000 S&X per week for several weeks now. They even closed the reservation system and are taking orders for 2 months out.
It’s widely reported (even among usually optimistic forecasters) that Model 3 production has stalled as low as 3k per week after the initial rush week. There are further questions regarding warranty provision that may be hiding significant costs which would impact that 15% GM.
Absolutely not, when and if he is found guilty of market manipulation then be it, he deserves everything that coming his way. If not then, well not. It would just be pitty that hubris has destroyed a great legacy in that case. And, even more troubling, with Tesla basically being Musk its future, and that of its employees, looks rather grim all things considered. Best thing for Tesla would be if Musk was not found guilty and stepped down none the less. I don't see that happening so.
How about because nobody should be able to go from perfectly fine to having ruined their life* in under 30 seconds. you have one dumb thought, open twitter on your phone, push tweet, and it's over. That's not an ability people should have. We are impulsive and often dumb.
He was perfectly fine to surrender his CEO position at Tesla (and any position of power in any other company he is in) in order to get rid of this "ability". He did not.
Certain positions of power just come with the ability to ruin your life in seconds. Some even can ruin the life of others in milliseconds. You cannot cushion these people from these facts. If they cannot deal with that, they should surrender the power. The concept is called responsibility.
They are referencing other tweets and statements by him. So it isn't a single bad decision that lead to this. It is a constant flow of bad decisions run over several months. People in important positions really should put a legal/marketing department between themselves and their twitter account.
He had his dumb thought, broadcast it, and then continued to publicly support his dumb thought for days. I know it's great to be a CEO and say anything you want on Twitter, but you should at least run it by PR and IR first, because they're going to get asked about it. And maybe someone says 'Hey Elon, that's not actually true.' or ' Hey Elon, you can't post that while the market is open.' or 'Dude, we have to send this to the SEC and wait 10 minutes, dummy'
The difference with him is he is trying to move humanity forward and truly improve things and helping to secure our long term survival.
Those short sellers don't care about any of that, they only care about making money and it's understandable that Musk is trying to find ways to ruin their game.
Musk should have run this type of tweet by his close business friends / counsel.
I hope he will only get a slap on the wrist for this.
We need companies like Tesla, SpaceX or The Boring Company.
Musk is trying to make money, and he says that he is trying to move humanity forward to secure our long term survival. This may very well be true. However, similar statements are often made by people committing scams in order to give investors and the public an excuse to ignore serious signs of fraud. Anyone who gives him a free pass because of his claims of saving humanity is potentially making an enormous mistake. On the other hand, if he really is saving humanity, he should also be able to comply with the law.
You shouldn't be allowed to share this opinion, as you have never owned a single share of stock. Why don't you buy some, wait till you lose some money, then come back and tell us you feel good because, you know, the company pushes humanity forward.
Musk wasn't raising money for humanity sake; he was raising money to found his company and doing so he agreed to be bound by the rules that such market created. You don't like these rules? Sure go see your senator to change the rules and allow companies "moving humanity forward" to do or say whatever they want to when they are exchange listed. The problem is if that would to happen, nobody would invest a dime in such company because people don't invest their money into pushing humanity forward, but rather to multiply their hard earned cash.
And how the fuck is building rockets pushing humanity forward? We are not going to leave Earth en masse; With his behavior of "fuck Earth I will move everyone to Mars and adopt your body to live in Martian atmosphere", Musk is actually pushing humanity backwards. I recently saw someone on highway throwing away empty cigarette pack. It happens we pulled over on the same gas station I asked him about literring to what he answers "Dude, Musk throw away a car into space and you have a problem with me? why the heck should I care about some cigarette box thrown out of window".
I have shares and you only lose money if you decide to sell the shares now - price might recover if you hold on to them and if you believe in Tesla's mission and value you might even think it's a good time to buy some more. (This is not financial advice)
But like I mentioned, I said he shouldn't have tweeted that message and should have consulted with his business partners first. I think he just wasn't thinking clearly of the consequences along with his other rather eratic tweets. I blame his lack of sleep and taking stuff like ambien...
I don't think he is a scammer and is all about making money. If you follow his history - he's an engineer and he wants to solve tough problems and wants to add value (see recent interview with Joe Rogan). What I would have liked to see more though is him mentioning his team and the brilliant people working at his companies.
To your last point (paraphrased):
> How is space technology moving humanity forward?
SpaceX is about space technology and that technology can improve life here on Earth - see:
And there is nothing wrong with trying to find or create outer space habitats. We can improve life on Earth and build rockets at the same time, i.e. we have enough resources and minds to work on all these problems.
Sorry but I don't believe you own stocks... this just sounds too naive, like first advice any broker will give you NOT to do is to buy and keep for the sake of it:
> I have shares and you only lose money if you decide to sell the shares now
Many stocks went to near zero just to get de-listed next minute. Some of these fine folks that have played marked by your advice blew their head off in the process. Never assume stock will just rebounce; to the contrary before you execute a trade set a head ceiling (in most cases) and definitely set the floor that you going to play by strictly following it. This is indeed an advice any book on trading stock market will tell you.
I'm not gonna comment on the part about Musk being scammer or not. I don't want to change a subject all of sudden.
You're right - technically I don't own TSLA outright. I trade CFDs. I should have made that clearer - my bad.
And of course you have to set your stop losses - that's just common sense, no?
But TSLA is not near zero, so I'm holding the position I've got, because I believe that if Tesla can overcome this hurdle - the price will recover again, because the underlying long term value Tesla produces is immense in my opinion.
And that's my point - what Elon and his companies / teams are trying to achieve is game changing and a big value add to society.
And you did talk about more than one subject in your previous comment - which I've responded to.
You say the shorts don't have any power to hurt tesla, but much of tesla's and elon musk's personal debt is backed by Tesla shares. If the price dips too low, it's potentially catastrophic for the company and him.
What exactly did the shorts do here? Musk has brought on all this scrutiny himself. The shorts didn't bail out Solar City, miss nearly every production target, use TSLA as a way to personally finance a lavish lifestyle, or commit securities fraud.
The shorts are all over this stock because of issues like the above. They were not the cause of those issues.
The idea that Tesla is drastically missing its production targets is overstated. It originally claimed that what was later named the Model 3 would begin production in 2017. This claim was made as far back as 2014. This occurred as projected. It has since been ramping up steadily. The rate of that ramp up has been slower than initially projected, but is well within the long-term projected numbers.
Critically, Tesla ramp up is already high enough that it is now leading the US in sales of electric vehicles. The numbers are decidedly in favor of Tesla, who sells almost as many vehicles a month as the other electric providers sell in a year.
This should be a good thing in your eyes, considering the impact of climate change which will be felt by this generation. However, the legacy of effect of sowing doubt about climate change and automobiles is bearing itself out. The seeds were sown and they now sprout. Enough idiots were convinced to bet against renewable energy and now they're going to do their best to damn the rest us.
This seems to me like a woe to the world moment. The world is trying to take down someone seeking its good. It reminds me of the persecution of Jesus Christ. Read through this thread and see the false witnesses being refuted by his co-laborers and friends. Read the testimony of the people saying that his product is good. Read the empirical reports on the quality of his work.
When the righteous are persecuted, it is done, not because they are evil, but because they are good. Nobody is afraid of the incompetent fool, but rival automaker executives line up to plead that Elon Musk should be removed from his position, now that they realize the danger they are in.
> The idea that Tesla is drastically missing its production targets is overstated.
The target misses seem like quite a bit more than tiny, immaterial/technical misses. July 2017 projection of 1500 Model 3s in Sept and 20,000 in December with actuals of 260 and 2425 (17% and 12% of target, respectively).
Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it. I also appreciate the extra effort you put into making sure I interpreted in the spirit in which it is given. It can be hard to understand intent via text.
You're right. They definitely aren't immaterial misses. I'm not trying to deny that there are misses.
I'm trying to talk about the vector that Tesla is representing and the way that vector makes the claims about their misses less important. There is now a new trend in the auto industry, with the monthly sales of ICE vehicles going down every month and the number of electric vehicles sold every month going up. Tesla is now projected to have a vehicle within the top 20 most sold vehicles in the United States. They are projected to be first by vehicle revenue for a single model. They are doing worse than they wanted, but not terribly. They need support, in my view, so that they can continue their mission of electrifying transport. Not to be torn down, which feels almost suicidal at societal scale for as long as the other manufacturers still make most of their income on ICE vehicles.
Though, I suppose legislators will eventually ban those vehicles outright, it is already starting to happen in some places.
Hope you have a wonderful day. As for me, I'm in the house of mourning. I'm certain that more people are going to suffer in the future. It has me really down. I'm watching people trying to bet on disasters occurring, seeing another person realize this and try to do something to fix it, and then seeing that blow up in the most horrible way. It is tragedy. Already, I have friends and family that have been impacted by climate change. I can't stop caring about them.
We're late on stopping climate change. So is Tesla. It sucks.
> Enough idiots were convinced to bet against renewable energy and now they're going to do their best to damn the rest us.
No one is betting against renewable energy. They are betting against a company drowning in debt that has been poorly ran with a CEO who has been charged with securities fraud.
And please do not try to compare Musk to some modern day Jesus Christ. My bible studies are a little rusty, but I do not remember Jesus buying up multiple mansions [1], doing shady bail outs for family like Solar City [2], or leveraging himself to the hilt on a company that is in a crisis [3].
There are people actively experimenting with manipulating people through feeding a process which produces division. They have confessed to this [1]. Some people are choosing to bet against Tesla as a result of this. The knowledge doesn't come with the disclaimer when you get it secondhand.
But, you're right that I'm speaking too broadly when I say it is a bet against all renewable energy. Thank you for removing this speck from my eye. I appreciate it.
As to your being offended by my reference: First off let me be clear that Elon Musk is a man. He cries the tears of a man. He has the many failings of a man. Many talks in which he describes his life makes it clear that he hates it and would not recommend it to others. Part of what is feeding into that these days is the cruelty directed toward him, much of which is not fully justified by the ever so slight nature of his failings.
Now as to your attempt to show Elon Musk as having done some sort of wrong? Let me remind you of some of your rusty scripture:
Jesus Christ talks about the many mansions of his father. He does not need to buy them. He made them. All things are made by and for him. Therefore, I'm not about to condemn someone for having mansions, in isolation from the rest of their deeds [2]. Solomon also had incredible wealth. Rather than calling that evil, Jesus Christ described Solomon as wise.
As to bailing out family? Jesus Christ came to save us, despite our sins. A healthy person doesn't need a healer. Moreover, we are described in scripture as children of God. So I'm also not about to condemn a person for trying to help someone related to them. Especially since I consider the continuance of solar deployment to be a moral /good/. That said, I've read the reviews of SolarCity. Clearly SolarCity is falling well short of the rest of Tesla given customer reviews of the company. Hopefully they manage to get things together at some point. That would be wonderful. Eventually, I expect solar to be a dominant provider of energy. It seems to me like a good long-term investment.
[2]: TL;DR for the people who didn't read the article: He bought mansions. The mansion are near another. He converted one it into a school for his kids and others he knew who presumably were interested in attending. The other was for his wife, who was interested in having the option of alternate living arrangements. Another is thought to house security staff. It is a tabloid piece, trying to make a sordid story of Elon Musk's personal life for the entertainment of gawkers.
I'm ignorant of the practical aspects here: aren't shorts self-fulfilling eventually if the people taking this positions are powerful enough?
If I'm long on Tesla, then I lend my shares for someone and the shares happen to fall at all (normal market variations) then I lost money. If I see more short orders then surely I'm going to get antsy, move to "a more stable share", pushing the price down a little, making some other short positions come off and starting the snowball rolling.
Add to that the ability of people to win on large short positions by selling shares 'they' are holding (pushing the price down), or knowing what major news outlets are publishing in advance, and any inkling of weakness gets multiplied beyond reality.
Surely you'd be stupid not to respect a major trading operation going short on a company you're long on; but that makes the position easy to manipulate?
If you see the sharks circling ready to depress your share price the temptation to blip the share price with an announcement "free cake for all shareholders!" is going to be strong. Especially if that might save the company.
Teach me oh wise ones, where am I wrong, what am I missing.
(I'd guess one thing would be the ability to hide the origin of bids/buys; I assume these are public.)
If you see vultures circling a dying or dead animal, does it mean they killed it? The vultures show up when something is dying or dead.
TSLAs financials have been a disaster for a long time. Its stock price has been completely disconnected from reality for a long time. Musk/TSLA fans have buoyed the stock price, but people are starting to realize that even if the TSLA car is nice it doesn't mean it's a good company.
> aren't shorts self-fulfilling eventually if the people taking this positions are powerful enough?
Powerful enough to do what? There is not some grand short conspiracy. TSLA and Musk have given the shorts all they need. Yes, a lot of short interest could cause people not to go long, but because people use short interest as a proxy to something is wrong at the company. It only takes 2 mins of research to see that TSLAs financials are a disaster. The CEO is on Twitter calling people pedophiles and now looks to have committed securities fraud. The shorts are a symptom of the problems of the company, they are not the cause.
> Add to that the ability of people to win on large short positions by selling shares 'they' are holding (pushing the price down),
First, you're making an assumption this person holds enough shares to move the market (millions of shares change hands per day in TSLA). Second, there are all sorts of rules around market manipulation of that type. If someone is moving that kind of money to move TSLA with the sort of daily volume it has, then that person is on the radar.
You know Musk how could screw all the shorts? Get off Twitter and execute. Hit a target more than once a year. Actually make some money. Unfortunately it may be too late because of the TSLA debt load (added to by the Solar City bailout which was itself shady).
It was intended to be more of a general question on shorting, but thank you for your analysis - I shall cogitate on it; I'd certainly agree Tesla has problems.
> use TSLA as a way to personally finance a lavish lifestyle
The others I get but this seems like an odd personal attack. What CEO of a huge public company doesn't live a "lavish lifestyle"? Or is this just supposed to make us hate him more because he's rich and we're not?
Perhaps it was harsh, and I can't find the article right now outlining the multiple mansions, etc... Outside of that, I don't care how rich someone is, but the problem is that he's using TSLA stock as collateral for large personal loans. This puts enormous pressure on him to maintain a stock price above $X at all costs. Assuming he has used all of the other money borrowed to fund his other companies, if TSLA goes down could it take down all of his companies? That I'm unsure about.
Lol. Musk over extended. Plain and simple. He played it risky and now, when it didn’t work out, he is pissed.
In response he waged war via twitter on those who took risks in the other direction. Would have been wiser for him to focus on finding a way to cut his losses so he can continue fighting. Instead he played with fire and was burned.
Shorts don't affect the stock the price that way. They profit if the price goes down, sure. And lots of short interest might make people more likely to sell, which will drive the price down, but just shorting a stock doesn't have much effect on the price.
Shorting is selling a stock. Selling a stock lowers its price.
The way shorting works is Alice lends a stock from Bob and gives him a small compensation for that. Then Alice sells that stock she lend. Somewhere in the future Alice will buy the stock and give it back to Bob.
If the price goes up enouogh, Alice will (be forced to) cut her losses. For this she has to buy a stock, which will increase the price further. This can lead to a so called 'short squeeze' when shorters Carol and Dave also (are forced to) cut their losses, driving the price up even further.
Right now >28% the TSLA float is sold short[0]. That must have an impact on the price. Also should a TSLA short squeeze ever happen, that's going to be epic. There will be enough Tesla believers that it's probable going to be hard to find that 28% for anything close to reasonable prices.
Shorting a stock means borrowing shares and selling them (making the seller short of shares they still owe). This puts the shares back on the market and absorbs purchasing demand. By supply and demand the price goes down.
Regardless of any change in public sentiment or incentives to publicize dirt, at scale shorting a stock inherently reduces the price while the short positions are open.
In practice, at the scale of short selling actually taking place, does it materially impact the price of Tesla shares? Is there even any way to know?
Seems like a boogeyman to blame all manner of company ills on. For example, I think very few of the negative press Tesla has received over e.g. union busting or manufacturing defects is due to a short seller conspiracy. That's newsworthy stuff and the media is doing its job.
> In practice, at the scale of short selling actually taking place, does it materially impact the price of Tesla shares? Is there even any way to know?
If you divert some of the water from a river, the water level goes down. How much does it go down? You can calculate it if you know the values of all the variables that go into it. If you don't know all their values, does that mean the principle ceases to operate?
> Seems like a boogeyman to blame all manner of company ills on.
Not being responsible for 100% of all problems is not equivalent to being responsible for 0% of all problems.
> In practice, at the scale of short selling actually taking place, does it materially impact the price of Tesla shares? Is there even any way to know?
Right now >28% the TSLA float is sold short[0]. I can't imagine that not have an impact on the price.
Permitting and perpetuating this kind of myth-making is practically part of Elon's fiduciary duty to his shareholders at this point. You can't fault him for doing it, because he has to.
You have to admit though, based on comments all over any story about Tesla here at least, that it works as a bogeyman. The only other fiction that’s more powerful is that Musk does everything he does to send humanity to Mars, save the world, etc. Musk has a true talent for figuring out what his target audience wants to believe, and then selling it to them at a premium. Smart, technically minded people (key early adopters of Tesla) are desperate for a way to keep humanity going in the face of climate change, possible impact events, and so on. Musk more or less frames his rather mundane personal aggrandizement and money-making endeavors as lynchpins in just those areas. He helps to convince people who want to believe, that they can help save the world not through anything like sacrifice, but by buying stock or a luxury car!
They eat it up, and are enraged at people who scoff, and no one scoffs harder than someone who puts their money on a bet that the stock is overvalued. As a result the short is already a subject of hate, and perfect to pin all of the evils of the world on. It perpetuates a classic tribal narrative and dresses it up in just enough pseudo intellectual finery to convince a target audience which already wants to believe. As a bonus that audience thinks it’s too smart to be fooled that way, and above tribalism, making it easier to sell the story and harder for them to admit what they’ve fallen for.
Look at some of these comments, and you see the evidence of just what I’m talking about!
The law says a lot of things. I'm ok with short sellers losing their shirts regardless.
—
I also take the long view; Elon is instrumental to the long-term outcome for Tesla, our species, and our planet.
—
Because he made short sellers look like idiots? I think not. I just bought more.
—
SEC suing Elon Musk is , quite frankly one of the most abhorrent actions a US govt agency can ever do against genuine American Entrepreneurship and American innovative spirit. There is not a single human being on the planet who comes close to Elon Musk when it comes to big , bold innovation and tech entrepreneurship who is putting his heart and soul into leading the human race into the future.
—
you can’t disrupt or otherwise show up all of these players: the us/eu/russian/chinese space industries (and by extension the governments of china and russia), the oil industries of russia/saudi/usa, the major auto manufacturers, power companies, professional car and truck drivers, and the us dealership association (what am i forgetting), all of whom are politically very well connected, and some of whom have their hordes of paid shill internet commenters, and upvoting/downvoting bot nets (not that that would ever happen on hn (and if it would it’s against hn rules to suggest it)) and expect not to get trounced. elon might have fucked up by sending that tweet, but the response here, on reddit, and by the gov’t is way out of proportion, esp considering everything positive that this man has accomplished and is currently working on.
—
He didn’t screw anyone over. Wall street gamblers lost money, and our culture coddles Wall Street bros like helpless babies.
Traders who lost money wouldn’t have had the stock to trade without Elon in the first place!
—
The entire world will lose if Elon is forced out. He’s the biggest fighter for climate change and space travel in modern history, greater than Al Gore in marketing and execution, greater than Buzz Aldrin, Tyson, and cosmos. I’d much rather have an honest relatable Elon Musk than a suit. I’d rather have creativity than suffocating structure.
—
The subtext is that Elon intentionally bumped the stock price to screw over short sellers like Jim Chanos. But the rationale behind 10b5 is to protect investors from fraud. Right, we are not concerned with protecting short-sellers who spend all day on twitter making up negative stories about their targets.
—
The battery and solar operations side of TSLA are critical to spaceX's mission to Mars. Can't have a martian colony without being able to harvest and store energy. Additionally the CV being done at Tesla could prove critical in automating prefabrication of living spaces and life support infrastructure. Can't be doing anything like that remote controlled with 8 min latency.
—
What a joke, there are plenty of scumbag and criminal leaders of corporations and this is the guy who doesn't walk. It'll be a sad day for the world if this guy goes to jail.
—
I know where Elon comes from, what missions and goals he has stated for years now, and what he is trying to accomplish.
I promise you, Elon legitimately thought there would be an opportunity to go private again. He's said he wanted to do so in the past, and even has said they never wanted to go public, but were left with no choice. I don't think any part of Elon was trying to commit fraud or security manipulation. He made a mistake, we all do. He said something that should not have been said at that given point of time. I'm sure he was excited. He even said he typed that tweet in the car after leaving SpaceX.
Somethings are just not worth doing, regardless of whatever little virtue fight is at stake. Punish Musk and you handover the keys to the auto-industry kingdom to Germany and Japan on a platter.
You also risk scaring away, Musk like entrepreneurs to other countries. Emmanuel Macron wants to set up a SV competitor in France, and UK tops the world in quality universities. Germany too could put up a tough fight. Most of the world already has infrastructure to dethrone SVs dominance over creating high quality value and leadership. This is beyond countries like India and China having millions of super hungry entrepreneurs wanting to prove themselves.
Even if there is small chance of this happening, you risk losing trillions of dollars of future worth economy, talent, IP, ecosystem and culture to competing countries.
And all of this for what? A few overzealous prosecutors and short sellers on the market, all of whom are inconsequential and sometimes even a net negative to the economy.
In my country(India). Plenty of small to even large business people are known to indulge in blatant corrupt practices. Government does nothing because you rather have them at home, than compete with someone like them in a competing country.
Prosecuting Musk will make US Justice system win a tiny inconsequential virtue war, but it will be massive shooting in the foot at the country level.
No, I don't think all that negativism in the news about a company that is disrupting the automotive industry in less than 15 years, have a product that customers literally make lines to buy and they love it when they finally receive them are brought up by short sellers. I mean, who would not want a company like that to succeed? /sacarsm
From what I understand, and I'm sure I'm using the wrong terminology, they got loans to run the company using Tesla stock, and if the value dips below a certain amount, the loan terms say they need to be repaid with cash instead of stock.
> Shorting is selling? Selling to whom? Ah, right, a buyer.
A buyer who would otherwise have had to buy from a seller who wanted a higher price.
The stock price is really the value for which shares were most recently exchanged. If the price is $500, shares were exchanged for $500.
That isn't the same as what other people value the shares at, which is different for each person. The people who own shares value them at more than their market price (or they would sell) and the people who can afford but don't own shares value them less (or they would buy). Someone could own shares and value them at $600, so they wouldn't even sell at $550, meanwhile another owner values them at no more than $500.02, so they sell as soon as the price hits $500.02.
That's where the bid/ask spread comes from. The lowest seller values the shares at $500.02, the highest buyer values them at $499.98, so the seller keeps their shares and the buyer keeps their money, and the share price is still considered to be $500.00 because that's what the last actual sale went through as. To get another transaction either the seller or the buyer has to "cross the spread" and meet the other side's price and then the price goes up or down based on whether it was the buyer or the seller.
So what happens when someone makes a short sale? They borrow shares and cross the spread to sell for $499.98. Now the share price has gone down two cents. Moreover, the buyer willing to pay $499.98 now has their shares. The next highest bid is $499.97. If another short seller supplies that buyer with shares, the share price drops again and so does the bid price, because the previous high bid already has their shares. The more short sellers, the lower the sale price.
This is one of the reasons why short selling is frequently unprofitable. If you're not an early short seller, you're selling shares for $450 that all else equal would be worth $500 once the existing shorts close their positions, and at some point you have to buy them back. Which means to make money the company doesn't just have to lose value, it has to fail hard enough to prevent your profits from being erased by other shorts buying back shares to close their positions.
> Telsa share price has risen through extreme short interest for years. How?
If the share price would rise by $3 while short selling would cause it to decline by $1 then on net the price rises by $2, i.e. $1 less than it would have but still a positive value.
It doesn't sound like you understand how stock markets work.
A limit order doesn't necessarily get filled immediately, or at all.
If there is a lot more volume in sell orders than buy orders on the book, it is a buyer's market and price will go down. Inversely if there is more buy order volume, it is a seller's market, and price will go up.
I don't know if shorts have affected the price of Tesla significantly. This is really fact-specific and I didn't do the research. But the principle is sound.
Why do you say for SpaceX's sake? Would it not be great news for SpaceX that their CEO would be forced out of the other companies he's running, and thus almost has to focus most of his time on SpaceX?
"Shorting" a stock means selling it without owning it, essentially owning negative stock. You're betting that it will go down, and then when it does go down, you close your position by buying the stock (to get back to zero shares).
The risk in doing this is unlimited. If you short a stock at $100, and then it goes to $500, you've lost $400.
Your broker doesn't want to take liability for your loss if you're not able to cover it. So your broker will forcibly close your position for you.
Even if your broker doesn't close your position, you might do it yourself to stop losing money.
When a lot of people do this all at once, it's called a "short squeeze" as everyone who was short buys shares to close their short positions. It can make the price go up.
I don't follow Tesla's stock price, but Musk getting on Twitter saying something that could make the stock price go up could (and perhaps did) cause a short squeeze.
Shorting a stock means borrowing it and paying a fee for borrowing it. Then selling the borrowed stock and hoping when you buy it back it's worth less. If the borrower doesn't want his stock back and the price is too high for you, then you simply don't buy and continue to pay the fee.
So if you borrow stock for $100, maybe each year you pay a $5 fee, and sell it for $100. Considering there wouldn't be any transaction fees you would now have $95. If the price now rises to $500, you don't buy but continue to pay the $5. So it means you are only $90 ahead instead of $95. But you are not in the minus.
This is actually a really good deal for both the borrower and the short seller, which is why I bet there are lots of rules forbidding that and banks not actually doing it if you don't borrow a certain minimum size of a few million $. I don't know that, though. In theory you and I could do that game as well, if it's not illegal.
If you have > $400 to cover the difference, then yes, you could keep on holding the stock at $500.
But most people don't 'leverage' like that. So they either get spooked and cut their losses (before the price goes on to $1000) or their broker steps in and basically says: "either you show us that $400 or we sell before your bad judgement becomes ours."
Many investors (long or short) place what are called stop orders to protect their positions from steep losses.
For a long investor, you might buy a stock at $100, watch it go up to $150 and enter a sell-stop order at $130. That stop order has no effect so long as the price stays above $130. When/if the stock drops to $130, the order becomes a market order to sell out, protecting from further losses.
For a short seller, they might place a buy-stop order (at a price higher than the current price) to protect from disastrous runaway price to the high side. Those stops could have been triggered by the run-up after Musk's tweet.
I think it's quite interesting that the SEC is obviously in the right, but it brings to question whether or not broadly, the SEC serves the public good.
SEC suing Elon Musk is , quite frankly one of the most abhorrent actions a US govt agency can ever do against genuine American Entrepreneurship and American innovative spirit. There is not a single human being on the planet who comes close to Elon Musk when it comes to big , bold innovation and tech entrepreneurship who is putting his heart and soul into leading the human race into the future.
I love the work that Musk has done. Everyone has to play by the same rules though. We cannot bend the law because someone has otherwise done amazing work.
What they did might have been morally appalling, but much harder to pin as breaking a law. What Elon did was a blatant and highly public violation of regulations
Most of the root of the financial crisis was things that weren't illegal.
Poor lending standards and verification practices.
Financial institutions buying and selling complicated derivatives they should have understood but didn't.
Relying on ratings agencies to do a good job, when they didn't.
Relying on insurance that wasn't appropriately priced or capitalized to cover the risk.
There was some outright fraud in loan applications and foreclosures, which was prosecuted when there was sufficient evidence.
All of these stupid decisions and the resulting easy money distorted the housing market, and the results when it fell apart were painful, but bank execs don't have a legal duty to not engage in stupid endaevors or maintain the stability of our markets. On the other hand, officers of a public company do have a legal duty not to knowingly distribute misleading information about their company in order to manipulate the stock price.
Not an apples to apples comparison there, but even if it were; is your argument now that we should let Elon get away with breaking the law because others have gotten away with it in the past and you happen to respect Elon more than those people?
Personally I don't Musk had a choice. If he didn't do what he did then very likely Tesla would be bankrupt by now because of its debt obligations + short sellers. The short sellers counted on it. The choices he faced were go bankrupt and lose company or do this risky move and hope SEC lets you go with slap on the wrist.
He definitely lost it. And it's going to cost him. This is an open and shut case against Musk. He definitely sent out that tweet. Yes, maybe just not enough sleep and too many drugs. Not a good excuse.
Tesla might do better with a new CEO. They're past the vision stage. Tesla's problems today are all those of running a big auto plant.
Elon Musk has always had a disdain for the responsibility of running a public company, it seems perfectly reasonable that he tweet, in exasperation, that he wishes to make the company private. Why do so many people in this thread want the only guy making (rockets && green cars && batteries && solar && ...) to fail so badly? The guy smokes weed once on camera, now he's a witch and needs to be hunted down? We care about the wrong things.
In the US, you're not supposed to say anything publicly that can manipulate the stock price. For a person in Elon Musk's position, it is incredibly easy to drum up hype about a stock from a public media source (in this case, Twitter) then secretly sell off stock at the higher price causing it to dip further than it was at before. This is called pump and dumping and is very illegal in the United States (read up on The Great Depression and the stock crash of 1929 for more information).
> In the US, you're not supposed to say anything publicly that can manipulate the stock price
Not quite. You can't intentionally say things for the purpose of manipulating the price, you can still say things if they affect the price -- it is impossible not to, since every little thing a CEO does affects the price to some extent (econophysics?).
The lawsuit would have to prove that Musk tweeted with the intention of manipulating the price. Seeing as Musk has always been wary of being public, it seems unlikely he engineered the tweet to do this. Occam's Razor would suggest that he's getting sick and tired of being public (ironically, for this exact reason) and tweeted that he would rather just take it private to avoid this sort of drama.
Musk didn't say he wanted to take the company private, he said he wanted to AND that he had secured funding to do so at a specific price.
This is a clear statement of facts, something that would be entirely reasonable to trade based on. It also appears he knew this was a false statement, at best it was very reckless. I really don't see how you can defend this.
When your words make people gain or lose 9 or 10 digits of money in a matter of hours, they are taken very seriously.
And it seems likely that he did have the "intention of manipulating the price." He's gone on about price changes and annoying the short sellers quite a bit. He's not naive on this stuff.
Of course a CEO "manipulates" the stock with every other word. But the words, especially ones expected to greatly affect the stock price, have to be accurate. Investors would lose confidence in the market (and thus not invest, hurting the economy) if CEOs can do things like troll about buyouts. The SEC exists to protect against these shenanigans and is right to take action if Musk trolling is indeed the case.
Did you forget that this is only the SEC action and that the DOJ is also investigating? The DOJ has subpoena power… they can easily build a case by gathering witnesses, starting with the board of directors.
That’s not the bar for this case, since it’s civil. Proving negligence is enough, and the burden of proof is “preponderance of evidence”, not “presumption of innocence.”
I certainly don't want Tesla or SpaceX to fail. Nor do I want Elon to fail however he screwed up big time as the CEO of a major, public corporation and should be held accountable like everyone else. Celebrities, even ones trying to make the world a better place, shouldn't get a pass.
My personal opinion is Elon should find someone to run Tesla. He proved good electric cars can be built, but now we need someone to turn Tesla into Toyota to spread good electric cars to the masses. Given his behavior, missed manufacturing targets, etc I don't think he is the right person to do that. If the SEC wins, Elon being forced out may be a blessing in disguise.
> The guy smokes weed once on camera, now he's a witch and needs to be hunted down?
He sent out a tweet that had a major effect on the shares of a major company, representing billions of dollars to be lost and gained by a lot of people. That's a serious offense and there are laws about that.
It's not about weed, it's about stock price manipulation at the highest levels.
I care because he’s wrecking Tesla with dumb decisions that a bit of good advice would have fixed. Now he’s dragged his own company into unnecessary legal risk to soothe his own ego.
If you want Tesla to live, you would cheer about his immature ass being kicked out to the curb.
> it seems perfectly reasonable that he tweet, in exasperation, that he wishes to make the company private.
He's the CEO. That doesn't just mean he gets paid a lot and can do whatever he wants. He also has responsibilities to his investors and potential investors such as accurately reporting on the financial situation of the company. If he doesn't want this responsibility and prefers the freedom to vent on Twitter he should step down. After all, one of the reasons CEOs are so well compensated is the additional responsibilities the job (supposedly) entails. You can't have it both ways.
Edit: It's not a witch hunt to hold someone accountable for their actions in a position of power. No one forced Elon Musk to tweet misleading information that could affect the stock price. Given how intelligent he is, he should know better.
Honestly, I don't care if Musk succeeds or fails. However, I want Tesla to succeed and I think at this point Musk might not be the best candidate to figure out Tesla's problems.
They're maliciously envious - which is the product of an overly good self-image colliding with reality. They wish him harm because if he fails, he'll no longer remind them that that's how it looks like to actually achieve something.
Who are "they"? Anyway I can think of two parties: short sellers, who actively bet on Tesla shares losing value - and who are very likely behind all the negative press about Tesla, including making sure every accident a Tesla ends up in (especially if it's down to autopilot or involves fire or a death) stays in the news for weeks if possible.
The other would be competing car makers, who only now are starting to realize that electric cars are the future, except they're 5-10 years behind Tesla. I'm sure they'll catch up soon enough, given how they're much better at mass production than Tesla is atm, but they're way behind. Tesla will probably pivot to focus on their other endeavours - batteries (building the largest battery factory in the world), charging stations (building the largest charging station network in the world), green energy (solar panels and large scale battery storage), etc.
Short sellers and competitors have a financial reason to not like Musks success. Average Joe does not and still there are enough of them hating him and/or begruding his success. It's "them" that I was talking about.
1) Short sellers. Short selling, as opposed to simply investing in a stock, is something that requires significant resources to begin with. Take these people with resources and acumen, and now given them a multi billion dollar incentive to see Tesla fail. You create a major motivator for people to not only speak negatively but to do all they can to try to foster and drive negative sentiment towards the company and Musk. This group of people are the main reason Musk has a problem with short sellers. Shorting is not bad, but the twisted incentive structure created by substantial shorting is. This group is made doubly effective by the fact that Tesla has chosen to keep with the strategy of a $0 marketing budget.
2) Useful idiots or trolls who simply enjoy attacking people without much of any consideration for facts or data. These individuals are already ubiquitous on the internet and unknowingly work as tools for #1.
3) People who genuinely feel Tesla is not headed in the right direction and would do better with different leadership.
---
In my opinion, the largest group by far is #2 followed by #1, distantly followed by #3. The problem is that #2 is a really really big group. They almost certainly already outnumber, by far, the entire population of people that go out of their way to speak positively of Tesla. So you end up with a perceived mass negative sentiment, even when in reality it's not really supported at all. E.g. - recently there was a motion to find a different CEO and it was voted down by an 83.5% margin. Another issue here is that Musk has decided to point out the awful behavior the media, which has also turned them against him. For instance on that vote I mentioned, reuters instead of reporting the result chose to run an article, "BlackRock voted to replace Tesla's Musk with independent chairman" with the numbers given, without percentages, in the article body. [1]
Without Musk, Tesla loses enormous value attributed to future projects which people believe “only Musk can accomplish”. Any other leader (except maybe Cook or Bezos) making the claims he does about production ramps, solar tiles, electric semi trucks, fully autonomous cars paying for themselves as a taxi, colonizing Mars, etc. would be met with at best skepticism and at worst outright derision.
Nobody of any importance should have the confidence to write and publish teams of their own. Shareholders for public companies should be very clear about this, that neither they nor the CEO nor any senior executive is allowed to make any statements regarding the company without going through a legal team and / or advisors.
I suggest you re-read the headline. Elon is fantastic in some ways and terrible in others. He really needs to - quickly - get some self control or it will end badly. What do you think are the chances of Gwynne Shotwell tweeting SpaceX into the gutter or wrecking its reputation by getting into a tiff with a guy trying to rescue a bunch of kids?
> What do you think are the chances of Gwynne Shotwell tweeting SpaceX into the gutter or wrecking its reputation by getting into a tiff with a guy trying to rescue a bunch of kids?
This comparison is an excellent point illustrating just how far off of the baseline Musk has already drifted.
>What do you think are the chances of Gwynne Shotwell tweeting SpaceX into the gutter or wrecking its reputation by getting into a tiff with a guy trying to rescue a bunch of kids?
Low, but we also know that the chances of her starting a company like SpaceX wouldn't have been nearly as high either since she didn't.
I think HN's ire isn't based on him being a "terrible CEO"; it's anger toward the hubris of what is seen as someone who thinks the rules don't apply to them.
being a good CEO at the beginning isn't the same as being good CEO farther down the line. That's what most people are saying on this topic. It's possible that elon is great at starting companies, but maybe not "finishing" them.
It's not. They have to prove intent. Musk didn't make any transactions while the stock was on the rise, so intent (which is hard to prove) and benefit (which can't be proven) are both a huge problem with this case. He deserves the lawsuit, but this is just to force his hand on a deal.
Intent doesn’t matter here, the SEC is alleging negligence (read the actual complaint). Remember that this is a civil case, not a criminal one.
Second is that he’s being accused of securities fraud, not insider trading. So the SEC doesn’t actually need to prove that he benefited, only that rules were broken.
The SEC is alleging he broke rule 10b-5, which says that the defrauding actions must be "in connection with the purchase or sale of any security".
The SEC complaint doesn't seem to allege negligence at all, in the claim for relief it says 'Defendant, with scienter' which definitely does not imply negligence.
The complaint alleges that the statements were made in connection with the sale of securities but I don't really understand where that comes from.
Anything that effects price is connected with the selling of securities. In fact, his very statement was equivalent to "Buy now, and make an easy $420 per share!", and people did actually purchase the stock.
At this point his biggest goal should be avoiding prison, which with the DOJ investigation and the sheer stupidity of his actions is very much on the table.
> Although having initially received a sentence of sixteen years, she was required to serve only nineteen months in prison and two months under house arrest.
> Milken was sentenced to ten years in prison, fined $600 million, and permanently barred from the securities industry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His sentence was later reduced to two years for cooperating with testimony against his former colleagues and for good behavior
How common is that for the common person? I'm not arguing that it isn't, I'm just not sure.
How many billionaires publically break the law in the way that Musk did, and put themselves in the position to risk jail? How many billionaires are there to begin with?
Yea he’ll join all the other billionaires in jail. I would say he looks pretty guilty of fraud but agree he will never see a cell, just heavy fines. And spaceX may survive without him but losing musk would suck a ton of wind out of their sails.
My understanding is that his imprisonment was questionable though, no?
> charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001
I'm not so sure, one of the other space companies could start poaching talent and there's no way they can continue the government contracts with a huge loss of critical staff.
SpaceX is an extremely desirable company to work at, it's more NASA than NASA. Even without Musk that would remain the case. Talent squeeze is not a risk IMO.
Yep. Musk is looking at possible insider trading charges. The DOJ will absolutely throw a rich guy in federal prison for that since the damage to the economy can be enormous.
He may have not insider traded but market manipulation is also a crime. It is on record that Elon was looking to hurt short sellers and making materially false statements about the company can be easily argued to be a criminal act used to do so.
SEC Act - Sec 9(a)2
It is unlawful... or raising or depressing the price of such security, for the
purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of such security by others.
The SEC complaint claims that "Musk knew or was reckless in not knowing that each of these statements was false
and/or misleading because he did not have an adequate basis in fact for his assertions."
That's good to know -- I think, based on some random article I read a month ago or so, he can beat that charge, because he had concrete knowledge about the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund being interested in helping take Tesla private.
Again, I could be wrong, and I really wish I could remember where I found that article...
He also went on to say a number of things that his board advised were probably impossible, such as bringing all investors along with him if Tesla went private.
In the US, you're not supposed to say anything publicly that can manipulate the stock price. For a person in Elon Musk's position, it is incredibly easy to drum up hype about a stock from a public media source (in this case, Twitter) then secretly sell off stock at the higher price causing it to dip further than it was at before. This is called pump and dumping and is very illegal in the United States (read up on The Great Depression and the stock crash of 1929 for more information).
IMHO, If Elon musk were a chinese entrepreneur, the Govt would be more than happy to fund him and allow him to focus on what he is good at, innovate the hell out!!! SEC should answer the American people first on why it failed to hold any bank exec accountable for the worst financial crisis of our time that brought the world to an economic collapse.. double standards ?? https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/finance/309544-why-ha...
China's had a round over the last few years of prosecutions of big shots, including high-level officers of successful companies, for financial irregularities. See, e.g.,
There are complicating factors in figuring out whether any particular person would be a target of this sort of prosecution (in some cases, the real issue is likely failure to toe the Party line) -- but the idea that the Chinese government turns a blind eye toward this sort of thing generally is, at the very least, oversimplified and out of date.
Surely the law should apply no matter how “innovative” your company is. Yes, the SEC should also be held responsible for its failure to go after banks, but this is not mutually exclusive with action against Tesla.
Ok , so you agree that in theory its the same, but in practice it isnt ? Bcoz i havent seen/read/heard anything so far even after a decade that any action is taken or any one under investigation for the 2008 crisis... where as one tweet a few days ago from Elon is enough time to go after him !! Sounds very selective !!! Also, IMHO, just as US govt announced auto bailout in 2008, they should announce one more bail out not just for Tesla but all US auto companies working on next gen innovative tech especially focussed on creating US jobs as the recent tariffs (from all sides) can have -ve impact on US jobs (those building auto plants outside USA) /US consumers. SEC can leave Elon alone with a warning /small fine. They shouldnt be dictating who should be CEO or who shouldnt. Elon is a job creator !!
Of all weird things he did, that tweet felt the less induced by mean emotions (unlike the issues with soccer team rescue). I believe he was angry at people using the system to see someone doing his best to make a good thing. Sad.
I think there's a bit of overexcitement going on in this thread; it doesn't look to me like Musk is going to jail on this one.
This part is interesting:
> The SEC had crafted a settlement with Musk that it was preparing to file Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Musk’s lawyers called SEC lawyers to say they were no longer interested in proceeding with the agreement, it said.
If his lawyers had a settlement lined up, and then retracted it, that means that they are confident they can win a better outcome in court. The deal they were going to cut did not involve Musk going to jail, so the outcome that Musk's expensive lawyers are betting on by retracting the settlement presumably also doesn't involve that.
> If his lawyers had a settlement lined up, and then retracted it, that means that they are confident they can win a better outcome in court.
It only means that the decision was made to risk a worse outcome in court in hopes of getting a better one. Musk is famously willing to take big risks and make big decisions himself, so it’s possible that his lawyers do not have such confidence and recommended taking the settlement.
It’s also possible that he sees this as the only chance to retain control of the company, which would be such a bad outcome that he feels he must do anything to avoid it.
Part of the deal was that he step down as CEO. I think that was not acceptable to him. Ultimately, I believe he will lose. A strong operator to handle traditional car company problems will make TSLA sky rocket
Faber just said on CNBC the settlement was couldn't be chairman for 2 years, add a couple independent directors, and pay a personal fine. I initially heard "step down"... But it seems just from the board for a couple years
He was trying to bankrupt the short-sellers, and he was doing it by lying: the price would soar, their options would be called, and they'd lose their shirts, all for a lie. When you're head of a public company, that's a crime. Not only will the SEC come after him, but the short sellers can probably sue him too. I have huge respect for his engineering ability, but he has messed up badly. He's overextended and it seems his conduct lately shows that he's melting down from overwork.
I don't think personal fortune is anywhere near as significant of a motivation for Musk as the public image of his companies or their success. I have no doubt that he let negative headlines get under his skin, and that he wanted to fight back.
If he was angered by the haters, then - while tanking a couple near term shorts would serve that goal - the best most final and bold way to get back at them would be to take the company private (thereby depriving them of the opportunity to short) and succeeding (thus proving them wrong and depriving them of the opportunity to later bandwagon). Ie he meant what he said about his intentions & funding.
I think he also really wanted to do that, but I think he couldn't wait to announce it with a more concrete deal in hand because of the reasons I outlined above.
> He's overextended and it seems his conduct lately shows that he's melting down from overwork.
I agree completely. Elon Musk is a remarkable person, but he's still human. He's ignoring the science around performance, mental health, and the need for rest at his own peril.
Edit: It's also an alarming sign that Elon Musk has not been able to solve this problem by finding people whose judgement he trusts to take on some of his responsibilities. Even Steve Jobs, someone who had a reportedly huge ego, was able to build a team he could entrust his legacy to.
A lot of longs loaded up on Tesla shares because they believed his "funding secured" tweet. Are you OK with them losing their shirts, too? Because many of them did.
I didn’t load up on Tesla shares when Elon tweeted about Ambien, self driving advancements, or software updates coming any day now, so why would I take him seriously about going private?
The route for going private was to stop trading the shares, meaning I would never make good on that profit. Because ceasing trading is what going private means: I no longer hold stock at $420/share, I hold stock in Tesla which I might be able to sell to someone some day for some as yet unspecified amount.
"long" is a misleading label for someone buying for the purpose of being immediately bought out.
Also someone that bought stock in that period would have lost something like 355->320 which is only 10%.
If someone leveraged up to take advantage of a short-term pricing condition then they get vastly reduced sympathy no matter which direction their position was.
The context is a lack of sympathy for short sellers, and to me seems to be about betting in the near term vs. holding.
The platonic long purchase is based on holding, and the question is structured as if it's following that same dichotomy, but it describes a bet that is in fact long while also based on near-term betting.
That's why in-context I think it is both technically correct and misleading, and the question should have been phrased differently.
But whether I should have said "dichotomy" instead of "misleading" still has nothing to do with the actual substance of the discussion...
I am. There is inherent risk with investing. Buying up stock because of a tweet by the ceo who was "thinking about" (even if he did have funding secured) isn't the most sound financial decision IMO.
The book The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, details Musk's time at Paypal and pretty much describes him as an eventual hindrance rather than a help. He was eventually ousted from the company. Peter Thiel was the one that was able to nurse the company to success.
He was vital to get the company started but eventually, he was difficult to work with. Looks to me that history repeats itself. He's a great visionary but that does not translate to a great CEO.
He needs to get a new CEO at Tesla and focus on another company where I'm sure he'll make a great impact. He truly has great vision but the everyday minutia of running a company probably irritates and bores him.
I can only think of Elon as the only person to create THREE multi billion dollar companies in wildly different industries.
Elon is a fantastic CEO AND visionary. I personally know people who could be making double specifically work at spacex because they believe in his vision. Elon is able to get Supreme talent and productivity for pennies on the dollar. He’s able to market Tesla and spaceX to billions with such a positive favoriability unlike anything we’ve ever seen. SpaceX and Tesla don’t have a marketing budget because of Elon. Car companies spend billions marketing, Elon tweets saving billions for Tesla which he reinvests in r&d.
The entire world will lose if Elon is forced out. He’s the biggest fighter for climate change and space travel in modern history, greater than Al Gore in marketing and execution, greater than Buzz Aldrin, Tyson, and cosmos. I’d much rather have an honest relatable Elon Musk than a suit. I’d rather have creativity than suffocating structure.
Elon is a great CEO. I would pick him over almost anyone alive.
Unless you have worked with Musk you shouldn't be making these claims. I personally haven't but I know people who have and they tell me its mixed bag. Very passionate but if he gets a bad idea then you are screwed. Many of his various blunders include the way he insisted Tesla self driving stack should look like and how entire factory should be human-free. Both of those decisions have cost in range of 100s of millions of dollars. This is not to say he hasn't made decisions that has brought in billions of dollars.
Well he turned Tesla into a multi billion dollar behemoth in a short time and revolutionized the electric car industry. He didn’t create Tesla but he did “create” Tesla the billion dollar company.
PayPal is more complicated agreed. Elon’s portion of it might be a billion due to inflation? But regardless he set the basis for it.
The biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance goes into more detail for those curious. It's based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Elon and those close to him — including family, friends, co-workers, etc. And Elon wasn't allowed to read it until it was published.
>"We need him in this world to save us from ourselves."
He can't even save himself from his own bad impulses. This whole fiasco being a case in point among many. What an absurd statement to make. Speak for yourself.
He seems smart, but toxic. These "revolutionary" companies run by "brilliant" CEOs tend to chew people up and spit them out because they're less important than the company mission.
It might be somewhat important for morale that he remains CEO. So many people are rooting for the very idea of Elon Musk that it's probably what holds spacex and tesla together.
I very much hate to see this. Not for Musk's sake, as he has been pretty much asking for something like this to happen. I hate it because of the damage it will do to Tesla and SpaceX when he's likely banned from leading a company.
Tesla's not exactly lighting the world on fire in terms of potential long term success, but SpaceX really has been doing well in recent years. The fact that they are already refurbishing solid rocket boosters is a BIG deal. Losing a CEO is a very turbulent thing, and this will only set back their progress towards affordable space flight. I hope both companies are already grooming a suitable replacement.
> I hate it because of the damage it will do to Tesla and SpaceX when he's likely banned from leading a company.
He would only be banned from leading a public company; SpaceX is still private (and, heck, maybe he could realize his plan of taking Tesla private, too.)
I was surprised to see someone dealing with export restricted technology and secret clearance launch missions smoke mj on the podcast. I know for a fact they're still relatively zero tolerance about that.
So US interests could be harmed by damage to an important US company, itself entirely due to backwards US drug policies? I don't think Musk is the problem in that case...
Still stupid of him to break it publicly even if the law is stupid. But even stupider is the recreational use of Ambien and wine, which is a legitimate security risk.
It obviously is. Countless billions of dollars wasted and millions deprived of their freedom for what? Prohibition will go down in history as one of the biggest mistakes of our time.
Obama, the then Candidate, publicly admitted he "inhaled". People voted for him and made him the President. Elon on a show smoked once and explicitly said it is not productive and he never smokes weed at all. Some how it is a topic of discussion every where and he lost his mind and what not. Double standards !
It would be a double standard if Obama chose to broadcast illegal drug use to millions of people to score some internet points while holding a security clearance.
Tesla is not without challenges, but I am very happy with the products they have delivered thus far, and if I could afford them I would have a model x and s.
I see this sentiment a lot but the reality is not only are the cars that they have delivered good but I think their safety ratings are top notch. I am not sure I want a 'regular car company ceo' I do not think they would have delivered in the way Tesla as a company has.
From all the stories in the last year it seems like if you took a regular car company CEO they would’ve been delivering faster with better build quality. Perhaps service times wouldn’t be so atrocious either.
Or rain wouldn’t cause bumpers to fall off.
Tesla’s tech is pretty top-notch (excluding auto pilot which I have doubts about).
I think their ability to build cars is questionable.
If you took a regular car company CEO, Tesla would be building hybrids and selling through dealerships and charging for map updates and providing atrocious media software and generally not doing any of the things that makes them interesting.
Not sure though. SpaceX is a federal contractor. And to be at the helm of a company with federal access, you might need a clean record. When Musk was smoking pot on radio, the AirForce had to look into it to see if there was any actions they needed to take.
You don't want to have to go hat in hand to the Russians for RD-180 engines to launch your national security payloads (which the Russians specifically won't sell their engines to US integrators for [1] [2]), or waste $100 million more on an unnecessary Delta launch (vs Atlas). Better to ignore a minor infraction.
Ahh, my mistake. I was unaware that the SEC does not have pull over privately held companies, or at least their employees. Still, the wave of litigation headed Musk's way can't help matters. He's going to be very busy.
> the SEC does not have pull over privately held companies
I'm not sure this is accurate. The SEC could try to bar someone from serving as CEO or a director of any corporation. It's just never attempted that. The SEC regulates everyone who touches securities, and private companies issue securities.
This ban, however, specifically restricts itself to public companies. The issue is therefore moot.
I'd like to think Shotwell et. al already have a pretty well established convention as to how much Musk is allowed to intervene directly in operation and decision-making.
He can pretend that he knows better than automotive engineers but I think his self-awareness is better calibrated when it comes to rocketry.
He definitely has a lot of say when it comes to the technical details of rocket design. Mueller told the story about how on Merlin engine he insisted on utilizing fluid Dynamics to control the fuel instead of using valves, when everyone else disagreed, and the idea worked really well. And you know that there is no way Musk can fire Mueller and keep SpaceX so he doesn't need to brown nose Musk.
Musk wasn't a founding member of Tesla. In fact, not all of the founders of Tesla were big fans of Musk's hire.
Your point is valid though, and I do think someone could go in there and take over his job effectively. That doesn't mean there won't be a period of relative instability while that transition takes place.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla. Elon Musk joined the board as part of their Series A a year later, and then became the CEO a few years after that.
That's because after he took over complete control he retroactively titled himself a “founder” even though he was not, in fact, involved in founding the company (he was the leading funder of their Series A, and has been the main stockholder since then, but “funder” and “founder” aren't the same thing.)
Musk may be brilliant, but he's got a long history of a slippery relationship with the truth.
Does anyone else find it amazing that these days social media posts are becoming official government documentation? Who would've thought that the very platforms where we once just shared pictures of cats are starting to run our our elections and stock markets.
> 13. On November 5, 2013, Tesla publicly filed a Form 8-K with the Commission stating that it intended to use Musk’s Twitter account as a means of announcing material information to the public about Tesla and its products and services and has encouraged investors to review the information about Tesla published by Musk via his Twitter account.
>Musk’s Twitter account as a means of announcing material information to the public about Tesla and its products and services
I do not understand why he did not hire a PR firm to run his Twitter given the high stakes of each of his tweets. This is really bad judgement on his part.
That might be technical protection, however the way the SEC gets access to mails is not on a technical level, but by sending out a letter "please send us all your mails on that topic" and if the response on such a request is not convincingly consistent you get into even more trouble.
This. At Toyota corporate, we had a meeting with a lawyer and the lawyer instructed in the event of an investigation (e.g. bad floor mats), provide all of the emails and documents. Make everything easily searchable, and keep emails for 3-4 years. People think that hiding evidence from your lawyer makes things better but according to the lawyer, it actually hurts the case by not being able to have information. So save everything! The Toyota I.T. department must’ve heard something different because outlook now erases all emails older than 90 days.
Your IT department probably is likely to follow a document retention policy relating to archiving emails (an archive you don't get access to).
Your document retention policy should be included in your onboarding training and accessible to all staff, not doing this would cause all kinds of compliance problems.
The SEC is not going after protonmail, but your company. They use legal powers against you. They don't care about technicalities. (Except on the delivery channel for the Gigabytes of data) If you don't comply, they put charges on you.
I think it's odd that these powerful technologies are not taken more seriously and incorporated into society more quickly. It just shows how slowly society thinks and adjusts.
Are there any previous examples of someone doing something similar to what Musk did and the punishments they received? I don't normally follow SEC cases, but this seems like a pretty extreme potential punishment compared to the slap on the wrist that many people were predicting.
> Are there any previous examples of someone doing something similar to what Musk did and the punishments they received?
If you look at the facts of what Musk did...yes, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of examples, and they mostly go to jail or face, as Musk is, stiff civil penalties. It's pretty clearly fraud; he made false statements, which he knew or should have known were false, and he did so with the intention of manipulating his firm's share price. That's open and shut, and Musk hasn't really tried to deny it.
> compared to the slap on the wrist that many people were predicting.
If you squint a bit, there's a lot of reasons why what Musk did "feels" different. Maybe you think he had good intentions; maybe you think he was stressed. Maybe he was on medication that interfered with his cognitive abilities, maybe he's just a great guy, maybe the fact he wasn't financially profiting from the fraud makes it different, maybe Tesla is just really cool, maybe short sellers are just really unsympathetic, maybe this somehow just doesn't "count". All of those are plausible reasons why the SEC might give him at least a partial pass, and a lot of commenters were sort of expecting that it would happen.
But fundamentally, the legal system says that what he did actually is really bad. CEOs of public companies who lie about material events in order to manipulate their share price are committing a serious crime, which is why outside of penny stocks and scammers, they never do that. Even if they were tempted, their legal team would tackle them and sit on them until the urge to set their career and company on fire faded, and the legal team would have the opportunity to do that because other CEOs don't just tweet whatever occurs to them, in large part because they know that's super dangerous, because this exact thing could happen.
It's hard to overstate how unusual Tesla and Musk's behaviour here is for a multi-billion dollar company. Other companies of this size only communicate to investors through carefully vetted press releases, which is boring, but makes sure they don't accidentally step on a landmine. Tesla (or Musk) chose a different path, and here we are.
Yes. SEC litigation releases, press releases, report major updates to cases including the resolution. Here is a Google search for "prohibited acting officer", the key legal phrase/keywords, on the relevant section of the SEC website.
I was asking what the punishment is for similar crimes and that isn't the same as asking for what crimes have caused a similar punishment. I looked through the first few results on that page and they all seemed, in my opinion, to be more severe crimes than what Musk is accused of doing.
Add "misleading" to the search and the first few results seem similar to what Elon did. Making public, false, and misleading statements to investors is something the SEC gets pretty upset about.
>In its August 28, 2012 Complaint, the Commission alleged that, between 2005 and 2008, Wwebnet, Inc., a video software company, and Kelly made false and misleading statements and omissions to investors, including...
The accusations there are repeated and occurred over the course of several years. Musk has been accused of a single case of wrong doing. Musk's seems to be a much lesser crime. Also by still including the punishment in that search you are missing any similar accusations that received lesser or more severe punishments.
The answer to your original question is "yes". The SEC does not like when CEOs make misleading statements even once. All I did is point you in the right direction. I am not going to go through 100s of cases to find something that is exactly like the Elon Musk case for you. You are welcome to change the Google search yourself.
You are obviously under no obligation to do research to answer my question. I wasn't expecting anyone to spend time reviewing hundreds of cases to answer my question. I frankly don't care enough about the answer to review hundreds of cases myself. I simply proposed a question towards anyone who is more familiar with SEC punishments than I am. However, if you are going to answer my question I think it is fair for me to debate the validity of that answer.
I'm perplexed how Musk could act without thinking of the consequences? Now I fear that he will be banned from SpaceX as well, when you are convicted of fraud by SEC, it will impact your duties at other companies.
It takes decades to build a reputation but it can be destroyed overnight with a single tweet.
> It takes decades to build a reputation but it can be destroyed overnight with a single tweet.
To be more accurate it was a series of Tweets, each expanding the narrative and doubling down on the original statement:
- "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"
- "My hope is all current investors remain with Tesla even if we’re private. Would create special purpose fund enabling anyone to stay with Tesla. Already do this with Fidelity’s SpaceX investment."
- "Def no forced sales. Hope all shareholders remain. Will be way smoother & less disruptive as a private company. Ends negative propaganda from shorts."
- "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote."
The guy hasn't been sleeping and short sellers had essentially all but cornered him to the extent he would go bankrupt. I don't blame him too much except that he hasn't got his #2 with whom he can vent out, calm down and strategize. Gates had Ballmer, Page has Brin, Zuck has Sanders. Who does Musk has? Not acquiring #2 is his single biggest failure.
Not only is it a private company, but "A Musk trust owns 54 percent of the outstanding stock of SpaceX, and has voting control of 78 percent of the outstanding shares....No other shareholder owns 10 percent or more." Short of a criminal conviction I think he'll be fine with SpaceX.
Given that Musk has made his point with electric cars and major luxury brands are starting to push hard in that direction, it might not be terrible if Musk were to step down from Tesla, get some sleep, and focus on getting us to Mars.
The battery and solar operations side of TSLA are critical to spaceX's mission to Mars. Can't have a martian colony without being able to harvest and store energy. Additionally the CV being done at Tesla could prove critical in automating prefabrication of living spaces and life support infrastructure. Can't be doing anything like that remote controlled with 8 min latency.
I'm going to have to correct you on the solar part, Solar City is a dud. I was listening to a podcast and it was said that Solar City's acquisition would be Tesla's undoing. I think that's Musk's biggest concern, not so much the $420 tweet but the fact that scrutiny directed at the Solar City acquisition that will land Musk in serious trouble.
Allegedly, ex-Solar Cities are saying they were told to fake sales. Quoth the Raven podcast first brought it to attention but now that the SEC investigation is starting, it will be a matter of time before Musk is under the gun, this time with serious jail time, if the allegations hold true.
Tesla is not the only provider of batteries and solar panels, and could sell them to SpaceX even if Musk isn't the CEO of Tesla. There is some technology sharing between the companies, but even that could continue. Lots of companies collaborate without sharing a CEO.
(Incidentally, a Mars colony could also use NASA's new fission reactor designed for space missions. It's likely that NASA will be deeply involved in the effort anyway.)
> The battery and solar operations side of TSLA are critical to spaceX's mission to Mars.
What stops them from buying off-the-shelf commodities? Why the NIH? Didn't they, to much nerd fanfare, famously make all of TSLA's patents public two years ago? What stops them from sourcing these components from someone else?
Haven’t you been following the news at all? It’s called “rich white male privilege”. The person occupying the White House exemplifies it. Inauguration day was tough for many parents; lots of people didn’t know how to explain to their kids how such a person could get to the highest office in the land.
Rich isn't even necessary part of it. Musk, as well as many other people in the news, exemplify white cis male privilege. If a female or non-white CEO did half the shit Musk has done, she'd be out. Look how Marissa Mayer was vilified online despite doing nothing really out of the ordinary.
As I said nine days ago in this box and was roundly downvoted therefor: "Good chance that Musk will get placed on the bad actors list and will be unable to serve as an officer or executive of Telsa." What I don't understand is how this took 10% of the price of Tesla shares. How is it possible that this event, which was a 100% certainty, was not already baked into the price?
I think most people thought Musk would get off with a fine. For a company partially driven by a cult of personality (at the very least given a significant benefit of the doubt). That hope was diminished and without Musk the entire company will be perceived differently.
The outcome wasn't 100% certain? There was supposed to be a settlement, presumably milder in sanctions, but then Musk said no thanks. The share price reflected the possibility that Musk might play nice. Now he won't; now it doesn't.
Almost everyone except you has been surprised so that should give you a clue. The Bayesian probabilities are all relative :). If you did believed 100% then you should have shorted the hell out of that stock. But you didn't so my guess is that even for you it was more like 90%.
"The suit seeks an order from a judge barring Musk from serving as an officer or director of a public company, a request often made in SEC lawsuits, as well as unspecified monetary penalties."
Does this imply that they want to remove him from being CEO and from the board of directors?
Why? He's a huge liability to the company every day he remains with this hanging over his head. The SEC directly says he "violated, and unless restrained and enjoined will continue to violate, Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act". Other than a fine, they're pushing for him to be barred from serving as an officer of a public company.
Well it also rarely goes to filing a lawsuit against the CEO... So I guess who knows, but if I was on the board I'd be reading the D&O insurance policy quite closely.
Every fund that tracks the Nasdaq 100 (which includes $TSLA) would sell out of $TSLA when it was de-listed from Nasdaq (and therefore form the Nasdaq 100).
There's less financial wreckage created from replacing the CEO, IMO.
The only countries I could see Tesla moving to, if this plan is followed, are China, Russia, and North Korea. Obviously lawsuits would be the least of their problems if this occurred.
I don't believe so. I have been a Tesla owner and investor for a long time now. I know where Elon comes from, what missions and goals he has stated for years now, and what he is trying to accomplish.
I promise you, Elon legitimately thought there would be an opportunity to go private again. He's said he wanted to do so in the past, and even has said they never wanted to go public, but were left with no choice. I don't think any part of Elon was trying to commit fraud or security manipulation. He made a mistake, we all do. He said something that should not have been said at that given point of time. I'm sure he was excited. He even said he typed that tweet in the car after leaving SpaceX.
Should he be fined? That is up to the SEC.
Will I and many other investor lose trust in what Elon's mission is? Absolutely not.
> I promise you, Elon legitimately thought there would be an opportunity to go private again.
That's cool and all. And that's probably why the DoJ case will fail (at least, I'm betting that the DoJ case will turn up nothing).
But this is the SEC: they only have to prove recklessness or negligence. That Musk was NEGLIGENT in his ability to properly vet the information before tweeting.
In particular:
> Musk knew or was reckless in not knowing that each of these statements was false and/or misleading because he did not have an adequate basis in fact for his assertions.
As a CEO, his responsibility is to report on the news of the company to his investors in a responsible manner. If Musk is negligent and/or reckless about the facts, then that is ALONE sufficient to have him removed from the position.
That's the thing about this SEC case. They do not have to prove scienter (criminal knowledge of wrongdoing) or malice. They only have to prove recklessness or negligence.
EDIT: Upon further review, paragraph 79 claims that Elon Musk has scienter of these events. So the SEC is in fact claiming that Elon Musk deliberately knew that making these statements were wrong, and did it anyway. This is above and beyond "reckless" or "negligent" !!
I find it hilarious that intent is under doubt. Somehow people have forgotten "short burn off the century". If shorts squeeze did happen, there would be cheering everywhere.
Personally, I don't doubt intent. But "Beyond a reasonable doubt", as well as the necessity for a "malice" in the DoJ's case makes me think that... the DoJ has way too hard of a case to pull together.
I mean, I might be proven wrong. But... showing off a couple of rage tweets in court to prove malice doesn't seem plausible to me. Would a Jury of 12 (and remember: all 12 have to agree) be convinced over a couple of "who likes short-shorts" tweets?
If a SINGLE jury member, 1 out of the 12, disagrees, then you get a hung case aka a mistrial. As per the rules of the DoJ investigation anyway. That's why I don't think the DoJ will go anywhere, because proof and evidence is at a way harder standard in a criminal case.
Au contraire - I think what's more fascinating about this is Musk's personal branding, which apologists like you have bought into. Just hear me out.
I mean, insiders and the SEC clearly know he didn't have an offer to go private on the table when he announced. With Musk's pattern of behavior on twitter recently (pedophile name-calling, weed gifs, etc.) it's much more likely that he was reacting to the short sellers that got under his skin, rather than making a calm, confident announcement of acquisition as you say. When Musk's team finally scrambled together an offer after the announcement, Musk rejected it outright because he was paranoid about Volkswagen [1], a manufacturer that would have helped solve Tesla's scaling problems.
There's always going to be short sellers. There are not always going to be CEOs who let them get under their skin or let hubris in the way of business.
> I promise you, Elon legitimately thought there would be an opportunity to go private again.
According to the hard facts the SEC is presenting this is patently false, there was absolutely no reason for Musk to "legitimately" think that.
> even has said they never wanted to go public, but were left with no choice.
Also just not even close to true. Elon would have been canned and Tesla would have been bankrupt by now if they didn't go public. If by "left with no choice" means "structured the company so that only a public IPO could sustain it and allow for the path he wanted" then I guess you're right?
That's not going to happen unless the sales stop growing. As things are right now, they still can't make their vehicles fast enough. Demand is outstripping supply.
Until that changes, investors will overlook a lot.
You sound a bit like Doctor Strange here. Sure he's made some bold moves intended to steer us toward a better future, but the fate of civilization does not rest on his shoulders.
Unless we make him President. Don't make him President.
The fate of civilization depends on the individuals that share his trait - the trait to desire most strongly a bountiful and amazing future - knowing that they will be able to successfully build companies such as Tesla and SpaceX without ruthless persecution by the government, the media, and short sellers.
This is a serious deal. The rest of the year is going to be a real test for Tesla! It'll be real interesting to see if they can rebound from this.
I wonder if the Tesla board is thinking of doing an Uber and replace Musk with a more calmer executive! Wouldn't be surprised if he gets fired after this.
> I wonder if the Tesla board is thinking of doing an Uber and replace Musk with a more calmer executive! Wouldn't be surprised if he gets fired after this.
I would be. They have stood by him so far, this isn't going to push them over the edge. Besides, who would they replace him with?
If the SEC fines him, he'll pay the fine and get on with his life.
Part of being a visionary CEO is making choices that other people don't like, and sticking with them. As a janitor, you can suggest all you want, but unless you're on the Board, you can't force things through (unless you rely on backchannel bribery or coercion or other unsavory means).
>According to Musk, he calculated the $420 price per share based on a 20% premium over that day’s closing share price because he thought 20% was a “standard premium” in going-private transactions. This calculation resulted in a price of $419, and Musk stated tha the rounded the price up to $420 because he had recently learned about the number’s significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend “would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price.”
That way he can argue it was a joke that no reasonable investor would have relied upon.
I smoke pot regularly, and hold a non-trivial position in TSLA. My first thought was most definitely not, "heh, heh, funny pot reference, bro." My first thought honestly was, "well, he wouldn't say it if it weren't true, because the SEC will haul him off." So I don't know about your reasonable investor theory.
I'm curious, does "reasonable" actually matter in a case like this? Say he tweeted "I just killed someone LOL" and the stock price drops. Could that also be construed as misleading investors?
The SEC needs to prove he made a “materially” false and misleading statement. The Supreme Court has defined a “material” fact for purposes of the securities laws to mean that there is:
> a substantial likelihood that the...fact would have been viewed by the reasonable investor as having significantly altered the “total mix” of information made available.
If a statement is an obvious joke, no reasonable investor could have viewed it as altering the mix of relevant information.
Could the SEC use as evidence the fact that the price went up post-tweet, and down after Tesla recanted? That is arguably objective evidence of reasonable investors taking his tweet as a material fact to their trading strategies (i.e. by buying stock).
Yes. Its not dispositive, because “reasonable” is a legal abstraction (so it admits the possibility that there are unreasonable investors who don’t get the joke), but it’s evidence.
Apple's first Apple I sold for $666.66 [1]. Teslas are Model S, Model 3, Model X, (S3X). Model E was taken so they had to go with Model 3. Possibly a Model Y coming (S3XY).
People can have fun at work still, though shorts and MBA C-level execs that want to take over the company and drive it into the ground, milking the innovations without innovating for future, will end that fun.
interesting that this kind of language is accepted legalese
par. 80.IV and 80.V seeks both civil penalties and removal from office.
Is it feasible that Musk/Tesla can negotiate only penalties, thus keeping him on the board? Given Musk's position of power over the board, and importance to the company, I could see the board agreeing to it, but would the government.
"Pray" is an old word that means to ask. Hence "prithee", which is kind of a mashed together "pray thee" (which means "ask you"). And "prayer" is noun form of that verb.
Yes, the words are really old (archaic-sounding if not actually archaic), but that happens all the time in legalese.
And yes, they have religious connotations, but they are also used in secular ways. For example, from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": "I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire: The day is hot, the Capulets abroad".
Per WSJ reporting, they already had negotiated some sort of settlement, presumably with milder action toward all concerned, and then the Tesla side blew up the deal at the last minute, resulting in the SEC's hurried drafting and filing of the complaint we have now.
As a procedural matter, they probably could still settle the case if both sides agreed to do that. But the best deal Tesla could get now is almost certainly worse than what was on offer Monday -- particularly since the case against Musk looks awfully close to open-and-shut.
(The case: 1) He said he had funding secured, 2) he didn't, and 3) the result was to run up the stock price to his personal benefit. 1) and 3) are matters of easily accessible public record; as for 2), Musk thought he could get the money from the Saudi government's "sovereign wealth fund", which was thinking about formally providing it, but had absolutely not agreed to do so. During the BFR announcement, Elon talked pretty frankly about his habit of promising best-case outcomes to give people something to shoort for -- but when it comes to public statements about company financials, it's a very, very, very bad idea.)
A short while ago (per my comment history), I asked whether Elon Musk should remain as CEO of Tesla.
I think, for my part, the answer is clearly no. He might be brilliant, he has undeniably had a hand in creating something awesome with Tesla and SpaceX's technology, but he's now a danger to the very thing he helped build. This is just one of the lawsuits filed against him or Tesla in recent weeks that have him as the primary cause. I want Tesla's mission to be achieved, I want them to succeed, and to me, Elon Musk is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in their way now.
Where does the buck stop? In my opinion, with Tesla's board, and Elon's ouster as CEO.
Edit: Worth noting that Elon's removal as CEO is one of the remedies the SEC seeks as well, and could thus be part of any settlement. (I'm not knowledgeable enough to handicap how likely that is.)
Another edit: Tesla has no D&O insurance, and therefore might be liable for whatever misconduct Elon is found to have done. That's a pretty big deal, and also a bad move on Tesla's part in not insuring against their (known quantity loose cannon) CEO. See https://www.dandodiary.com/2018/08/articles/securities-litig...
He may deserve that, but I believe that public perception is that Elon Musk is Tesla. In the same way that Bill Gates was Microsoft and Steve Jobs was Apple, Musk commands a huge moral force (in a Clausewitz sense... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz). Fire Musk and you need to hire a press team, rebrand, and basically become seen as a stuffy company instead of the hip trendy up-and-comer. How much perceived valuation does Musk create? 20%, 50% of the company? Hard to say, but I bet it's a big number.
2029: Elon Musk is hired back to lead Tesla after the board decides the brand, having been diluted over the past 10 years and the stock down to pennies, is in serious danger. Musk meanwhile had been focusing on SpaceX and laying the foundation for the first Mars colonization.
2031: Shortly after his return to Tesla, Musk introduces the first hovercar.
2035: SpaceX and Tesla merge
2042: TeslaX solarshuttles frequently take multi-year tourist visits to Mars and Europa
2047: TeslaX undergoes a hostile takeover by Amazon for 8.7T in stock (hey, who doesn't love a twist ending?)
If Jobs hadn't of gone back to Apple in '97 after being fired in '85, they wouldn't be here today. Jobs was their last hope after Sculley made them mediocre. Apple was down to relying on a 150m investment from Microsoft in the late 90s (Aug 1997), that they probably only got because of Jobs [1]. I'd also argue everything that Jobs had created at NeXTSTEP became Apple and saved them [2]. The technology made it all the way into iPhone, you can see it in their libs still in Objective-C with the NS prefix [2]. Interestingly Jobs built successes in NeXTSTEP and Pixar while he was away from Apple for a decade, just like Musk has other companies.
It could be argued Ballmer almost killed Microsoft, but Bill Gates has had influence in the company all along on the board up until February 4, 2014 as the chairman of Microsoft. Microsoft returned to developer/engineering focused with Satya Nadella was made CEO in February 2014 after the marketing/bizdev focused Ballmer era that nearly made them irrelevant, and Nadella has turned it around entirely back to developer roots.
Tesla is an engineer first, I see that as way more beneficial than some operations or lifetime MBA / C-level executive running it, it will take the life right out of Tesla just like Baller at Microsoft or Sculley at Apple.
Tesla is a product company, they do little, if any, marketing.
Find me a Tesla owner that doesn't love their car.
Tesla is an engineering led product company first, both for the good of the environment and for making products that people love.
Not many could have built what Elon Musk built, if any others today at the time and survive the Great Recession or get people excited about the product.
Tesla has that excitement that nostalgic leaders like Disney, Ford, Jobs, 'World's Fair' type of innovative excitement had in the past.
Yes, but is it in the national interests of China for the United States to be the leader in the electrification of transport?
He is very likely to persist in claiming both that Elon Musk is not at all an capable of engineering and that Tesla is a marketing company. There is a technique called firehosing where you just keep spewing lies as an influence strategy.
You can look at his other post in this thread to see the degree to which he is willing to have faithful discourse.
I would argue that it is in the interest of China. Everyone is going to have flooding coast lines. The short term solution to curbing that issue and others is fast electrification. China will find a market for its own vehicles, because every electric vehicle is going to find a market. So the United States pulling its own weight in this matter is just helping to get the task done more quickly. Meanwhile, in the long-term, present day technology is going to be eclipsed. It will be easy enough to figure out how the better batteries are made and produce them. Economies of scale can then allow winning on price. Meanwhile, the digital record will preserve the manipulation attempts, making them more obvious in retrospect. This isn't good for diplomatic relations with the many nations who will be damaged by floods. So taking actions which could slow electrification could lead to unanticipated consequences. Meanwhile, advocating for more rapid acceleration won't even harm diplomatic relations with the oil producing countries: many of them are leading the charge in adopting green technology, they understand the dangers. There is good will to be gained in helping the world to electrify its transportation.
The difference with Gates and Jobs is Tesla has not delivered, i.e. it has not become profitable enough to guarantee success in the future. At this point he's indispensable. (There is also the thought that without him Tesla does not have an advantage vs cheaper competitors from all around the world)
I understand I think why you say Tesla has not delivered. But I feel like Tesla kicked off the entire electric car market finally. Not to mention the space stuff. Amazing work even if he is ousted I think. Plenty of awesome stuff.
There's an argument that that makes him more essential, because (so the argument goes) one thing he has been demonstrably good at is fundraising.
Not sure if I buy it or not - I've not looked into it in enough detail really - but for a Company in that kind of position it's an important attribute for the senior executive team to have.
I think his point is that when you strip away the personality cult, Tesla is just an unprofitable car maker with crushing debts and trouble meeting goals.
Yeah, this whole “Tesla will fail if they fire Musk” strikes me as kind of pointless, because Tesla will likely fail either way. Best case scenario is M&A, which Musk is essentially too proud to do, which means not firing him means committing to the company utterly failing.
That's a weird definition of "delivered". The car industry requires scale, and Tesla needs to be much bigger before it could possibly meet that definition of "delivered". That's why the last US mass-market car startup was Tucker.
Windows has lost on Mobile OS space totally to Apple and Google. And Apple is already showing signs of not being able to think beyond the iPhone and Macbook.
That's not called doing fine.
Once the product inertia is gone, the effects of absence will show.
This is key, I think. Microsoft had enough runway to figure it out. Apple has a multiple of that. What does Tesla have to keep it alive while they figure out the next step?
Fire Musk and the board could also risk a situation similar to Apple's board firing Steve Jobs.
Musk is taking too many chances with too many things, often unnecessarily, but without him Tesla could be trampled by the big carmakers in the coming years in the EV market.
Who at Tesla will still want to add rocket alloy to their cars to make them the safest ever cars? Chances are whatever new CEO they hire will see that as a huge cost-cutting opportunity to be "more in line with the rest of the industry."
Also, the big car manufacturers have a huge head start in terms of actually producing a very large volume of cars across the globe.
If toyota decides they can make a yaris or aygo as a purely electric vehicle, tesla will be nearly unable to catch that large, low end market segment.
Also, you need low-end, mass volume cars to be able to push eletric infrastructure and replace the current gas infrastructure. (although i think using hydrogen and reusing the gas infrastructure might even be a better solution personally).
If Elon Musk is removed as CEO at Tesla, Tesla is over.
I find it curious that an innovative American company pushing to help our carbon problem by going electric is so lambasted, shorted, constantly under attack. It cannot be argued that Tesla pushed forward both electric cars and self-driving vehicles as a major force (original self-driving push was a DoD X-Prize)
Personally I like when American companies succeed and push innovation forward. I would have zero hope of that happening if they bring in some generic C level executive like back in the day at Apple when they ousted Steve Jobs and brought in John Sculley.
It's not shorted because of its mission, its shorted because of the negative cash flow. Musks' public persona doesn't exactly give off the aura of a man who has his companies operating expenses and profitability under control.
So, I get it. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. But I don't think anyone is going to care about the wealth of these short sellers when the climate is irreversibly changed.
China is smart. They don't fuck around with tax incentives and other silly market manipulators. They use central policy planning to drive forward renewables and battery electric vehicles at nation state scale, and it's a damn shame the United States and other first world countries don't have the same fortitude; yet, our markets will rail against someone who has bet his personal fortune to accomplish these goals.
Without short sellers or another market mechanism to call bullshit on over-inflated and over-hyped investments, capital will be badly allocated.
You're imagining some future where because of shorts we don't put enough money into TSLA and never have electric cars. That's not how this works.
With shorts (if the short sellers are right) TSLA is full of it, and capital is much better allocated at BMW, Toyota, or some other car startup, and the sooner everyone finds that out and moves their money over or stops inflating TSLA the better.
I'm ok with shorts in general, but I do wish that the SEC put at least as much energy into prosecuting some of the bad behavior by some negative parties (who may or may not have been shorts, tbh) as it is the company.
I follow the company closely, and have definitely seen some questionable behavior that seemed to be aimed at trying to create the negative news cycle for the business. Things like promoted reddit articles and a horde of bogus NHTSA complaints can be very damaging to the business' fundamentals.
But maybe there is more investigation into these things than I realize, and certainly the need to investigate this material doesn't negate the need to investigate Musk's own questionable conduct as well.
Why should the SEC be prosecuting short sellers writing slander about TSLA any more than they should be prosecuting the people who are long on TSLA writing literal or figurative press releases praising the company?
Both parties have an interest in the stock going one way or the other. Regulators need to get involved when something like insider manipulation of the stock happens, say when the CEO uses Twitter the way Elon Musk does.
When those statements are blatantly false with a clear intent to do reputational and market damage to the business they become more than simply "short sellers writing slander". When they pay to have them promoted it looks more like fraud.
The SEC doesn't regulate people talking shit in public, even when those people are talking shit because they have a financial interest in a public company, or even if they're paying to make their message heard.
They regulate things like people talking shit in public on Twitter while having access to insider information. There's no evidence that any of these people talking shit about TSLA because they hold shorts have access to information not available through the usual market disclosure mechanisms.
> Without short sellers or another market mechanism to call bullshit on over-inflated and over-hyped investments, capital will be badly allocated.
Capital allocates to what is best for the markets, not what is best for the world. I can't breath shareholder returns. We can't wait for BMW and Toyota to cannibalize their internal combustion product lines with EVs because it's not financially convenient for them (runaway climate change, all that jazz [1]). Traditional manufacturers have no incentive to disrupt the status quo and instead, continue to churn out internal combustion vehicles.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.” [2]
Short-sellers didn't cause Elon Musk to tweet fraudulently, putting himself and his company into legal jeopardy with the SEC.
Frankly, Q3 2018 was shaping up to be a big moment where M3 cars were mass produced and selling well. If Mr. Musk just shut up for the past 6 months and never tweeted anything, then Tesla would be in a far stronger position.
Today: Musk has to deal with the pedophile slander lawsuit, the SEC investigation, and now the DoJ investigation. The shorts did NONE of this, it was all Mr. Musk's mistake. If Mr. Musk sat tight, released the (what seem to be) good Q3 2018 numbers, then the shorts would have been busted naturally.
That's how you "beat the shorts". Have a strong quarter, have a strong year, and push the stock price up. Short sellers lose money every time the stock rises.
-------------
And I'm sure people out there will complain about the 2-billion convertible loan due 2019, and how short-sellers are destroying the $360 price point.
Guess what? The CEO's job is to secure funding. It was Mr. Musk who signed Tesla to that deal. If you think the loan was idiotic, then it was Mr. Musk's fault for signing the loan back in 2014.
That's Musk's decision however. He's had 5 years to make a profit on a 5-year loan with 0.25% coupon (!!!) and that's his own darn fault for not keeping track of it and turning a profit in time.
(Frankly: 0.25% loan for 5-years are stupendous terms. I do think it was good way to raise money)
The terms of this loan are: $360 call option or cash back on March 2019. Which means bondholders can buy the stock at $360 (no matter what price TSLA is at), OR can demand cash back instead. Given the current price of TSLA, it seems like the bondholders will ask for Cash.
But Musk clearly though, way back in 2014 when he signed this deal, that he would raise the stock price to $360 to avoid paying back the loan. OR he was fine with a 0.25% coupon (!!) on a 5-year rate. Anyone who follows finances knows that this bond was an incredible deal to the advantage of Tesla, and no one should be touting this loan as a disadvantage.
Elon has wasted capital, both political and economic; this I can't argue with. I agree with the mission, not the man's behaviors, but have also lived long enough to recognize what a necessary evil is.
Let's be real here. In the grand scheme of things Tesla's selling luxury toys and is bound to be something similar to cars as what Apple is to general computing. Overly expensive status symbols.
Both in number of vehicles sold[1] and in distance driven[2] Tesla vehicles are handily beat by the likes of the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf. Those are the sorts of vehicles that are going to change the game and make a dent in climate change, not luxury cars.
Let’s be real then. Tesla is actually attempting to ramp energy storage and EVs as fast as possible. No one else is even trying. Nissan has sold 300k Leafs in 7 years. Tesla sells that many EVs in a year at their current run rate. Ford isn’t even going to sell sedans in the US anymore, only low gas mileage trucks. The president of Fiat Chrysler asked people not to buy their EVs, as they lost money on each one. The Volt isn’t a vehicle worth arguing about (Chevrolet has only sold 100k of them, ever). The Model 3 is even outselling all BMW sedan sales. Just the Model 3, not including the S and X.
This singular $3 Billion project will give 2GW of power. If the lake holds 8-hours of water, that'd be 16-GW-hrs of energy in a single project.
---------
If energy storage is to be figured out in the USA, we need to be calculating GW-hr scale projects, not MW-hr scale projects like Mr. Musk.
Lithium Ion's main benefit was to Tesla, as Tesla would have a 2nd place to sell their Lithium Ion batteries. Its great for Tesla, but its way too small of a scale for me to consider it as a major solution to the USA's energy problem.
Yeah, we argue this all the time :) you can’t stick hydro storage just anywhere, yet you can ship cargo containers full of powerpacks to anywhere in the world in a week or two. The Hornsdale Power Reserve was built in 90 days. Tesla is building a 700MW-1.1GW facility with PG&E to replace 3 natural gas generators (in the Southwest US, solar and batteries are cheaper than natural gas).
Utility scale battery storage will lead the day. Raw materials go into your factory, out come battteries good for at least a decade, that can perform energy arbitrage and frequency response for grid services. And every year it keeps getting cheaper to build. Hydro storage construction is always going to be geoconstrained, time consuming to construct, and expensive.
Owning about 12k shares of TSLA, having followed the company closely since inception (when it was ran by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning), I can't see Tesla succeeding without Musk. It'll end up acquired, or as a boutique manufacturer like Ferrari.
Tesla's value is Musk's determination. Still, he needs to choose his actions more wisely, clearly.
I'm financially independent without my Tesla holdings. If it all goes to zero, I'm prepared for that.
If being a fanboy of a company working towards positive change in the world (which is so very often rare, unfortunately) is wrong, I don't want to be right. Everyone finds meaning in different ways. This is my small contribution.
Though internet companies aren't the best at cash flow management either, it is more about getting the market / customers then the profit. I think innovation is excusable for revenue/profits for some time.
Starting an electric car ONLY car company is even harder than having it as part of an existing car company like Mercedes is doing well with.
The shorts are mainly trying to kill Tesla and coming from the oil, gas, other auto companies most of all. Lots of games are played with car companies (see VW short squeeze a historically big one) because they can't react as fast as it is hard work. I think the shorts have been not just focused on profitability but to drive out the competitive threat, the shorts have also been attacking Elon Musk non-stop.
I imagine they are hard to run. But they don't require "genius" to run, they require people skilled in process management, supply chain operations, assembly automation and the rest. The stuff all the other big car manufacturers have been doing for decades. All stuff that Musk doesn't have a background in.
What makes Tesla unique in this respect, and Musk so essential to the operations?
I'd argue nothing at all, other than his image. Hire some experts from the other companies, people with a few decades of experience, and let them turn it around. Maybe start with why you're hand-assembling and gluing things together in tents, rather than using the high efficiency production lines everyone else is using.
Elon Musk survived the Great Recession when other car companies needed bailouts, that is pretty good line item. Ford probably would have needed one as well if Ford's didn't still run it.
Elon is also an engineer first, that is needed at innovative companies, not some metric focused MBA C-level executive just looking to cash out. Musk actually cares about what he is building and has done a smashing job considering the pressure in my opinion. Tesla is made with love, a car/product people want, not just for the short term numbers.
When your company is a tiny player, needing bailouts is largely irrelevant. Tesla didn't have anything like the risk and exposure which required the bailouts. Most of the major manufacturers didn't require bailouts either…
Your comments regarding being "made with love" doesn't square with all the other articles I've read recently regarding the poor fit and finish of new Teslas. They are having problems scaling up, and it looks like quality took a hit as a result.
Running a large scale industrial manufacturing operation means extensive delegation. Those "metric-focussed" executives actually have an important role to play at this scale. Product design and engineering happen well before scaling up for production. The production side is all about supply chains, efficient assembly and QA. No one should be changing the design at that point; however talented Musk might be as an engineer, I can't see him specifically having much to bring to the table for sorting out manufacturing issues. (I have worked doing QA in an industrial setting. ISO 9001, six-sigma and all the rest do start to have a point when you are working at scale and want to guarantee quality, throughput, efficiency, customer deadlines etc.) Tesla is bringing nothing new to the table on these fronts that I have seen.
Musk can easily bring in process people and metric focused people to help. Removing the product/engineering focused CEO that is part of the product innovation and success is a very bad idea.
You do need a focused innovative leader to run innovative companies that are competing with big players, if you get a metrics guy as the CEO or one calling the shots they will fade away.
Taking away the founder/creator is like how Python is without Guido and Linux kernel without Linus, they will eventually run out of momentum and get convoluted with many directions trying to take the lead for short term needs, similar to how node went for a long time or Microsoft under Ballmer or Apple under John Sculley (they thought an exec guy from Pepsi could run a technology company).
The typical process only focused metric MBA guys should come in when the innovating is done and it is time to focus on short term revenues over product, which eventually runs out everytime as it is milked and research and development is killed.
There is a reason Amazon is so successful still, Bezos is an engineer/product guy first that is laser focused on taking profits and putting them back into R&D, hard to beat that as you can see.
> Elon Musk survived the Great Recession when other car companies needed bailouts, that is pretty good line item. Ford probably would have needed one as well if Ford's didn't still run it.
This has little to do with producing cars, and more to do with (financial) management. (Also, most major european car makers survived the great recession just fine).
> most major european car makers survived the great recession just fine
Most of the European (Mercedes/BMW) engineering and product people have power. Even Honda for a long time engineers/product people drove most of the decisions and power structures. American car companies not so much, most MBA / bizdev lead over engineering and product people. Germany is unique in that engineering and the product quality is highly respected over short term gains only.
Additionally, BMW/Mercedes/etc cars also target the upper classes that weren't as affected by the Great Recession so they didn't have the pressures as much as the US car companies that needed bailouts. American industries targeting consumers in upper class and wealth didn't suffer as much.
> I imagine they are hard to run. But they don't require "genius" to run, they require people skilled in process management, supply chain operations, assembly automation and the rest.
That's pretty much any company (with certain variations for different industries).
That's exactly the point I wanted to make. Tesla is in no way special compared with other companies. But there are plenty of people who think that it is, somehow, groundbreakingly different.
> It cannot be argued that Tesla pushed forward both electric cars and self-driving vehicles as a major force (original self-driving push was a DoD X-Prize
Sure it can. Tesla has done basically nothing for self-driving cars, it's technology is glorified lane-keeping. As to electric cars, the Model S is the third best-selling electric car ever, after the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt. Both of those cars were introduced before the Model S. Electric cars are not yet mainstream, but when the become mainstream, they're going to look a lot more like a Chevy Volt than a Model S or Model 3. (The sport-sedan market Tesla is targeting is a niche, even if a very lucrative one. What people really want is a $25,000-35,000 small cross-over SUV or pickup truck.)
You are missing a few facts that completely oppose the point of your comment: the model S is not Tesla's first electric - that would be the Roadster, which was release a couple years before the other cars you mention. Chevy Volt is not full electric and can't get very far on pure electric. And the Nissan Leaf is a glorified golf cart that doesn't surpass 100 miles on a charge.
The frank truth is that both the better design and range of Tesla vehicles set the stage for electric cars to be adopted by everyone rather than just special interest groups.
You can be assured that every manufacturer in the world, such as BMW, is building up electric manufacturing capability due to the success of Tesla, and not Nissan.
The Volt was also not GM’s first EV. Both the Roadster and GM’s EV 1 were niche products. You can call the Leaf a golf cart, but it’s sold more vehicles than the Model S. Yes the Model S has more performance, but it’s also a vastly more expensive car.
As to other manufacturers, they were “building up electric manufacturing capability” before Tesla. Toyota was selling thr first RAV 4 EV before Tesla was even founded. Tesla didn’t have the first EV. It may have the best EV now, but that hardly says anything—it’s much easier to make a $50-100,000 EV than on at a mainstream price point. The remaining question is who is on track to create products in the form factors people care about (not sports sedans) at prices they can afford? At this rate, that’s not Tesla either.
Are you aware that the RAV 4 EV used Tesla batteries?
Regarding the Roadster being "niche", it still looked like a normal car at least, unlike the EV 1, and any other electric car at the time. Furthermore, they had a roadmap to more affordable cars that still fit the moniker "normal". Other car companies were just running their EV projects as experiments, or as a way to appease California legislators to meet quotas, or simply retrofitting a non electric frame with batteries in a way that left much to be desired.
No one was trying to make a non-toy full electric car until Tesla.
The first RAV 4 EV came out in 1997. Tesla was founded in 2003.
> No one was trying to make a non-toy full electric car until Tesla.
The Roadster was a toy, costing over $100,000 and selling approximately 2,500 vehicles, in the same ballpark as the EV1. The idea that it spurred GM and Nissan to build completely different EVs for the opposite end of the market is delusional. The timing also doesn’t work. It took Tesla several years to bring the Roadster to the prototype stage. Counting back a similar length of time from when the Volt was unveiled as a concept car, that means GM would’ve been working on it since 2004 or so, years before the Roadster came out.
>Electric cars are not yet mainstream, but when the become mainstream, they're going to look a lot more like a Chevy Volt than a Model S or Model 3.
Is your argument based on the form factor? Tesla's EV value proposition is based on the range of the battery pack, which blows the Leaf out of the water (the Volt is a hybrid). Switching to a smaller form factor (hatchback) would increase Tesla's range advantage.
How is putting an electric motor in a slightly different shape of car a more important accomplishment than making it run for 300 miles on a charge? The end-game car might look like a Chevy Volt on the outside, but under the hood it'll look more like a Tesla. Also, the cross-over SUV only replaced the station wagon as a way to exploit emissions regulations, which will no longer be relevant for EVs; see:
> How is putting an electric motor in a slightly different shape of car a more important accomplishment than making it run for 300 miles on a charge? The end-game car might look like a Chevy Volt on the outside, but under the hood it'll look more like a Tesla.
The Model 3 has more range because it has a much bigger and more expensive battery pack, and accordingly a much higher price tag (starting at $30,000 versus starting at $50,000). There is nothing to suggest that Tesla is going to be able to scale down to a mainstream price faster than Nissan, Chevy, etc., improve the performance of their offerings which sre already much closer to a mainstream price point. Tesla’s persistent inability to sell the promised base Model 3 suggests the opposite.
> If Elon Musk is removed as CEO at Tesla, Tesla is over.
What if Tesla's progress wasn't because of Musk, but in spite of Musk? He's chased away dozens of key people and his intolerance for criticism is well known. Apart from attracting cash, do you really think his contribution to the operation was that significant?
> I find it curious that an innovative American company pushing to help our carbon problem by going electric is so lambasted, shorted, constantly under attack.
Working towards a worthwhile cause does not mean nobody can call you out on bullshit. And he bullshits a lot.
> What if Tesla's progress want because of Musk, but in spite of Musk
No way that's true. No way. If you believe that then you must also believe SpaceX and him leading the company to create re-usable rockets was also just a fluke.
So Musk somehow just stumbled upon a highly successful, innovative, and cost-effective private rocket company, while also stumbling upon the first new American company to survive (for now, and as long as it has) in the car market in 100 years and also one that happens to build EVs from scratch.
Musk must have one hell of a luck to keep stumbling upon these sort of companies that "could have succeeded even without him."
SpaceX is a genuine astounding success, no doubt about it.
My opinion is that this success has clouded his judgment.
"Everybody told me SpaceX can't work, and I made it work. Everybody is telling me $THING at Tesla can't work, therefore I know I'll make it work, and everybody else must be wrong".
SpaceX was a novel endeavor. Building a car production plant is not.
Elon Musk doesn't run the day-to-day at SpaceX. That's been someone else, Gwynne Shotwell, for several years, and everyone credits her with getting SpaceX on track and meeting its contractual deadlines--which was something it wasn't managing when Musk was in charge.
Why? Honestly, what does Musk bring right now? If Tesla's product is good, if it's technology is good why shouldn't they succeed without Musk providing an inconvenient distraction.
The thing is, the product is not good, yet. They've yet to ship a $35,000 car, they've yet to hit their production goals, they've yet to justify their sky-high valuation, and their current build quality is below what one would expect for a $50,000 car.
This doesn't mean that failing to fix those problems will kill Tesla. It may, however, cause a large drop in stock price, massive losses for shareholders at large, and E.M. in particular, restructuring of their debt, and possibly acquisition for pennies on the dollar by another auto manufacturer.
That sounds like what they need is someone like Tim Cook: someone with a background in operations management.
Like, when I step back and look at Tesla's current challenges, they have two big ones: delivered products to meet demand and improving their driver assistance/autonomous driving offerings.
Which is why Jerome Guillen was promoted to President of Automotive [+] weeks ago.
"Jerome Guillen has been promoted to President, Automotive, reporting directly to me. In his new role, Jerome will oversee all automotive operations and program management, as well as coordinate our extensive automotive supply chain. Jerome has made major contributions and acquired deep knowledge of Tesla’s operations over the past eight years at our company, from being the first Model S Program Manager to managing all vehicle programs, then all vehicle engineering and worldwide sales & service. Recently, Jerome played a critical role in ramping Model 3 production, leading what almost all thought was impossible: creation of an entire high-volume General Assembly line for Model 3 in a matter of weeks. Before coming to Tesla, Jerome was responsible for creating and running the most successful semi truck program in history at Daimler’s Freightliner division."
I've owned two Model 3s, and while this is anecdotal at best, I've found the build quality to be excellent in both of them. I have coworkers that drive BMWs and Audis that have ridden in my Model 3 and commented that the car feels very solid.
I would argue that a lot of those things are true for current BMWs as well. They've fallen below the quality targets that I expect for their price and their base prices are too high.
I'm not sure that the summation of that would be that the "product is not good", though. It just means that some aspects of it are disappointing.
Musk brought this on himself. All he had to do was not make false financial statements on Twitter.
For that matter, he'd be better served if he didn't libelously call people pedophiles, try to start a war with the media, subject his factory workers to unsafe working conditions, and engage in union busting. Ultimately, these are all going to bite him in the ass, and he will have brought it all on himself.
What’s wrong with someone else stepping in to run things? Why is E.M. the one person out of 7 billion on Earth who can possibly run the company? People said the same thing about Jobs, but here Apple is, still printing money.
Apple coasted on for a long time under Sculley as well, but in the long run, they stagnated and almost went out of business. After Jobs came back and restructured everything, they went on to become the most valuable public company in the world. It's premature to say that Apple is fine without Jobs, companies have a lot of inertia, for better or for worse.
Apple is a bad example, since it literally almost failed after they ousted Jobs... And yeah, Musk is one of very few who created major changes in several industries, and 7 billion people didn't. Removing Musk now, when Tesla is on a brink of becoming profitable can create an avalanche of bad things that will destroy it. I agree though, that tweet was very unfortunate, really doesn't seem like clever thing to do if you can't back it up.
I think the primary fear is that he’d be replaced with a visionless drone and the company would cease to push any kind of bar, sliding into the same sort of profitable stagnancy found at every other American carmaker.
The impact would be reduced now that the big guys are finally starting to take full electric seriously, but the impact would still be there. Without Tesla’s constant pressure I could see full BEV adoption being delayed by 5 years or more.
There's already a solution for what you're describing.
She's running SpaceX. They're already doing it there.
You make Musk the product lead or equivalent, chief visionary. The CEO is a specialist focused on operations, manufacturing. You don't need the CEO to be the chief visionary so long as you have Musk in the company. There's no good reason he needs to be overseeing every detail of manufacturing, there are people far better at that than he is.
I get that argument, but I'm pretty sure that a stagnant Tesla still ships the Semi, Model Y, the new Pickup Truck, that little something else that keeps getting whispered about, and maybe even the Roadster. Maybe the timeframes for each elongate by a few years, but there is still a pretty clear pathway to success.
And the cool thing? Elon Musk could join a competitor, grow them over 6 years, and leverage their sales to regain control of the business. That last bit is mostly joking, but good on you if you get history that it references.
That's bad news for Tesla's fiscal situation, but a shortage of semiconductor wafers isn't indicative of some major flaw in the actual manufacturing process. Also, Tesla currently dominates the market for these wafers:
which suggests that any potential competitors will face the same limitations, because SiC inverters dramatically improve the performance of electric motors:
The global supply chain has to adapt to high demand for high-powered electric motors.
Anyway, once Tesla has successfully produced and sold a mass-market car, the need for a mythical figure at the top fades away. Since it looks like they're close to doing that, they're also close to doing away with Elon.
Agreed this would be a tradgedy, if Tesla and it’s truly ground breaking innovation, is killed off, by a boring SEC parasitic bureaucrats, anally following rules, for rules sake. Yes the SEC has some purpose, to protect investors from outright fraud, they don’t need protection from taking late night impetuous tweets from notoriously emotional Musk too seriously.
Tesla is not a fly by night sham, it is a serious long term business, and with inherent risks involved.
Musk is obviously a genius and of course eccentric, he is still indespensible to Tesla.
Reminds me of when the UK government destroyed their own genius of the 20th century - Alan Turing - please don’t repat the same tragic mistake.
I don't agree. I don't believe in the "key man" clause. Apple wasn't over when Jobs passed. Microsoft wasn't over when Gates left.
But supposing I did agree -
> I find it curious that an innovative American company pushing to help our carbon problem by going electric is so lambasted, shorted, constantly under attack. It cannot be argued that Tesla pushed forward both electric cars and self-driving vehicles as a major force (original self-driving push was a DoD X-Prize)
It can't be argued. But their CEO is a self-aggrandizing buffoon who is hurting himself and the company, and now, because the board couldn't or wouldn't stop him, the SEC will. I don't like it, either. I really honestly want Tesla to succeed.
Elon is preventing them from doing that now. If there's any hope for them to survive, in my opinion, it is without him. Even if that's riskier.
Edit: Accidentally killed Bill Gates :(. Sorry Bill!
> I don't agree. I don't believe in the "key man" clause. Apple wasn't over when Jobs passed. Microsoft wasn't over when Gates died.
I think most people believe Ballmer did a terrible job as CEO – Microsoft's stock was basically flat for the 12 years after Gates left, and only really started to climb again after Nadella took over. That seems to be some evidence for key men.
>Microsoft wasn't over when Gates died?
When did Gates die?
On a more serious note, they left after significant pass over and forsight that they were stepping down. They were both profitable, and they were not forced to step down. When Steve Jobs left the first time he was forced to, Apple almost went out of business.
> I find it curious that an innovative American company pushing to help our carbon problem by going electric is so lambasted, shorted, constantly under attack.
You're not the only one who smells something funny.
"I find it curious that an innovative American company pushing to help our carbon problem by going electric is so lambasted, shorted, constantly under attack"
I'm not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but that is precisely why he's being attacked.
There are few leaders in the business world as capable as Musk. Would we even be having this conversation without Twitter? Social media considered harmful.
Most business leaders in the world are far more capable than Musk at actually running successful companies. You just don't hear about them because they spend their time running their companies or with their families instead of bragging about what a great job they're doing on twitter. (Here's a hint: if you have to publicly brag about doing a great job, you really aren't.)
No, they're not. If they did, they'd be making headlines. A lot of execs are good at extracting value from pre-established business models, but few would have the intuition, intelligence, and risk-taking capacity to create the kind of innovative companies that Musk has.
It's generally not news for a businessperson to be doing a good job, because that's expected of them, especially in an up-economy.
intuition, intelligence, and risk-taking capacity to create the kind of innovative companies that Musk has.
Citations needed. Paypal's success was based on Thiel's technology and IP, not Musk's. SpaceX was a non-contender until Shotwell took over running things. Hyperloop hyper-hasn't gone anywhere in 5 years. Tesla has missed every deadline and milestone its ever set for itself, and has never made a profit--it's only cash-flow positive quarter was from a one-time flash sale of emissions credits.
Citations are not needed, my friend. This is not a college report or a Wikipedia article. This is a discussion. But since you made a bunch of loose cannon statements without citations yourself...
Peter Thiel himself would tell you, that "he would never compete with Musk" [1]. He went on to say, in an interview with Rubin, "...after Paypal, Elon set off to start both the rocket company and the electric car company, Space X and Tesla, and I think the conventional wisdom about Elon was that if one of them succeeded, you'd have to question it, but when both of them succeeded, it suggests, you know, he knows something that other people don't."
I'm not going to comment on SpaceX. As CEO since 2002, Musk is instrumental in the operations of SpaceX, and ultimately the buck stops with him. [2]
As for Hyperloop, that was an idea that Musk put forward. I imagine that he would create a Hyperloop company, if he wasn't already CEO of two companies (SpaceX, Tesla) and core founder of a third (The Boring Company).
Tesla could die tomorrow and you would still have to call the company a huge success. 10 years ago, nobody thought that big oil's hold on the transportation industry would ever end. The establishment auto companies piddle paddled for decades with fuel cells [3]. Even by missing whatever bold milestones Tesla has ever set for itself, it has surpassed any other company's progress in producing oil-free autos. Now, it's within reach, and that's in no small part due to Tesla.
Sure, I suppose you can look at quarterly profit, if that's your sole metric for success. And I suppose a lot of bean counter types would look at that metric, but what I'm telling you is, if you only looked at metrics like that and raw odds of financial success...those same bean counter types would never, ever take the same risks that Musk took.
By the way, Amazon was criticized for years for never showing a profit, they kept re-investing their profits in their business [4]. And what they've transformed themselves into is a nearly unstoppable behemoth. That's because Bezos is a visionary, like Musk. And people like that, are not a dime a dozen. They're exceedingly rare.
Agree. I want Elon's companies to succeed. I don't care if Elon himself is part of the equation, and it's starting to look like they might be better off if he is not.
Either way, he committed something between gross negligence and fraud. He should be held accountable and isn't above the law just because some of us like the work his companies are doing.
I tend to agree, but it’s a double-edged sword. Without Musk’s cult of personality it’s unclear whether sufficient capital can be secured to bridge Tesla to a sustainable future. Of course given his recent behavior it may not matter either way.
Spare a thought for all the other perfectly reasonable, and achievable goals which companies did not achieve, because the funding they needed went to Elon Musk companies instead.
Note that Tesla requires a super-majority vote for major changes, and with Elon's ownership (as well as insiders who may toe the line) it would take an almost 90% vote.
(Obviously the SEC can take action that supersedes those rules)
Even if Musk is removed, his votes give him an extraordinary amount of control over Tesla's day to day operations, until they change the supermajority rule (which in itself would require a vote subject to the rule)
Shareholders don't have control over day-to-day operations. They get to pick the board, which picks the management team that actually runs day-to-day stuff. If (after this all goes down) Elon were to effectuate day-to-day control, he would be treated as an officer of Tesla in violation of the SEC order and they would likely seek jail time the second time around.
Ousting Elon Musk will only make Tesla's eventual takeover of the auto industry take longer. Tesla will have a "John Scully" character who ruins/devalues the whole company to the point where Elon can buy it back, then he will take the company so far that it makes every other auto manufacturer obsolete.
“This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way.”
I'm quite doubtful this suit will succeed. To succeed the SEC would need to prove intent to disrupt the market. You can certainly show that he had a reason to attack short sellers, but he also has a long history of communicating in exactly that manner. He probably also has plenty of evidence of meetings that justify the statement. If that assumption is correct, given his historical use of this medium of communication, I can't see how you prove intent.
> He probably also has plenty of evidence of meetings that justify the statement.
By Musk's own description I don't see how any reasonable human being could interpret the meetings he said he had with the Saudis as meaning "funding secured". The verbal gymnastics he tried to use when explaining his tweet in saying "I knew we could get a deal" made me think "Come on Elon, I don't even think you believe the bullshit you're peddling."
The theoretical "go private" option under current circumstances is probably out. Tesla would have to rely on Regulation D[0] to privately place its securities in connection with going private. Being deemed a "Bad Actor" with respect to Tesla could eliminate that option as long as Musk is still a "Covered Person", which includes directors and executives, and, importantly, large owners of the issuer[1]. As SpaceX presumably relies on Regulation D to place its securities, this may have also already implicated SpaceX's ability to rely on Regulation D going forward.
I thought the most fascinating part of the article was the following exchange:
>"About 20 minutes later, the company’s chief financial officer texted Musk: “Elon, am sure you have thought about a broader communication on your rationale and structure to employees and potential investors. Would it help if [Tesla’s head of communications], [Tesla’s General Counsel], and I draft a blog post or employee email for you?”
Musk responded, “Yeah, that would be great.”
Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer then replied, “Working on it. Will send you shortly.”"
The CFO seems oddly nonchalant with this crazy development. Or is this just sarcasm?
The individual then offers to draft up comms without even first inquiring about that "rationale."? Is this what passed for normal at Tesla or were the "WTF" and exclamation points redacted?
Interesting legal point, does Musk have any legal duty to the Tesla shorts? If I'm not mistaken they don't officially own the shares they short so I'm thinking not.
On the other hand if the "shorts" are actively working against the interests of "long" holders of Tesla stock and Musk works against their interests (but in the interests of shareholders) how can that run afoul of the rules?
Not a lawyer so it may not be as black and white as this but I would interested to hear from those that are familiar with legal precedents on this issue.
How many different lawsuits and investigations is Elon now the subject of? There’s this, the separate DOJ investigation, the lawsuits from private investors who exited their short positions, the libel suit from the British guy, possibly an Air Force investigation about the weed... am I missing any?
Even if every one of these turns out to be nbd, I wonder if it makes sense to remove Elon just on the grounds that a) it’s embarrassing and b) he can’t address all of these at once and still effectively run two companies.
What a joke, there are plenty of scumbag and criminal leaders of corporations and this is the guy who doesn't walk. It'll be a sad day for the world if this guy goes to jail.
Securities crime is almost always prosecuted in the US because of how much of our economy depends on it being free of outside manipulation. This is why all stock trades are tracked so intensely. A crook may be able to systemically deprive people of health insurance and get away with it, but he/she will almost certainly go to prison if caught manipulating the stock market for personal gain.
I believe it, but it's kind of stupid that GS or JPM "analysts" can "downgrade" a stock and move it by 4%, and this happens literally every day, but some guy who is going to put humans on Mars and fly them around the moon is going to get shit for a tweet that was obviously a joke to anyone who isn't a total moron.
Alas, on the path to greater things achieved, quarrels of mankind see no relief; to build a house of time and stone, requires an ounce of flesh and bone.
tesla might have succeeded if this guy was not ceo. if he is doing these kinds of shenanigans in public, i can only imagine how he runs things internal. also, from the lawsuit it seems like he is surrounded by yes men. nobody told him what he did was stupid, instead the other executives immediately jumped on board of promise train.
Hopefully it only hits Tesla (which never understood people excitement) and a deal can be made he's staying head honcho (resarch? vision?) at SpaceX where I really think he can help humanity (hopefully Mars will not become a land grab as the US was, but I fear it's the same again)
This seems incredibly unlikely because his actions were so independent of Tesla. They aren't pursuing Tesla right now, they're pursuing Musk personally.
The statute they are charging him with says he has to have made an untrue statement of a "material" fact. So his defense is what he said was not an untrue statement of a "material" fact. You could make the argument that his discussions with the Saudi's let him to believe that what he was saying was factual.
According to the case [1]. On Nov 23rd, 2013 Telsa filled Form 8-K with the SEC that Elon's twitter account was a means of official company communication.
So they can't say this wasn't Musk or Telsa's responsibility, or that the statement was unofficial. It was an official company statement meant to deceive investors.
I think the best he can hope for is a plea bargain, or that the SEC made a clerical error.
That’s not necessarily true, and, I guess, what his lawyers will contest. I’m not a lawyer, but I guess that whether there was an intent to deceive can make a difference in sentencing, just as it is with murder vs voluntary manslaughter.
Questions of intent are likely also much more significant in the DOJ criminal investigation.
Edit to add: I suspect that questions of harm are more relevant than intent in this civil proceeding though, given the violation is about making material statements which are false or misleading.
I think they'll not play for defense, they'll play for a settlement of a big fine, that he'll pay personally, and only a fine. The primary risk is the ban from being CEO, and they can probably avoid that if the SEC is willing to treat it as a teaching moment for Elon.
The shorts against Tesla were enormous. Millions (billions?) were put against Tesla. You can't tell me that the shorters did not invest extra money to make their short profitable. That extra money would go into PR to make Tesla look like failing company. That is not fair play either... Basically Musk gave a punch back after being bullied and stressed.
Self-defense?
Also the Tweet started with: "I am thinking of". Not matter of fact, but just announcing what you are thinking of.
Anyway... maybe he can be CEO by proxy or focus more on leading the engineers.
> The shorts against Tesla were enormous. Millions (billions?) were put against Tesla.
It's definitely billions (about $10 billion short interest as of mid-September-[0], not including options contracts). I'm very much a small-time investor and I'm personally short well over a million dollars of $TSLA.
However the tweet started, the fact that it included the phrase “funding secured” is the kiss of death, and the SEC and DOJ will be even less interested in “shorts” conspiracy theories than everyone else is.
Musk is Tesla, and people loves Musk whatever he do. The same way a couple years ago, the Apple Board pulled out Steve Jobs from his company, they are now trying to do the same with Musk on Tesla. BAD Move. Tesla without Musk is nothing
To me it’s weird because when I heard the news I assumed he was full of shit. And the market realized pretty quickly as well. Wished I had shorted the stock...
Unless he's an evil genius. There are financial advantages to tanking the value of your stock in the short term, especially if your primary goal is to increase your ownership in the company. I believe on more than one occasion he has made controversial statements which tanked the price, then purchased millions worth of shares to "inspire confidence".
does the SEC have a case? Elon can say the post was a joke (probably the truth), or that he sincerely intended to take the company private at $420 after smoking a joint with a potential backer but then later thought better of it, say he even confessed that his tweet was a deliberate attempt to mislead short-sited investors in a lapse of moral judgement; it would still be just a note on a social network, not an official company announcement. what if he left his phone unattended and someone made that tweet, would the SEC be suing him for negligently managing his twitter stream? isn't the real problem that too many "investors" are making short-sited decisions based on nonsense posted to social networks?
> In November 5, 2013, Tesla publicly filed a Form 8-K with the Commission stating that it intended to use Musk’s Twitter account as a means of announcing material information to the public about Tesla and its products and services and has encouraged investors to review the information about Tesla published by Musk via his Twitter account.
The day Elon Musk ceases being CEO of Tesla is when I'll buy TSLA. Until then, it's too much of a volatile shit show with his unpredictable behavior too closely resembling that of the 45th president of the United States.
TLDR; According to article, SEC did do the "swift" investigation and it seems they were convinced Musk had no hard evidence to back up his $420 claim. They even drafted settlement agreement that was supposed to be signed which I'm guessing involved removing Musk from exec position. However at last minute Musk's lawyers decided not to go for settlement and now they are going to fight the case. I'm thinking they probably cooked something with Saudi to corroborate the claims - may be in exchange for some future deal. For whatever reason, Musk lawyers have figured things out so at this point Tesla is buy for me.
People talking shit on the internet isn't a problem - it's that real name policy large numbers of people opted into and still think is acceptable.
In the future organizations will be run by mysterious persons - everybody with a real name sooner or later put "I am an idiot" on the web's permanent record by depleting their credibility in some way. The only person who seems immune is The Orange Man. Recall Paul Graham - the founder of this website, mild mannered - it didn't save him from attack. I don't know the full story but it seems he got fed up of Silicon Valley's character assassination subroutine.
If I am wrong you have to believe the outrage culture takes a bow and exits - people relax and move on. Hmmmmm
This isn't really the context here. It's a tweet from 10 years ago. He wrote a tweet, lying about having secured funding to take Tesla private, even giving the weird price of $420. His tweet was not taken out of context or misconstructed, he did this tweet very willingly and this tweet meant exactly what he wanted it to say.
Oh yes, you're correct, and sometimes I go on a tangent and leave comments that aren't in the exact same context from when I first started thinking. :)
>A world where your entire life has to be squeaky clean in order to achieve anything above-average is not one I want to live in...
We always lived in that world, it's only extent of the checks that have changed.
Outside of a national security context, a background check in 1950 entailed an inquiry with the local constabulary and citizenry about your character. Maybe a cursory check to make sure you were current on your bills. (And of course, a check to make sure you didn't get a dishonorable.) By 1980, the check on bills had been formalized into a credit check, and the check with the local constabulary had been formalized into a nationwide criminal record search. Today, we're approaching the point where we can formalize the inquiry with local citizenry as to the content of a person's character, but every other check is still made. (Try to find a decent job if you have a dishonorable, or a criminal record.)
Point is, previous generations have always had the problem of companies wanting to know more about us than we wanted to share. It's just that not many other generations would have foolishly volunteered all of that information to companies. We did.
I've got even worse news for you, as you might imply from my little timeline above, background checks will get better and better as time goes on. It's just the world we live in. It's the world we've always lived in.
@ravenstine's comment about deleting past tweets is thought provoking - I use to use Twitter a lot but abandoned it years ago. Might be a good idea to check I didn't say anything too many naive and stupid things that I've forgotten about
Imagine if he knew this would happen, and the reason he went on rogan was a strategic play to win public favour. (I mean I love Elon, but it's not totally improbable.)
Presumably they have engaged in some investigative work to determine these facts. They apparently interviewed people from TSLA's board, and perhaps Musk himself, already.
The proposed punishment is statutorily allowed for the infraction. Sadly, in this climate, it's not clear whether this is standard operating procedure for this, though, or whether a particularly vindictive response because of some political slight Musk may have committed towards the administration or the SEC.
It is really sad to see this happening to Elon. He is one the handful of visionaries who wants to change the world for the better. He could have easily choosen to sell our private information for adds but he went for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. And then he sends an idiotic tweet in the middle of the day. Such a shame!!!
What if it was true, what if he was working with a group to secure funding to take the company private? Would that make the claim that he was 'deceiving' the investors invalid? I don't really know anything about this kinda thing but I would think if he was just saying that he was working towards that goal but deiced not to do it wouldn't be 'deceiving.'
Well the SEC has access to Tesla's internal documents and came to the conclusion that he did not do these things. It makes some quite detailed claims and is worth reading:
"Working to secure" and "secured" are two entirely different things. Even if your hypothetical were true (and I'm sure we will find out during the trial, supposing there is one), it would still be misleading investors.
When I'm making a deal, I usually keep my mouth shut about it until every document that needs to be signed, has been signed. The Musk worship on here and the Internet in general has for too long overlooked his impulsive behaviour in the capacity of his CEO role.
I don't find impulsiveness to bar someone from being am effective CEO (though I might not invest in that company). I was looking for a more reasoned answer around if it would still be illegal to say what he did if he actually had the backing he was alluding to. The answer that jonknee gave shows that my question is not the case in this instance but it was a more hypothetical.
....well, fuck. I had hoped like any of us rooting for Elon Inc. that this wouldn't happen. I truly hope it amounts to a slap on the wrist because I want Tesla to succeed.
I'll show my support with my wallet as soon as I am able.
Elon's judgment has been compromised by intense stress combined by lack of sleep and he is now a detriment to Tesla. For the past several months he has been a complete PR disaster. If you want Tesla to succeed as I do, you should support his ouster.
If Tesla can't survive without Elon, then maybe it doesn't deserve to. A single point of failure that is one person is not a sustainable business.
The suit asks to prevent Musk from being an officer of a public company. That would be a very severe punishment for him. So the way to deal with that is to take Tesla private.
Something's not right in the US when one of the world's top innovators and fighters for renewable energy is toppled by a tired tweet, and the unaccomplished sexual molester of a leader of the US says many far worst things on nearly a daily basis for years and gets away with it.
Probably he's gonna draw out an email by the Saudi or some other state fund declaring they're willing to take over enough Tesla stocks for effectively taking Tesla private (gotta leave some stock for Musk and employees, I guess).
For what it's worth I actually expect something alike this, the Saudi (and other Arabian) states are trying to convert their monies into something that does not depend on oil since years. Tesla and every other car company with a decent EV portfolio are and will be perfect targets for that strategy.
While there isn't much doubt that Musk is at fault here, I wonder how a business owner should react when perceiving that his company is threatened by some journalists and (social) media influencers who seemingly have ties with short sellers. I understand that shorting helps stabilize markets but in this case with Tesla being the most shorted stock it seems that forces were at work to stain the company's reputation in order in order to prevent important losses. Seems unethical to me as well, but maybe I am being very naive here.
If a CEO of a publicly traded company expresses a belief in a short-side/journalism conspiracy, the board of that company should relieve that person of their duties right away. All such people in recent history have been paranoid cranks who drove their companies into the ground. See: Overstock
As for Tesla specifically, there is an overt and massive "conspiracy" on the part of the long side to cheer their share price. There are numerous online news outlets that are shameless boosters of Tesla. The idea that there's a big conspiracy between short sellers and journalists has no supporting evidence whatsoever.
I'm just baffled by this narrative about a shadowy cabal of nefarious short sellers. Is the claim that there is no reason to have legitimate concerns about Tesla?
Honestly it just reeks of people being in over their heads regarding the markets. It's about as compelling an argument as those ridiculous George Soros conspiracies
Prove them wrong? Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not a lot you can do about that. Trying to do something about it that goes beyond saying, politely, "well, we disagree" usually ends up making you look a lot worse.
Musk being banned from serving as an officer or director of a public company... Does anyone else see this as the beginning to the rise of a super villain?
Think about it: our insanely legislated government decides that a rich and accomplished engineer/businessman can no longer run his businesses? He would totally turn evil, buy an island, and start building his super lair!
On one hand, the $420 tweet was just blatantly obviously a bad idea and he should have known better.
On the other hand, it feels... strange somehow that a joke (if a slightly deadpan one) has consequences this severe. It affected the markets and it obviously wasn't without real-world consequences in any case, but something about this all just feels a little off somehow.
Read the complaint. It was not a single tweet, but a string of them leading investors to think a deal was all but done at that price. Musk's Twitter account was also registered with the SEC as an official channel for TSLA information. He fraudulently manipulated the stock. At this point, all that's left is negotiating punishment.
> On the other hand, it feels... strange somehow that a joke (if a slightly deadpan one) has consequences this severe. It affected the markets and it obviously wasn't without real-world consequences in any case, but something about this all just feels a little off somehow.
If it was legal to do stuff like this there would be a lot more stock manipulation than there is now, which would make the market worse for investors.
The point of these regulations is that investors should have confidence that the price of a stock is based on the market's estimation of its value, that relevant information has been disclosed to the SEC, and so on. If people could not assume those things, investor confidence would decrease, and that would hurt the entire market.
I also don't agree that Musk saw his tweets about Tesla going private as a joke. He made enough tweets that it affected the stock price. A CEO of a publicly traded company ought to know better.
Does a gaggle of teenagers running into a movie theater and yelling "fire!" constitute a joke? People might get seriously injured in the ensuing chaos.
The same is (almost) true here, people lost money because of a tweet that was Musk was prohibited from making by law. There need to be consequences.
Please don't use the "fire in theatre" argument. It is one of the most misused arguments because yelling fire in a theatre, under Schenck v. United States, is (sorta) protected speech:
> The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
There's no amusement in yelling "fire!" in a theatre unless you enjoy watching people panic.
I can imagine this striking him as "haha, wouldn't it be funny if..." and tweeting it out without thinking. I don't think that makes it okay, but it's easy to imagine it not being motivated by the same psychopathic intention as yelling "fire!" in a theatre.
I'm not defending his behaviour; I guess part of my unease here comes from how a lot of people treat twitter as an externalized stream of consciousness, and how that has a strange interaction, especially with things like SEC rules.
It wasn't a joke, it was a lie. Even if it were a joke, the word "joke" is not a get out of jail free card. There are consequences for breaking the law, even humorously.
I wonder if they will be able to demonstrate that any damage was actually done. The $420 tweet had a reverse effect in the end, not what most people would expect from such a tweet.
If I, a not-inexperienced investor, briefly wondered if I should by a few more lots of TSLA based on the tweet, it is not unfathomable that someone actually clicked the “buy” button somewhere near the peak. In short, yeah, it would be trivial to demonstrate damage. Someone was buying those pricey shares before the drop.
EDIT: down $31 in after hours, hell, I’m thinking about suing. :-P
Same. I thought there was no way he say such a stupid thing as "funding secured" without haven't it locked down precisely because I thought the SEC would easily come after him if he lied about it.
Fortunately, my brother talked me out of it but I was seriously considering buying some.
because I thought the SEC would easily come after him if he lied about it
Which is exactly it. Folks here and elsewhere refer to it as "...obviously a joke". No, it's not so obvious, because if you joke about such things the SEC will nail your ass to the wall. And hence my consideration of purchase. Were the SEC not to follow through, well, what are they going to say when the next joker says, "j/k"?
And so, apologists and Musk themselves are about to find out that they're fucking serious when they tell you not to make bomb jokes in the airport security line. And when your antics take 10% off your share price in one day, Musk'll start to lose some fans even, because this shareholder sure isn't the Musk fan he once was.
For me the turning point was when he joked Tesla was going bankrupt. It showed a complete misunderstanding of the role of the CEO in a public company as opposed to the CEO of a private company. You live in a glass house, that means you move with care and don't throw bricks around.
>I wonder if they will be able to demonstrate that any damage was actually done.
This case is unique in that both shorts and longs were harmed. Plenty to go around. How many people bought shares at ~$350 assuming they'd be private at $420 because the CEO said so?
It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that several people holding short positions exited automatically when the stock price temporarily spiked. They were definitely harmed, and in fact are already suing in a separate case.
My ex-brother-in-law is the only reason I'd believe those stories aren't completely fictitious. I wonder if there's a formal psychological diagnosis for "thinks simple math is a genius system that everyone else missed". Because I had money, and EBIL didn't, he was always coming to me with shit like this. I don't know how many times I said something along the lines of, "if it's that easy, why isn't Goldman Sachs taking out loans for $200 million to buy TSLA shares?"
Because there is always a risk. It is a risk/return question.
The risk is if Elon musk could be a misleading liar, and the return was 20%. Well the end result is that Elon musk is a manchild who deserves books thrown at him by SEC and DOJ.
The subtext is that Elon intentionally bumped the stock price to screw over short sellers like Jim Chanos. But the rationale behind 10b5 is to protect investors from fraud. Right, we are not concerned with protecting short-sellers who spend all day on twitter making up negative stories about their targets. So the underlying rationale here has to be that Elon's $420 tweet harmed regular investors who purchased TSLA at inflated prices during the time between his initial tweet and the announcement that there would be no go-private transaction.
The irony of SEC enforcement power is that the harsher they come down on the company or its execs, the more damage they do to the very investors they are charged with protecting. And I tihnk that is why you often see relatively modest settlements. Ya know, unless the board of Tesla is tired of Elon, I think there is a decent chance they are able to reach a settlement where Elon is not barred from serving as an officer or director.
> Right, we are not concerned with protecting short-sellers who spend all day on twitter making up negative stories about their targets.
This doesn't make sense. We don't go after them because they don't have any authoritative powers/inside knowledge about the company, so a reader cannot be misled by them. If an exec of a company short sells a huge chunk of the company and plants a misleading negative story about the company, SEC will go after them too.
What I mean is, we are concerned with price manipulation. But the theoretical harm of price manipulation is that some investor has overpaid based on the intentionally misleading $420 tweet. The SEC is not primarily trying to protect Jim Chanos from getting screwed on his short position. It is trying to protect the "investing public" more generally. When they talk about damages it's not going to be damages suffered by the shorts. It will be damages suffered by investors who overpaid based on $420 expectation.
Note that you are actually wrong about 10b5 here, Jim Chanos can very well commit a 10b5 violation without being an insider. Securities fraud does not depend on fiduciary status of the perpetrator, and while insider trading is fraud, there are many other types of fraud as well.
edit: Jim Chanos is too smart to commit a 10b5 violation. I am just using him as a hypothetical example!
Yeah, and I believe some of the shorts may have cause to sue (or have already?) directly. But I tend to think the SEC's focus as to damages is not going to be that Elon screwed the shorts. It's going to be that some people bought shares of Tesla at too high a price. I could be wrong, maybe this is more of a general "integrity of markets" kind of thing, and the SEC doesn't care about direct harm at all, they just want to deter other aspiring short slayers out there.
Yeah I would be surprised if SEC treats short-sellers as different from investors. The general tone you are maintaining is short sellers are some sort of abominable gamblers who thrive on failures of other investors. Uh, no. A short seller is just another investor investing using the tools the market provides.
There was no "tone" intended. I was making a falsifiable prediction that the SEC would not penalize Musk or Tesla based on the harm suffered by short-sellers, but rather based on the harm suffered by purchasers of Tesla stock who "overpaid". Looking at the modest size of the civil settlement, we now have enough information to say that my prediction was NOT falsified by events.
As I also pointed out, this does not mean that one cannot commit fraud vs a short-seller. However, from what I gather, the rights of short-sellers under 10b-5, based on a "fraud on the market" theory, are rather murky in established caselaw and differ between federal circuits.
Unfortunately your notion of the SEC as neutral referee for a fair market is not reality. The SEC lacks the resources to enforce the law consistently even within a narrow mandate. Its approach is to target specific violators as a deterrant and/or to make known what it considers to be the proper interpretation of securities laws. Some people consider this to be a major defect in US securities enforcement regime and suggest that the SEC should be resourced appropriately to the immense task. Personally I have no idea what they would need to more systematically pursue violators, but wild guess would be a couple orders of magnitude more funding and personnel.
In the realm of securities fraud, I would say that the private securities bar does about 90% of the impact (in terms of judgments and settlements). And successful criminal referrals a la Enron are quite rare, proportional to the actual amount of fraud going on.
By the way, Enron was a fraud against its own investors. Enron was not about fraud against short-sellers, it was fraud against purchasers of Enron stock. Not that short-sellers don't deserve honesty, just saying that they do not typically receive much love from regulators. From what I can tell, it seems this is not solely due to the disposition of said regulators, but also because of legal uncertainty around short-sellers' rights under securities laws.
But 10b5 is not just about protecting investors in the company; it's about "the purchase or sale of any security" broadly. Securities representing a short on $TSLA are still securities.
This is an interesting area. I haven't thought much about it. But at a first glance (and please correct me if you are an expert) an investor with a short position has already sold his borrowed shares, with a promise to deliver back the same number of shares at a future date. He is a former shareholder, who has an obligation to a third party that depends on the reference stock price. What kind of protections such a person enjoys, I dunno. maybe there is a good law review article in that!
edit: here's a link to a law review article more or less on this issue; as I suspected, it's complicated!
I hope for Space X and Tesla's sake that the reports of a directory and Executive ban don't come true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18016250#18016292
SpaceX is doing well, Tesla has pulled itself back from the brink and may actually become a profitable car company.
All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights....
EDIT one thing I should point out is that some people have questioned if the tweet had any adverse affect at all on the shorts, given that the stock is down now.
The answer is hell yes and the fact that the stock ash gone down since the tweet only strengthens the shorts case.
The reason is that when you are short the biggest issue you have is that the stock could go against you, in this case that means it could go up. So to guard against that you generally have a price level in which you would exit the trade.
So when Elon tweeted, a whole whack of shorts got stopped out, intentional or by their risk limits. Infact there is a lawsuit already filed by Citron due to this. That momentary bump, while short lived was more than enough to close out some short positions.
If he's found to be in the wrong here by the SEC, then it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to find him guilty in the coming lawsuits.