How Twitter?

[Ari]

I'm amused that the lesson isn't 'indoctrination is bad' but instead 'Start early and harden your tactics!' but really going to Musk for parenting advice is like going to Musk for password advice, in both cases the answer is the same, make sure they contain both upper and lower case letters and at least one special character.

[JoeP]

I regret that I have but 1 thænk$ to give that.

[beyelzu]

This is about musk and not twitter.

So I am of the opinion that Musk bought Twitter sort of on accident. He didn’t buy it because he wanted to destroy twitter, but once he bought it, his narcissism started to take its toll.

I think we can see more of his disastrous decision making recently at Tesla. Tesla is valued much more highly than car manufacturers that sell more units.

Now that’s mostly just because of hype, but Tesla has long been viewed as an innovator in EV. Its value was predicated on Tesla continuing to own the segment and the segment growing.

They also have the supercharger network that other companies were going to use and Tesla could leverage to more profit.

Meanwhile, Tesla didn’t spend much money on advertising, Mysk was Tesla and his profile was advertising for the company.

Tesla also don’t freshen their car models like other companies.

This was fine when they owned EV market and had no competition.

Tesla got lots of slack compared to its car competitors that are valued less by the stock market.

Now that Tesla has declining profit (9 percent down from q1 last year) and they are downsizing, Musk stopped building superchargers. I suspect he was like these guys only cut into my market share because I’m building superchargers that they are going to use. But building and owning the supercharger network was a key reason to value Tesla over its competitors.

Then we have price cutting, price cutting is hard on a luxury brand as it decreases perceived value.

The cybertruck roll out that had a complete recall and the issues with self driving.

Meanwhile Musk does ever more culture war bullshit.

Musk is Tesla in many people’s minds and the people most likely to buy an ev up til now are the people Mysk is alienating. The ones who hate EVs are who Musk is in bed with these days.

And as part of the layoffs, Musk axed the recently hired marketing team.

fastcompany.com

The article just talks about pr and branding.


ETA

"It's very likely that Musk himself is contributing to the reputational downfall," Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told Reuters, saying his company's survey shows 83% of Americans connect Musk with Tesla.

reuters.com

There was a time when Tesla’s consideration score was 70 percent over the last couple of years it has fallen and other ev producing firms have increased that number brining them up to equal with Tesla currently.

[seebs]

Yeah. They were building this network that was likely to be moderately profitable, and Musk has axed it because he's a complete idiot who doesn't know what he's doing.

[Ari]

During the pandemic Tesla made a sizable amount of money selling EV (not EV but Carbon) credits to combustion engine manufacturers, and I presume Elon thought outside interest in the super charger network was a similar lip service while they pumped out gas powered vehicles. In Tesla's perfect world they would never need to fully ramp up car production and instead license their tech to others, a super charger network that's charging vehicles that payed a license to Tesla, is worth 'giving away.'

Instead multiple manufacturers are ramping up their own EV production with all their previous car knowhow while Tesla's big breakthroughs never materialized. Like their full self driving using only cameras. I do wonder how much the success of SpaceX affected Musk, as I bet he's said "How hard can it be, it's not rocket science!" to problems that turned out to be much harder than rocket science.

ETA: According to Carbon Credits, "Elon Musk’s Tesla generated a substantial $1.79 billion from carbon credit sales last year, as revealed in their Q4 2023 and annual financial report, bringing its total earnings from such credits since 2009 to nearly $9 billion."

Tesla Hits Record High Sales from Carbon Credits at $1.79B | Carbon Credits Feb 2024

[seebs]

Huh, that actually has some of the numbers I wondered about:

The revenue generated from the sale of carbon credits has become a substantial source of income for the company. In fact, the credits account for a staggering 11% of Tesla’s overall gross margin for the quarter, $4,065 million, down from 25.9% seen in Q4 2022.

Tesla’s total automotive revenues of $21,563 million were up 1% YoY but missed analysts’ estimate of $22,385 million.

So, as a fraction of their total business, it's not that large, but it's a very significant portion of their nominal profitability.

That said, it seems weird that they're shutting stuff down and laying people off given that they're nominally profitable and supposedly trying to grow rapidly.

[erimir]

I don't think Musk is a complete idiot, he has had some good ideas, but I would say that his reputation is much more of a Renaissance man than he deserves.

A lot of his key ideas have been around marketing and business, where he did succeed in turning the EV into a desirable luxury product, etc. but he's sold as if he engineered the cars himself when I have no reason to believe he actually has any particular automotive engineering expertise.

And like many of the ultra-rich, he believes that success means he's smart and knowledgeable in all areas, when he doesn't know wtf he's talking about on most of the things he opines about.

And I feel like the Cybertruck is the result of him believing his own hype which is probably why it has so many glaring flaws that a normal car company would have eliminated - most of those flaws being ones which are not found in Tesla's other models.

[beyelzu]

I don't think Musk is a complete idiot, he has had some good ideas, but I would say that his reputation is much more of a Renaissance man than he deserves.

No, not a complete dipshit, but he is a complete narcissus. He also tends to be a contrarian because of his certitude that he is smarter than others.

The self driving issues are because Tesla refused to use Lidar for years while over promising what their self driving could do. They ignored what was being commonly done in the industry.

Tesla consistently gets less range than they claim.

(I can keep going, but Elon over promises and hypes shit kind of all the time)

Functionally, I’m not sure there is a difference between an imbecile and a contrarian narcissus.

Lest we forget, he bought in to Tesla and ultimately pushed the founders out.

Musk gets to claim cofounder because he was the first VC to offer funding.

tesla had 5 cofounders but only two got super rich

[Ari]

Looking at the timeline it seems like Starship going stainless and the Cybertruck happened at about the same time. I do wonder if one day while high Musk got the 'iconic' image of a bunch of metal trucks doing truck things around a big metal mars rocket and that's been the driving force ever since. The two seem like they're designed to advertise each other, except stainless steel turned out to be harder to work with than imagined.

Originally Posted by beyelzu

The self driving issues are because Tesla refused to use Lidar for years while over promising what their self driving could do. They ignored what was being commonly done in the industry.

I was just reading an article about them buying up millions in Lidar, with the discount of their "Full self driving" it looks like they're joining everyone else but way late to the game and with the highest body count.

[seebs]

My understanding was that the cybertruck stainless steel was leftovers from things that had been planned to be stainless steel in the rockets but then it didn't work out. It's an incredibly bad choice for a vehicle, though.

The weird thing is, as I understand it, they had lidar originally, but then they decided to switch to cameras-only and stop using it.

[LarsMac]

Anybody who worked in a restaurant, or industrial kitchen should be able to attest to the high level of scrubbing and polishing it takes to maintain that nice stainless steel look.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Musk’s favorite game speaks volumes about him

[beyelzu]

I’m embarrassed for musk, I have played polytopia a good bit. It’s fun but it is really simplified and easy civilization (and I mean the original Civ from the 90s)

I had read Musks tweet about chess and gaming and thought he might be talking about games like StarCraft or Civilization or one of their many 4X strategy descendants. I suppose polytopia is one, but it’s incredibly simplified. I thought the tweet was kind of stupid even when I thought it referenced better and more complex games.

Later Civs increased their complexity such that they make the original look like polytopia (only a little hyperbolic)


This was my response when I saw the game they were talking about was polytopia.

Then I finished reading the article.

[Ari]

I too find chess boring to play after a few games, but have spent dozens of hours matching three colored gems, narcissism must be so exhausting to have to then justify the gem mining skills I was being taught! He can't just say he enjoys something, it needs to be the best something otherwise why would the bestest person be doing it.

[beyelzu]

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is rehiring some of the workers from the Supercharger team he dissolved two weeks ago, Bloomberg has reported.

Last month, Musk said in an email to his staff that he was dissolving the team behind Tesla's Supercharger charging-station network, according to The Information. But it seems that Musk has backtracked on his decision.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Monday that Musk had brought back some Supercharger workers, including Tesla's charging director for North America, Max de Zegher.

Oopsie.

Elon Musk seems to have decided he needs his Supercharger team after all, weeks after axing the division


I also found this funny

We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company. If you value Tesla as just like an auto company, fundamentally, it's just the wrong framework," Musk said in an earnings call on April 23.

This is hilarious because Tesla’s profits come from cars and carbon credits so far as I know and Tesla is way, way overvalued compared to car companies so the market has long treated him just like that, he is desperate for that to continue.

What AI or robotics have Tesla sold again?

Also, yknow who has and makes lots of ribots, the fucking car industry that Elon claims to not be a part of.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Ari

... narcissism must be so exhausting ... He can't just say he enjoys something, it needs to be the best something otherwise why would the bestest person be doing it.

Exactly this. And then narcissists end up being the least interesting, least talented people you've ever met. Because if something isn't immediately easy, if they have to struggle and fail and look bad while learning it, then it's obviously stupid and not worth doing. So good luck getting good at anything that takes actual work and practice.

[Stephen Maturin]

It's not actively intervening on the side of Russia in a war or killing 25 or so purchasers of very expensive cars, but fine work just the same:

Looking at data, [Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell] determined that the farmer’s find was likely linked to a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that had returned to Earth in February with four passengers from the International Space Station.

lol