This topic went up something like four hours ago… have there already been a bunch of credulous fanboys turn up to defend the $56 billion thing and they’ve already been nuked from orbit, or are they lurking somewhere waiting for their moment to gangpile the discussion with essays about how BB just doesn’t properly appreciate Elon’s genius?
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I get the impression Musk has various levels of involvement with Tesla, from bad management, to badly redesigning parts so they work poorly, demanding the removal of sensors from the self-driving system, various (bad) decisions around UI and entertainment (at one point Tesla was asking game developers to provide free games for the car… for “exposure,” and I’m pretty sure Musk was personally involved in that), etc.
(I imagine there are a ton of untold stories about his “input,” too. I keep thinking of the SpaceX story that went into a book - where Musk insisted that a broken rocket part could just be glued back together. He was told it wouldn’t be strong enough, so Musk declared he’d do it himself, had the parts shipped to California and stayed up all night putting epoxy on rocket parts. It didn’t work, of course.)
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I can believe that, because he suggested that the Francis Scott Key Bridge could be reassembled.
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I’ll do it for $9 billion and a bag of chips. The board has a greater fiduciary responsibility to hire me instead of Elno OR KathyPartdeux!
(runs off to wait by for the phone for Tesla’s call)
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So Tesla’s market capitalisation is currently ~560bn.
So he’s asking for a payout of 10-12% of the value of Tesla to shareholders.
Even if you accept that view of economics… Holy shit
Now, tricky thing is - that’s actually what they agreed to years ago, and he did broadly hit the required targets for compensation, and really Tesla’s stock was never imagined to be able to go as high as it did at that time. So yeah I mean, he kinda has a case here.
What’s fucking crazy is that this was agreed to in the first place. CEOs can make a big difference to a company, yes. But they do so by leading. That means they choose the risks to take, but it takes a mountain of people to actually enact those decisions, and each one of them is influencing the outcome along the way. To suggest a CEO is solely responsible for change in values really undermines the work of everyone else in the chain. Honestly, Tesla was in large part in the right place at the right time too.
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Or they can make a big difference to a company by leading it into an abattoir.
I forget, which of those comes wirh the higher compensation package?
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Musk shouldn’t be allowed to fly on the same plane as his ego.
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The board is operating as if Musk is the lead actor on a popular sitcom (complete with drug problem) and they’re his entourage. This isn’t showbiz, and the part of Tesla CEO can easily be re-cast.
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Denholm’s letter submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000110465924068792/tm2413800d20_defa14a.htm
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I can’t imagine anyone but him would have decided to ship the yoke as the only option in the model S/X for months despite it not being approved for use in passenger vehicles, and a significant number of customers complaining that they wanted a “real” wheel.
I think it may have actually been his idea to focus on $200k sports cars, then $100k sports sedans, then $50k cars then $25k cars…which seems like an obvious path in retrospect, but is very likely a big part of why Tesla only can close to going bankrupt and didn’t actually go bankrupt (I know, it is a serious answer).
I don’t think many other CEOs would bet the future of the company on AI self driving that only “mostly” works. While I expect this will in the future be viewed as another yoke like dumb idea, I guess if it works out it can be mistaken for being smart. Or maybe it actually is smart, but I’m not seeing it from here.
Launching a Tesla into space as the dummy load on a SpaceX test flight was actually a decent publicity idea. I mean I would not pay him a billion for that let alone $56B, but unlike some of the other things on this list it would make me want to fire him if I were on the board, so that’s better then his average idea!
He personally styles himself as a Steve Job’s like figure, and stamps his personal taste onto the product. Other than the cybertruck the cars are all at least alright in styling. So…hmmm, not $56B, but hey if it weren’t for the truck he did better then BMW at EV car styling, that’s worth…hmmmmmm…not firing? However for the cybertruck he gets a “Does Not Meet Expectations for the Role: Needs Improvement” for the yearly performance review, and that goes in his HR record.
To be fair some of the things you say he can’t be credited with like “fast charging” I’m not sure should be denied. For example making the business choice that the cars should in part fund the build out of fast charging infrastructure as opposed to the choice every single other EV maker(*) has made of “we don’t own gas stations, and obviously we can treat this new business exactly like the old business and assume someone else will solve the charging problem for us!” is something he did, and turned out well.
However the choice to fund a fast charge network may have justified some of his value a decade or more ago, what has he done this decade to justify a high salary? I’m not sure things like the success of the model Y are really soemthing you can credit him with, while having a glut of them produced is in fact exactly in his wheel house and maybe earns him another “Does Not Meet Expectations for the Role: Needs Improvement”, and unless you decide merely being CEO when the Model Y had it’s success year erases the old NI performance review that is two without a considerable improvement in between. Earning a new HR transaction a role change to a new role: “ex-CEO” in which he can “pursue other interests” as the more common method of letting go of a exec is unavailable “has decided to spend more time with family” because we all know that isn’t true, and “has decided to spend more time smoking weed and fucking up whatever companies he is still in control of” might be true, but a bad press release.
(*) Ok Rivian founded by an early ex-Tesla employee has also done the same, but largely because they are making most choices by “Did Tesla do something that worked out? I bet that is the right choice! Except being Run by Elon, and treating Trucks as a hobby”; also I’m not counting VW because I think they made their choice to run a charge network based off of “OK, we lost a huge fraud lawsuit, what can we convince the US states is a reasonable use of the fine money that is at least marginally valuable to us as opposed to being forced to give it to the tax payers or people we rolled into buying our cars”
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Musk leaving Tesla voluntarily would be a huge win for the company. He is actively making Tesla worse at this point with his horrible statements/actions/reputation and decisions to overrule the engineers. Their vehicles will never reach Autonomous Level 5 with a system based solely on cameras, for example.
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Many billionaires fly in their private jets and bring a cargo plane with their toys. Elno needs a C130 just for his ego…
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The story about gluing the rocket parts was seemingly a story that Elno thought made him look good (missing a big fancy event and ruining expensive shoes in order to stay up all night “doing it his way”) - and while that belief might have been down to the drugs, I think this is just Musk. He’s got no understanding of engineering while also having a hugely inflated, completely unrealistic sense of his own engineering knowledge and his ability to “think outside the box” and come up with unorthodox solutions. (That those solutions never work doesn’t seem to phase him.)
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Ug. How is this kind of design even legal?
I hate the idea of needing to use a hidden, manual door release under any circumstances (they have lead to multiple deaths and I hope I mever have to buy a car that doesn’t have manual door latches as standard) but this is just ridiculous:
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Anecdotal … I want to buy an electric car and I like the Tesla. But I cannot stomach getting one while Musk is still associated with the brand. Six years ago I didn’t harbour this level of disdain for the man.
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Frameless windows have been solved so many ways and all they had to do is choose one instead of “disrupting” frameless windows by shattering them.
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Yeah, I know a number of people who have expressed that feeling (not counting people who had previously bought Teslas and now regret it because of Musk), and research that indicates the same thing. It’s true that he had carefully cultivated a public image that brought value to the company purely through personality and PR, but that stopped being true and now he’s demonstrably a detriment.
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