I felt that way and sold most of my stock after one of his previous tirades. I also thought that whole truck debacle would hurt them a lot more than it did. I've since learned.... don't bet against Musk
I'm not the best in expressing this, but I believe to think like Elon Musk (except I'm lazy and not that bright), I think there are quite a few that think like Elon. Yes, I know how it sounds, but if you're obsessed about truth there's a chance you think like him as well.
IMO Elon Musk is rational and also expressive. He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world really work?) and he communicates that way.
Most people can't handle that. They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion) or reasoning from first principles (weed is legal right? Yea, might smoke it, might not, does it matter? New experience is new data, hmm, doesn't seem too interesting).
They think he's insane. He isn't. He does live a bit in a bubble where he sometimes forgets that other people are judgmental, mostly in a conservative sense (compared to how he thinks). But those judgmental people don't see one thing: the guy is hunting for truth, finding it and he applies it to its product.
Nothing beats truth* (the fact that we're using computers now and not an abacus is evidence of that)
* All the standard considerations of science apply (falsification, learning from your mistakes and so on).
> They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion)
He tweeted about having money to take Tesla private, which from what I remember turned out to be false. Lying is not being expressive, it's just that: lying.
I don't know enough about this (how CEOs ought to behave) and I don't know to what extent Elon Musk cares.
But I do know what I'd think in his position: I'd care more about freedom of speech. I believe that I should be capable of saying whatever I want (usual restrictions apply, hate speech etc.). Even if that means that I'm tweeting on a social platform about the share price.
Twitter is not a platform where official stuff should be on. That is what press releases are for. If people believe Twitter, then where should I go (as the new imagined Tesla CEO) to just say whatever the hell I want?
In any case, that's how I would think about it.
You're correct though, it is lying. Lying is a consequence of saying whatever you want to say.
When he wrote that tweet, I thought nothing of it. I just thought that it was his own private ideas that he wrote out in the world because he likes to interact. I know how naive that sounds, but I would be that naive as Tesla's new imagned CEO. And there are a few hints that Elon might be that as well. But of course, that's a different discussion whether he actually is (on paper: probably not, when I look at his behavior: well... it could be).
Actually there was a big difference between this tweet (expressing his opinion) and the 420 tweet, which was a statement on a material fact. There exist special laws for CEOs of all public companies, and he should be extremely careful about those statements. The new CFO helps Elon with those though, and Elon just gives really boring statements about the future numbers (as opposed to the products, where he can get more crazy).
But were Enron's issues related to CEO speech, or were they just massive accounting fraud?
I can be in favor of more free communication but still vehemently opposed to misreporting. For that matter, I think it is terrible that we don't require more details in financial statements as it is.
> Twitter is not a platform where official stuff should be on. That is what press releases are for. If people believe Twitter, then where should I go (as the new imagined Tesla CEO) to just say whatever the hell I want?
It doesn't or didn't have to be. Tesla were the ones who stated in their Annual Reports that they considered Tesla and Elon's Twitters to be official sources for Tesla information.
This wasn't forced on him as a matter of censorship. _He_ chose that, his bed to lie in.
If you're making claims like this where opinions are polarized, then a source would be handy. I could Google, but too lazy (see above), I'll simply assume what you say is correct.
I didn't know this (anyone who assumes I spend a lot of time on reading about Elon is wrong). If he knew this then it was stupid.
If he ought to know this but he didn't, then I get it. Don't get me wrong, that should be reprimanded by the SEC, but I wouldn't call it stupid. It simply means you're (perhaps too) focused on other priorities.
There were many times where I ought to know things about the Dutch law as well and I didn't and I got burned [1]. You can't know everything, I'd rather pay the fine so I can focus my time on more interesting things.
[1]
a) Too late with VAT without having anything too declare.
b) Going on a public road that I wasn't allowed to go in between certain times, I didn't even know it was a thing and I didn't read the signage fast enough. Now I know that municipalities are allowed to block people from other municipalities.
He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world really work?) and he communicates that way.
Everyone does that. Most of us just aren't stupid until to think that this means we suddenly experts in fields we know nothing about, especially when the "first principles" Musk deals with are just simplified abstractions of very complicated subjects.
Or all we all forgetting that Musk has claimed that a substance which kills people will cure coronavirus (it doesn't), that children are immune (they're not), and that coronavirus is less deadly than the seasonal flu (it's not)?
Moreover, Musk has demonstrated time and time again that he refuses to use scientific methods in his "reasoning" from "first principles", since when confronted with evidence that he is wrong he triples down on his assertions and begins making personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with him.
You have a couple of points that I would need to look into. I do remember that he was a bit too fast with certain things (seems to be an ailment of SV in general, fail fast and all that).
The comment that he acts like an expert where he isn't is probably a valid one (haven't looked into it, I'm hearing it sometimes though).
> Everyone does that.
You have a completely different social circle than me then. Some people don't believe in atoms, they believe in aura's.
You're right in all of these, he doesn't care about the virus, because he's focused on stopping global warming and getting to Mars. Also he's probably not the nicest person with everybody, as that's also not his focus.
I would be much more worried if he stopped developing the autopilot hardware for example, thinking that the current
version has enough capacity for the necessary calculations. The truth is, even if it has (with the right algorithm), more computations mean that self driving can launch earlier.
It would be better for example if the Model Y wouldn't be manufactured with lots of errors that QA should have caught, but that's also secondary to getting self driving, which is an extremely hard problem.
If Elon were truly focused on getting to Mars he would put more effort into robotics, agriculture/hydroponics, non-solar power generation and other things that would actually matter for a Martian mission, rather than wasting his money[1] into PR stunts like Boring Co which still haven't done anything that other boring companies have been doing for decades at bigger scale in far more complicated terrains and situations.
It would be better for example if the Model Y wouldn't be manufactured with lots of errors that QA should have caught, but that's also secondary to getting self driving, which is an extremely hard problem.
Tesla's inability to handle basic QA of their primary business activity nearly killed the company and doesn't speak well of their ability to properly QA something infinitely more complex like self-driving, especially when they've chosen to limit the available hardware.
[1] Boring Co is actually primarily financed by Tesla, and uses Tesla and SpaceX supplies and equipment, so Elon's not even investing his own money. He's investing other people's money and running.
Not the OP. I don't think his motivation is greed in a strictly financial sense but he's a complete narcissist. When a government guy comes and shuts his factory down due to a pandemic he apparently can't live with the fact that he's a non-essential business and needs to lay low for a while.
It's the same thing with the mini-submarine paedophile fiasco. Some regular dude who has experience in what he's actually talking about tells him to go away and he can't handle it because he thinks he's Tony Stark or something.
I don't think his eccentric behaviour really leaves much space for nuance, that's not really on anyone commenting here.
He has lofty goals that require massive resources. Each also requires a long timeline. Specifically he is attempting to populate another planet, link computers to brains and turn transportation green. Each is an earth shattering accomplishment on their own. He is trying to do all 3 and in his mind at least he is driven by saving humanity not greed. He feels the current restrictions are going to have severe impact on what are for him lifetime goals.
Now is it narcissistic to think that he has to do it? Maybe. Often times though I would think that the people that changed our way of life have to be narcissistic. Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Ford, Edison. They are real people with flaws but sometimes those flaws also drive them. Not malignant narcissistic though, there is a difference.
He is definitely ill served by his twitter account though and these recent tweets are not great in regards to the opinions of many of those that support him.
Along the lines of what others have said elsewhere in this thread:
No one reasonable is criticizing Musk for being a visionary CEO, someone who is interested in taking risks that overcome historically difficult challenges.
They're criticizing him going completely off the handle; calling someone a pedophile on Twitter when they disagree with him, talking completely out of his ass about "taking the company private", or trying to play armchair epidemiologist when he _clearly_ has a vested interest in a potentially risky avenue of behavior.
I'm very happy to see the things that SpaceX has achieved [0] and I'm also happy that Tesla has done such a good job popularizing EVs [1], but I'm blown the fuck away whenever I see people responding to _entirely justified_ criticisms of Elon's character by pointing out what he's accomplished and how lofty the rest of his goals are.
Do we just not have standards for people in Musk's position? Do folks really think it's reasonable for someone to comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does?
[0] Although let's be honest, the company treats its employees pretty damn badly.
[1] Accurately representing the self-driving capabilities of their vehicles, on the other hand, leaves quite a bit to be desired.
I mean at least 45% of the country things its totally fine for the president of the united states to 'comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does' so I have to think that many people are willing to overlook how Musk acts. For the most part I am too (in regards to Musk), I don't expect perfection from business leaders. He is a flawed person as are we all. Unfortunately for him he chooses to amplify his flaws to a massive twitter following.
I think the guy is a once in a life time visionary. With that said I would never want to work for him but I hope he succeeds.
Um, it could greatly depending on how Tesla is affected by this current lockdown and the recession afterwards. Close to half of Elon Musk's stock has been used in loans to finance his lifestyle of buying mansions, flying around in a private jet, and financing his other unprofitable companies.
If the price of Tesla stock ever goes down too far his whole empire risks crumpling.
I feel like a there is a large percentage of the population that doesn't realize just how dire things are getting as a direct result of these lockdowns.
It really is frightening and there are some strong responses, both rational and irrational on many sides.
I don't get the first sentence fully. I guess it's a sarcastic remark about the 420 price, but I can't see how it "risks people their lives". Hmm... now that I think about it, 420... weed? I wonder if he made that as a suble joke, in any case. I do get your second point, let me go into that.
I have friends who have a lot of difficulty distinguishing expressiveness and rationality. I can't do that in a post.
The best way to see the difference: find a CS/psychologically-minded person that is capable of being rational but has a default state of being creative. Yep, kind of describing myself here (= easiest description to give). They're quite easy to spot:
- they have some creative thing they like (drawing, music, anything pertaining to multimedia)
- they are also capable of going from existential and psychedelic to rational and focused within one second
- they are capable of explaining why they act crazy when they do and tell you their emotional, rational perspective on it (on parties, for example, it has a lot of instrumental value).
Hangout with them for a year. And you'll see how expressiveness is mixed with rationality.
FYI the 3 word all-caps tweet is the expressive part of Elon.
Also, I could be wrong about all of this obviously, this is simply my current opinion about it, I thought quite a bit about it (also about my biases, can't rule them out) and I think I'm right but I've been proven wrong (and right) in beautiful ways before in my life. So I could be (horribly) wrong.
Tesla should have considered that before announcing in their Annual Report that they considered @tesla and @elon to be "Official Company Statements", then, no?
> They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion)
How is faking a buyout offer for your company expressive? That's fraudulent.
> (weed is legal right? Yea, might smoke it, might not, does it matter? New experience is new data, hmm, doesn't seem too interesting).
Smoking weed on Joe Rogan's podcast forced the government to spend $2 million investigating the drug policies at SpaceX. Government contractors, especially those with security clearance are expected to have strict drug policies. Doing so sets an obviously bad example to all of your employees.
> They think he's insane. He isn't.
People don't think he's insane, they think he's a narcissist who is willing to say almost anything in order to satisfy his own ego or to meet some goal.
He needs to save his cousin's failing solar company, so he goes on stage with a fake product that has never come to fruition.
He needs to keep his shares a higher price in order to meet the debt convert convenants on some of his loans, so he fakes a buyout offer.
He has a cave diver see through his cynical PR move to insert himself in an international crisis, so he calls him a pedophile and pays a guy to try to dig up dirt on him.
He needs to re-open his Fremont factory in order to not keep burning cash in Q2, so he rails against "fascist policies" that close it down.
This isn't insanity; it's self-serving narcissism.
I don't think people doubt his smarts or business acumen. I'm really impressed by the guy. But his behaviour also shows him to be reckless and a disregard for the rules.
This is great to an extent when building a business but he just really has to rein it in with regards to his publicly traded companies, that shouldn't be too much to ask.
With that said, if I were to comment on you, I wouldn't use words like "cult of personality". I'd try to make a comment about what I observe about the person, how I interpret that and how I think that to be wrong (and "wrong" is strongly worded here).
> lots of extremely competent people hold some batshit insane opinions about a lot of pretty important things.
Talking about the same industry and about extremely competent people, John Ford was a Nazi sympathiser and he actively promoted "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which was pretty batshit insane.
The difference being that Steve Jobs wasn't up at 2 am in the morning ranting about taking his company private at 420.
The reason why there's a pretty compelling reason to point out that Steve Jobs was a good leader was because he actually did good things, and the company struggled in his abscence.
What has Elon himself actually done that looks like good management? Put an adult in charge of the company and see if they can't do better.
> What has Elon himself actually done that looks like good management?
Plenty. I'm a huge critic of Elon's tweeting on Covid-19 (see elsewhere in this thread) but to argue that Elon is not a good manager of the companies he runs is completely in conflict with reality (the reality of his successfully founding and running two massively successful companies).
>but to argue that Elon is not a good manager of the companies he runs is completely in conflict with reality
it's really not because there are plenty of reasons why those companies are successful, none of which can be traced to Elon. If people want to fawn over someone they should pay some respect to Tom Mueller who actually builts the engines that make those rockets fly.
Again, if he is such a good manager, which of his moves were that great? In concrete terms, rather than just giving me some argument from correlation.
I would really like to be convinced why i should believe that those companies are successful because of, not despite of him running them. History has more than enough examples of horrible managers in charge of great businesses.
I'm not sure how to explain this to someone who seems outright determined to see Elon through some sort of negative lens, but it's not possible to be a "bad manager" and do what Elon has done.
I'm not sure if you even understand what makes a good manager. Why does Tom Muller work for SpaceX? Did you ever ask that question? Tom Muller was identified by Elon and recruited by Elon.
Great managers understand how to identify and attract talent, they understand who to promote and who to fire, who to listen to etc. If Tesla and SpaceX are doing well (and I'd argue they are both massive successes), then a huge part of that is down to Elon's hiring and people management skills, along with his strategic vision.
If Elon was such a terrible manager, he wouldn't have as talented people working for him. Also, if he was such a bad manager, he wouldn't have hired or found those people in the first place. One of my good friends (an engineer) recently left my previous company to go and work for Tesla, part of the reason he did that was due to Elon Musk. You can choose to dislike him, but people go to his companies often because of Elon himself.
One axiom of successful leadership or management is that the value of any leader is the total cumulative value produced by all the people under them in the leadership hierarchy since they are influencing, directly and indirectly, all of those people. We can rate Elon's success as a manager and leader as extremely high, because SpaceX and Tesla are hugely successful companies.
What did you want readers to get out of that link to support your argument that Steve Jobs therapy beliefs were batshit insane?
From the link:
"It is unknown whether Jobs’ outcomes would have been different if he had pursued surgery at the time of his diagnosis, or if had followed a specific chemotherapy protocol. And it is unknown how effective any of his acupuncture, botanical and dietary approaches may have been before or after his surgery."
Dr. McDougall concluded that "The overall consensus was, and still is, that Jobs acted selfishly, stupidly, and irresponsibly when he refused surgery in October of 2003, at the time of his original diagnosis. Based on the natural history of his disease, Jobs acted in none of these ways. The cancer had spread many years before his diagnosis, and was unstoppable by any means."
I invested in TSLA at $212 / share. Elon is nuts, but the 200 TLSA shares I'm still holding (I sold a few to cover all of my initial capital expense) are doing just fine.
Nuts or not, his track record is getting things done others thought impossible. Now the industry is starting to come around that yes, you can in fact use machine vision in place of lidar since Tesla has published how they essentially use the same algorithms as LIDAR due to the way they structured their neural nets. Let's not forget this is the guy that invented what became (x.com) paypal before online banking even existed. He also made one of the very first online "phone books" before going to invest in early stage Tesla and land orbital class rockets on boats, something no government has even ever done.
You are completely free to not buy Tesla stock. I for one want to have a company I invest ran by that type of person. Nobody is forced into buying stocks and if you disagree with how one is ran you are welcome to sell
What's the point of even writing a comment like this? Comprised of completely obvious platitudes. We all know that we don't have to buy Tesla stock or can sell it if we decide we don't like the CEO.
The point that people are making is that Elon is being highly irresponsible outside his management of the companies he is running (where he is doing a stunningly good job). He is also a public figure with a massive twitter following and the comments he is making on Covid-19 are misinformed and blind to existential & systemic risk and therefore dangerous. Even he has realised that with some, as shown by his deletion of a few of the stupider tweets. But as yet he hasn't apologised for or recognised the harm he has done. Fine for him to have an opinion, even a stupid one, but as a public figure there is responsibility on him to be much more circumspect in publicly sharing it.
Where is Elon acknowledging that if he hadn't been part of the crowd who were downplaying the risk through January, February, March and even now, the US may have acted sooner and thus limited the need to shutdown or, like Taiwan who started acting on December 31st last year, not have had to shut down at all?
I think it's important to put tweets into perspective. Twitter is a media platform not a window into someone's mind. I think his tweets are great and he should just keep them coming. It's entertainment.
I don't know how you define "last startup to succeed", but... Hummer (1992, 28 years ago), Pagani (1992), McLaren (1985, 34 years ago), Kia (1974, 45 years ago), Hyundai (1967, 52 years ago) and even Jeep (1946, 74 years ago) and Saab (1945) seem like they would qualify as well?
From what I understand, they are the same thing. And many CEOs are apparently sociopaths.
And I think Musk is clearly one of the better ones. Admittedly crazy and dangerous when he starts picking stupid internet fights, but when he focuses on building his companies, he seems to work miracles, and he does seem to care about people and the planet, which is more than I can say from many others. There are plenty of psychopathic CEOs that suck at their job (like the one currently in the White House).
