Do these poor opinions really matter? He companies are still the top desired destinations for STEM graduates. Endless supply of people to grind that results in him providing products/services that others can't provide. This results in increased dependance on his companies and him.
I would say his personality absolutely creates headwinds. It reduces sales of vehicles, and public sentiment and visibility drives extra regulatory scrutiny on SpaceX. You have reporters asking the POTUS what he is doing to investigate Musk, and an angry stockholder just got a 50 billion ruling against Musk.
Has it really? His cars achieve supposed ~30% profit margins: some of the best in the industry. They have dropped prices beating inflation while competitors cannot. They also got the best software stack of any EV with additional value add such as Sentry mode. Im in the market for a new car and I am baffled as to why every car hasn't copied all the good things from Tesla yet. Its just software!
>and public sentiment and visibility drives extra regulatory scrutiny on SpaceX
so what? Its not like they can drop SpaceX for some other competitor waiting in the wings? If SpaceX says no to the government, the government is the one to lose out.
>You have reporters asking the POTUS what he is doing to investigate Musk
More performance art just like the SEC's investigations. Who wants to be the one to be blamed for destroying the golden goose? Definitely not the SEC and Biden is just performing like he always does to please his base so Musk gets away with stuff that would land others in prison.
>and an angry stockholder just got a 50 billion ruling against Musk
Yeah that was a nice victory but it remains to be seen if he appeals it and/or it has dire consequences for Delaware. So far Delaware has been a small bright dot in an otherwise hopeless situation as this is not the first time they managed to stick it to Musk.
My point is that his actions have had material real world consequences to things he cares about. I'm not making the case that they are running him out of business, or anything else.
I know several people who love tesla cars, but wont buy them due to Musk association, so I am going off that. 30% margins on more cars is better than 30% margins on less. Owning a tesla is a scarlet letter for many democratic owners I know.
Similarly, the DOD is not going to stop buying from SpaceX, but is slowing down development that he wants.
Similarly, Musk wants twitter to be successful, and hostility to and from the political left has made that all but impossible.
Early musk benefitted greatly from his social reputation and hype. My perspective is that his public persona since ~2019 has been more of a drag than boost.
Im not sure where you stand. Are you arguing that his public persona is currently a net benefit to his corporate objectives? That they are so small they cant be quantified? That the consequences fall short of what would happen in a morally just world?
>Im not sure where you stand. Are you arguing that his public persona is currently a net benefit to his corporate objectives? That they are so small they cant be quantified? That the consequences fall short of what would happen in a morally just world?
I am going to quote your post out of order to answer easier(hopefully you don't mind).
The reason I broke it down is to make the point that I feel those real world consequences are minuscule enough to the point where it does not matter. Maybe I should have clarified more in my prior post.
> I know several people who love tesla cars, but wont buy them due to Musk association, so I am going off that.
Its funny as I know multiple college professors with the same mindset. They ended up buying 80-100k BMWs or Mercedes Benz instead of Tesla. The market above 50k represents a small portion of the market. I call this the managerial class price tier. The further you go down the more people become price sensitive and that is what Musk is counting on.
He was never going to own 100% of the car market in the US, there are just too many players with more entering soon(The Chinese). So if some(maybe even the majority of) liberals refuse to buy Teslas, I am not sure if it would matter long term. The demographic makeup of his buyers may shift but the absolute numbers wont (once the numbers settle after the Chinese enter the market). His cars are just so much more competitive vs everyone else and selfish interests will sway enough buyers especially when the majority of buyers are price sensitive above all else. Its like that old push in the 70-80s to "Buy American" as the Japanese flooded the market with much better products at way better prices. In the end GM saw their market share crumble from ~50% to what it is today (~17%)
Ditto for everything else. The DOD working less with him is only a net negative to themselves. Its been 1+years since the announcement of the twitter takeover. If anything would have changed at DOD we would have seen it by now. Instead efforts at SpaceX have only accelerated since he exposed his views on Twitter.
Just as a small example: In 2023 1 year post twitter: World record for launches of any rocket in a single year (96) beating the second best record (Soviet Union at 60 launches) and anything the US govt has done, Falcon heavy improvements surpassed the world record for heavy lift vehicles(Saturn V). A record number of those launches have also been private for the government. I dont see any evidence the DOD is slowing down with them. They are speeding up.
>Similarly, Musk wants twitter to be successful, and hostility to and from the political left has made that all but impossible.
There are theories that he wanted to move twitter in this direction as it killed the only major way for people to push back against the powers that be. Just think of how many revolutions started on Twitter and sustained itself due to the real time nature of the platform. Now we are seeing Pro-Palestinian people being banned. I really don't know what his plan is for Twitter and it is still baffling that he continues to execute brilliantly in his other companies yet this remains a dumpster fire.
>Early musk benefitted greatly from his social reputation and hype. My perspective is that his public persona since ~2019 has been more of a drag than boost.
I was part of the Tesla "skeptic" community from 2016-2020. I saw first hand how so many industry experts were shouting from the rooftops at how terrible Musk was as a person. The Left only discovered this side of Musk when it was inconvenient for them. Before that they were happy to ignore the actual people working in industry and enjoy this "real life tony stark". The skeptic community was continually wrong about him. Every giant pitfall that they said was coming did indeed come but he always found a way around it. He has proven (to me) that in this country, the kind of success he has gotten makes his public persona not important in the grand scheme of things. Until something drastically changes, (maybe an extreme anti-corporate government that is just impossible until at least 2028) he is going to keep flying further and further forwards regardless of what people think of him. Hell this year is the year I finally started believing that landing someone on Mars will happen and he will be the one that makes it possible. If that happens no one is going to remember the leftists that criticized him in the history books.
>The reason I broke it down is to make the point that I feel those real world consequences are minuscule enough to the point where it does not matter. Maybe I should have clarified more in my prior post.
I don't disagree with 90% of what you said, I just dont understand what you think the criteria for "mattering" is. What would mattering look like or not? If the question is if Elon's flamboyant behavior has impacted his bank account, I think the answer is clearly yes, to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars.
If the question is if the consequences of his behavior are terminal for his companies, then I think chances are miniscule that any of it will matter. If meaningful consequences would be Elon plagued by regrets and misery, I think the answer is obviously not.
>I don't disagree with 90% of what you said, I just dont understand what you think the criteria for "mattering" is. What would mattering look like or not? If the question is if Elon's flamboyant behavior has impacted his bank account, I think the answer is clearly yes, to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars.
My criteria would be is he hindered in a material way from his goals. Clearly loss of income from liberals does not matter given the resources he and his companies have already.
If he were in Europe, i'd imagine there would have been attempts to break up his companies way before it got to this point. That would force him to choose what he really wants to do.
Maybe attempts to restrict him or people like him from getting to this point where he has so much sway. There is this idea on the left that "billionaires are a failure in policy".
The actions the Swedish union are taking against Tesla are very late but are a positive step towards clawing back some of that power but the actual pain that Musk has to endure has to come from the US.....and it will not be coming any time soon.
Thanks for clarifying what criteria you were talking about. I agree that he seems to be able to pursue his goals without major setbacks due to lack of funding. That said, I'm not inside his mind, and dont know what he would like to be doing, but is in some way has to compromise or is prevented from doing so.
