Elon Musk

musk-announces-30-million-donations-to-area-schools-brownsville

@Eulach; you see the issue here though right? I mean first off, he’s just buying local politicians to look away from what he’s doing; He got kicked out of his previous location in California for doing pretty much the same thing, He’s just realised that the cost of doing this shit in Texas is $30M, which is chump change for him anyway.

Secondly he’s still destroying a wetlands, restricting the rights of the inhabitants of the town, polluting the area, construction all day all night, breaking promises made about launches and what and how often tests would be carried out buying up plots of land, acting generally like an entitled asshole, but hey; he’s palmed off the mayor with a bribe, so that’s all OK. It’s all forgiven.

Thirdly billionaires and the massively wealthy should just pay their taxes, then local officials wouldn’t need to have bribes handed to them by these entitled assholes in order to build schools.

This doesn’t make him a better person, for him $30M is just the additional cost of behaving the way he wants to, and as he’s effectively got bottomless funds, he can afford to be an asshole.

Thirdly billionaires and the massively wealthy should just pay their taxes, then local officials wouldn’t need to have bribes handed to them by these entitled assholes in order to build schools.

The thing is Elon’s not really as wealth as he appears, he essentially lives off loans raised against the value of his various companies shares (to avoid tax of course). Tesla is massively overvalued, if investors were to come to their senses and a proper readjustment were to occur he’d be scuppered. The only thing really keeping the share value up is the hype…

I have a feeling that the dam has burst and Musk is basically finished. Tesla was always more hype than reality, they couldn’t make a profit selling luxury cars so they aren’t going to be able to compete with Toyata, VW, GM, Ford, etc. making cheap cars. Automotive journalists are now flooding the internet with horror stories about Musk’s complete disregard for safety.

Prompted by @Tweetermeyer's new article (below), some of the best transportation writers like @kirstenkorosec and @russ1mitchell are sharing their "awakening" moment re: Tesla.

Here's a quick thread on mine — and how it caught me by surprise.https://t.co/XUDWNP5yHC

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) May 28, 2022

He announced himself as a republican the other day and said something like “watch the left start their attacks”.

He’s just going to ramp up how much of a nob he is and blame everyone else. Classic rich old white man’s tactics.

I have a feeling that the dam has burst and Musk is basically finished. Tesla was always more hype than reality, they couldn’t make a profit selling luxury cars so they aren’t going to be able to compete with Toyata, VW, GM, Ford, etc. making cheap cars.

Unlikely, I think. Every other car delivered seems to be a Model 3 and they’re making slow but steady progress on the self-driving technology. Other manufacturers are lagging a long way behind on battery technology and in the US are basically throwing enormous batteries into bad designs and then selling at a loss to get market share. Tesla make a profit on every car they sell.

SpaceX is still a private company but has a potential market cap in the billions if he needs to raise more money.

Unlikely, I think. Every other car delivered seems to be a Model 3

The stock price of any company is essentially an “educated wish” Musk’s claim to be the worlds richest man is based pretty much entirely on the stock value of Tesla; a company that doesn’t really have a marker segment (it’s value is it’s novelty) and its place in the market is starting to be challenged, and has never made any money anyway (relies on carbon sales) Tesla cars are popular now, but fashions changes pretty fast and Tesla can’t compete with established car makers in their segments.

As soon as it starts to slide, the value of Tesla is going to fall like a brick dropped from a plane.

@thepodge

He announced himself as a republican the other day and said something like “watch the left start their attacks”.

He’s just going to ramp up how much of a nob he is and blame everyone else. Classic rich old white man’s tactics.

A cynical way of getting in ahead of the news he’s paid off his staff for being a revolting sex pest.

I think my opinion of him is lower than it would ordinarily be because of the army of tech bro sycophants lauding his every move.

A cynical way of getting in ahead of the news he’s paid off his staff for being a revolting sex pest.

Exactly.

Uncorroborated allegation from unnamed source comes out literally one day after he announces he’s no longer supporting the Democ-rats, because “they have become the party of division & hate”.

Offered a horse in exchange for an “erotic massage” ? Oh ok, entirely plausible scenario right there.

Every other car delivered seems to be a Model 3 and they’re making slow but steady progress on the self-driving technology. Other manufacturers are lagging a long way behind on battery technology and in the US are basically throwing enormous batteries into bad designs and then selling at a loss to get market share. Tesla make a profit on every car they sell.

No, they make money on selling carbon credits. They’ve never been able to sell cars profitably.

Their self-driving technology has some fundamental problems that mean it will probably never meet Musk’s exaggerated promises. The basic problem is that it’s extremely computing intensive and the required computing power increases exponentially according to how many parameters need to be processed. It might be possible to make it work on an expressway where all the traffic is going in the same direction and there aren’t any cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc. because that only involves processing a few parameters. Trying to process everything happening in a busy urban street is vastly beyond the processing power that Tesla can afford to put into a car.

On top of that, improving the system requires training it to recognize the relevant things in the video data. That requires a human to watch the video from the cameras and tag those objects in every video frame. This is very labour intensive and one person can only process a few minutes of video per day. It’s pretty much impossible to make a viable self-driving car using the technology that Tesla has.

AFAIK, Tesla is working with Panasonic on batteries. They are using the same chemistry as everyone else. Teslas are expensive luxury cars, they are competing with BMW and Mercedes, not Ford and Nissan. To justify their stratospheric stock price, Tesla need to be able to sell a practical car for US$25k and make a profit. If they can’t do that, they will remain a niche luxury car maker and their stock price would need to fall by about 90% to reflect that.

Tesla was always more hype than reality, they couldn’t make a profit selling luxury cars so they aren’t going to be able to compete with Toyata, VW, GM, Ford, etc. making cheap cars.

Toyota’s EBITDA for 1Q 2022 was £8 billion on sales of 2.2 million vehicles. Tesla made almost $13 billion EBITDA over the same period on sales of just 310,000 vehicles. So Tesla can’t make a profit? Tesla are also historically net +ve i.e. the company has made more in total profits than has been invested in it since start up.

Tesla don’t have to make cheap cars (yet) as they are not demand constrained. Also legacy auto can’t seem to make an EV for under £25k. Tesla’s real competiition will be from Chinese companies like Xpeng and Nio.

All the best sociopaths/ psychopaths are charismatic.

Incidentally, when I read surface detail in my head Veppers is elon musk.

Also legacy auto can’t seem to make an EV for under £25k.

Nissan sell the Leaf in the U.S. for US$27K. After tax credits, that drops to about $20K. The Ford F100 Lightning starts at about $40k and drops to under $33k with tax credits. If Tesla wants to become the dominant electric vehicle manufacturer, they will need to sell practical vehicles at prices like that, and they will have to comply with safety regulators. So far, they’ve gotten away with cowboy stuff but you can’t get away with that sort of nonsense if you aim to be a market leader.

Tesla’s battery and motor technology is almost unique. Only Lucid have equivalent cells and better motors/controllers. Every other manufacturer is using prismatic cells, which are easier to make, but less efficient as it requires additional busbars and more connections, which increases resistance and decreases efficiency. Tesla’s are also some of the most aerodynamically efficient designs out there. Their software is also quite clever for both running and charging. I don’t think Tesla is going away – it may lose market share over time, but I still think it’ll be a big player in the future.

if you aim to be a market leader.

They’re not aiming any more they are the EV market leader by a huge margin.

and they will have to comply with safety regulators. So far, they’ve gotten away with cowboy stuff

All Tesla cars have a Euro NCAP five star safety rating and the Model 3 has the highest NCAP score of any vehicle since the NCAP test was tightened up in 2018 so please explain to me what cowboy nonsense they are engaged in cause it looks like its working.

so please explain to me what cowboy nonsense they are engaged in cause it looks like its working.

Prompted by @Tweetermeyer's new article (below), some of the best transportation writers like @kirstenkorosec and @russ1mitchell are sharing their "awakening" moment re: Tesla.

Here's a quick thread on mine — and how it caught me by surprise.https://t.co/XUDWNP5yHC

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) May 28, 2022

The best you can do is one article from a journalist who clearly has an agenda casting up stuff that may have happened 6-7 years ago (except for the diesel generator bit I’ll give you that)?

As for Tesla cutting safety corners well the evidence from 22.5 billion miles travelled by Tesla cars is just not there.

Tesla aren’t going away so just deal with it.

The best you can do is one article from a journalist who clearly has an agenda

If you take a look through that Twitter thread, it’s not just one article, it’s a bunch of journalists who started out with very positive views of Tesla and then saw how toxic the company and Musk are.

Journalists have an agenda, that agenda is to report on important events. Good journalists do that honestly. Dismissing news that you don’t like as “an agenda” is exactly the sort of toxic behaviour that Musk and his fanbois use to try to deflect any criticism of his behaviour.

The key thing here is that Tesla cars aren’t self-driving and the technology they have cannot support a self-driving car, but Musk refuses to acknowledge reality and attacks journalists who question things. Tesla fanbois keep proving that self-driving doesn’t work by crashing and dying. Journalists’ have a responsibility to report on that. It’s not an agenda, it’s their job.

Uncorroborated allegation from unnamed source comes out literally one day after he announces he’s no longer supporting the Democ-rats, because “they have become the party of division & hate”.

Offered a horse in exchange for an “erotic massage” ? Oh ok, entirely plausible scenario right there.

Musk is an idiot if he believes the Democrats and not the Republicans are the party of division and hate.

Alternatively he is cynical and playing to an audience of the gullible, credulous and insincere. So when he was asked to comment on the sexual assault allegations (before they were published) he asked the reporter for more time before he would respond further. He didn’t. However he now knew the story was about to break, and in turn made the comment about being a republican and how he would now be the subject of dirty tricks and smears. And there are millions ready to lap all that shite up.

he is cynical and playing to an audience of the gullible, credulous and insincere.

This. He’s just a smarter version of Donald Trump.

so please explain to me what cowboy nonsense they are engaged in

Did you see the story earlier this week of the guy who couldn’t get out of his Tesla that was on fire? The doors are electrically operated, and (because they were on fire) the electrics had failed?

Tesla on fire.

There were similar cases a few years ago, so this doesn’t seem to be an issue they’ve got under control.

Tesla the company makes money, Tesla cars do not.

The company makes money through carbon credits & stock market / bitcoin manipulation

As Benedict Evans says, musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This really confuses a lot of people because it’s such an unusual combination.

I think he is an engineering genius, who has created 2 firms in which highly driven engineers can do extraordinary things.

Tesla is obviously massively over-valued, and will presumably come back to earth when VW ships a million EVs next year, and the carbon credits fade away.

The self driving stuff is fatally flawed – his “robo taxi” nonsense is decades away. Manufacturing quality isn’t great, and they haven’t got anything like the degree of manufacturing automation they envisaged. Yet.

Someone complained about tax earlier in the thread. He doesn’t take a salary – almost all his wealth is in the form of stock in his companies. The tax bill only happens when you sell. He exercised a bunch of options last year and paid 12bn in tax. I guess that’s the largest personal tax bill in history?

This year he will presumably sell/have sold a bunch more to raise the equity portion of the Twitter deal. If he ends up doing 20bn of his own cash, he’ll pay another 6bn or so of capital gains tax when he sells.

Did you see the story earlier this week of the guy who couldn’t get out of his Tesla that was on fire?

Probably written by a journalist with an agenda that cars shouldn’t be mobile crematoriums. Did they give equal space to Tesla’s PR response? No? Must be a Democrat Fake Media hit job.

I think he is an engineering genius, who has created 2 firms

He bought nothing to Tesla (an existing company when he joined) but money. He’s a computer nerd who bet some of his Dads wealth on what became PayPal, and then used the money he earned from selling shares to invest in Tesla. He has no engineering skill.

Tesla’s look sh1t – absolute zero style. Way out of my price range – I say that, I could afford the lease costs easily, but it’s a tin box on wheels. I don’t use a car enough to spend silly money on one.

There are FIVE vehicles at my house of 4 people – son has a car and a company Caddy, and we’ve got a little Aygo as a learner for my daughter = shop run car for us – stupid cheap motoring.

Tesla fanbois keep proving that self-driving doesn’t work by crashing and dying.

Slight exaggeration. As far as I know there is only one lawsuit against Tesla for the self driving allegedly injuring someone. In any case Tesla’s success is not dependent on self drive working but don’t let facts get in the way of your prejudice.

Anyone see the recent documentary (C4 or C5) – shocking treatment of staff at Tesla

Tesla is obviously massively over-valued, and will presumably come back to earth when VW ships a million EVs next year.

Current waiting time for an ID3 is a year, so VW have some ground to make up. It takes 30 hours to make a VW; 10 to make a Tesla. And then you have to find a place to charge it.

VW have some ground to make up

Using VWs own figures for their future battery production capacity VW’s EV business will be six times smaller than Tesla by 2030. Like I said above Tesla’s competition is coming from China not Germany.

He bought nothing to Tesla (an existing company when he joined) but money. He’s a computer nerd who bet some of his Dads wealth on what became PayPal, and then used the money he earned from selling shares to invest in Tesla. He has no engineering skill.

This pretty much nails it. He’s a nerdy guy with marketing skills but he leaves the engineering to others and throws tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants.

Their self-driving technology has some fundamental problems that mean it will probably never meet Musk’s exaggerated promises.

Have you taken a look at YouTube at some of the videos posted recently? Zero intervention drives across San Francisco at rush hour suggest that decent progress is being made.

Musk is partially right when he says that self-driving isn’t computationally that intensive. Right now it’s happening on some pretty weak computers in the existing cars.

What is crippling is the training of the neural networks. This is insanely energy and time intensive. It takes years for the human brain to become good at something, but almost no effort once trained. Similar thing here.

Musk is a privileged knob, but it’s undeniable that he has pushed electric vehicles forward by leaps and bounds. Same with SpaceX, which makes Boeing look like a schoolchild launching a box of cheap fireworks.

Say what you want about Musk – I won’t defend his personality, but when it comes to electric vehicles a lot of people on here have been hoodwinked by propaganda from oil companies and legacy manufacturers.

Jesus, some way off whack comments about Tesla from people who have never owned one!…but hey, it’s STW after all! 😀

I have the second generation Model S 100D and it has been absolutely flawless performance and build wise. It is the best car i’ve ever owned. The Summon feature can be a bit flaky, but other than that it’s tough to criticise.

@tekp2 – in my experience the self drive is fine, roundabouts, motorways, city driving, not even a hint of a problem…i’ve done over 80k in it.

If Tesla crack FSD and I admit its a big if but if anyone is going to do it it will probably be them, the underlying tech will be applied to a frightening number of simpler tasks currently done my humans.

Jesus, some way off whack comments about Tesla from people who have never owned one!

As the wise and insightful Taylor Swift said ” Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”

I’ll caveat this with, I’m not a fan or hater of musk.

He’s not done anything new with stock market/share price shenanigans. That shit has gone on for years, he just does it via Twitter/insta/other social media. Wealthy people/institutions have done this since forever.
Tesla will remain, the cars may slip, but I still reckon his drive wasn’t really ‘cars’ but the battery technology and ultimately licensing that to others.
They also have a smart charging network, and that is years ahead of anyone else. Charging at home and commuting back and forth is great, but the big thing putting people off EV cars (whether it’s sensible to choose a car based a once a year trip of 350 miles is sensible is another discussion) is charging and they have that sewn up.
He’s not going anywhere for a long time, and Space X is going to see huge growth.

Have you taken a look at YouTube at some of the videos posted recently? Zero intervention drives across San Francisco at rush hour suggest that decent progress is being made.

“Decent progress” isn’t what Musk is selling. A YouTube video of a single successful drive doesn’t mean it’s reliable enough to do it on a day to day basis in shitty weather sharing the road with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.

The Summon feature can be a bit flaky,

In other words, self driving isn’t reliable.

Fortunately the brains behind full self driving at Tesla belong to a guy called Andrej Karpathy, not Musk.

Take a look at the synopsis of his recent “AI day” presentation (you don’t need to watch it, there are some good write-ups but be warned it is technical). They’re quite up-front about where they are and the work he’s doing is genuinely innovative.

The only problem I see is that the enormously challenging and time-consuming training task may have to be repeated from scratch for countries outside of North America, due to different street furniture/ laws / and crucially, driving style.

It’s unlikely it’ll be true “self driving” for a decade yet, in my opinion, but getting to the point where it’ll do most of the driving and occasionally interrupt your movie to ask you to make an either/or decision is probably not far off.

In other words, self driving isn’t reliable.

Has anyone said it is? Its still in beta FFS.

In other words, self driving isn’t reliable.

Has anyone said it is? Its still in beta FFS.

Tesla market it as “full self driving” capability and it’s available for purchase by the public.