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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Late Night Open Thread: Speaking of Arrogant White Men…

Late Night Open Thread: Speaking of Arrogant White Men…

by Anne Laurie|  October 5, 20181:21 am| 26 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Science & Technology, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Assholes

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there are a bunch of people replying to elon musk begging him to stop tweeting because every time he does, they lose all their money. pic.twitter.com/uKfmlZmBbS

— mmmmm, breens ?‍♂️ (@isaiah_kb) October 4, 2018

I know, I know, but still…

Per Ars Technica, “Elon Musk isn’t on his Twitter leash yet, so he’s taunting the SEC”.

Per the staid BBC:

Elon Musk has mocked a US financial regulator just days after reaching an agreement with it over fraud charges.

The Tesla boss tweeted the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission”, as he dubbed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), was doing “incredible work”.

Last weekend Mr Musk agreed to step down as Tesla Chairman and pay a $20m (£15m) fine over tweets that he had funding to take Tesla private.

The deal followed the SEC’s decision to sue him for alleged securities fraud.

The SEC declined to comment on Mr Musk’s latest tweet…

The BBC’s North America technology reporter Dave Lee said many people had expected Mr Musk would “rein in his Twitter habit”.

Shares in Tesla closed down 4.4%, and fell further in after hours trading following Mr Musk’s tweet.

Also on Thursday, District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan gave Mr Musk and the SEC until 11 October to explain why the deal they had struck was fair and reasonable and would not hurt the public interest.

 
TOTALLY NOT A CULT!!!

I believe one day we are going to recognize @elonmusk as the greatest inventor of our times.

— Harmindar Singh (@SinghHarmindar) September 29, 2018

The $20 mil dollar tweet. Reading comprehension bro.

— Thomas (@ThomasDemichele) September 29, 2018



Nick Bilton, at Vanity Fair, ““Musk Is Someone Who Loves Attention”: Elon Musk Isn’t Henry Ford, He’s Kanye West”:

…At Tesla, there are three common themes among current and former employees I’ve spoken to about Musk. First, many truly believe that Musk is brilliant—a technical genius, a Renaissance man like Einstein or Teddy Roosevelt, who can solve massive problems almost extemporaneously. Second, many people seem to agree that Musk is also incredibly erratic. The employees who love Musk (and there are plenty), say this is just part of his brilliance. He is a mad scientist who is a little too electrified himself, prone to arrogance and egomania. Then there’s the third theme, which happens to be the most pervasive. There isn’t a single person that I’ve ever spoken with who works with, or has worked with, Musk, who doesn’t wish that he would just stop using Twitter. There have been almost half a dozen high-level employees at Tesla who have always cringed when Musk withdrew his phone and started tapping out 140- and 280-character missives without any control or oversight.

The integral part of Tesla’s settlement with the S.E.C. may assuage these concerns. As the settlement specifically notes, Tesla must “implement mandatory procedures and controls to oversee all of Elon Musk’s communications regarding the Company made in any format.” And any format means Twitter. This single stipulation might end up being the company’s biggest saving grace, and could even help end the mass exodus of executives over the past year.

rom the outside looking in, it appears that Musk is the kind of person who doesn’t like losing, or being told what to do… But there’s also another theory about why Musk acts out. One that a former Tesla investor told me was why he pulled out of the company: he thinks Musk is more concerned with being famous than with building a successful business that stands the test of time, like Ford or General Motors. “In a similar way to Trump, Musk is someone who loves attention. They are the kind of people who love to be famous,” the investor said. In his mind, “Musk smoked that joint on Joe Rogan to create a buzz. All publicity is good publicity, and the only thing he’s scared of the most is when you’re not talking about him.”

Musk isn’t Henry Ford, this person contended; he’s Kanye West, a star addicted to his own stardom who pulls the indecent levers of social media to amplify his audience and stroke his ego—someone who will “do or say anything to the detriment of their lives, their companies, and the rest of us, as long as people are talking about them.” Ironically, as I type these words, it’s still working. As someone joked (I think it was a joke) on Twitter, “That tweet cost him approximately $327,868 per character.” One could say that’s a lot of money for a lot of nothing, but for Musk it was the cost of doing business to purchase a news cycle. “Musk’s erratic behavior isn’t going away because the attention he receives when he acts out isn’t going to go away,” a former investor told me…

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26Comments

  1. 1.

    Martin

    October 5, 2018 at 1:45 am

    One of my odder hobbies is studying how businesses operate. It’s made me some money, so perhaps more than a hobby. Companies have distinct cultures and they need different kinds of leadership in different areas at different times.

    Musk is exceptionally good at spotting a problem, dreaming up a not entirely crazy solution, and then having the confidence to go for it, even when everyone thinks it can’t happen. It’s a wonderful quality and one that is very much needed.

    That said, once the solution has been demonstrated as being viable, you have to execute at scale. You need to progress from move fast and break things mode to stable operation. Musk is astonishingly bad at that phase of things. He really needs to get kicked out of the company once they hit puberty so he can find the next thing to work on. He’s just he own worst enemy in so many ways and doesn’t seem to realize it.

    Yeah, he’s got a bit of that Kanye thing going on as well, but I think if he stuck with the invention focus he wouldn’t get himself in nearly as much trouble.

  2. 2.

    SFAW

    October 5, 2018 at 1:51 am

    @Martin:

    Musk is astonishingly bad at that phase of things. He really needs to get kicked out of the company once they hit puberty so he can find the next thing to work on. He’s just he own worst enemy in so many ways and doesn’t seem to realize it.

    Somewhere, Henry Kloss is chuckling

  3. 3.

    Mnemosyne

    October 5, 2018 at 1:56 am

    Musk isn’t Henry Ford, this person contended; he’s Kanye West …

    Funny, the comparison that keeps coming to mind for me is Howard Hughes, increasingly insane and surrounded by sycophants who have a vested interest in him staying sick.

    Of course, that’s who I think of when it comes to Kanye, too.

  4. 4.

    Fair Economist

    October 5, 2018 at 2:03 am

    @Martin: Most of his ventures, however, including SpaceX and Tesla, are ambitious enough they have needed his imprimatur to develop until now. He could probably go emeritus on either now and it would be OK but I don’t think either could have survived without him as the public face until this year.

  5. 5.

    Beautifulplumage

    October 5, 2018 at 2:09 am

    I’ll argue that many, many “smart” people tell themselves that just because they are brilliant at this (and this and this) that they are “brilliant” at any and every other endeavor; one aspect of hubris.

    Prove me wrong. //

  6. 6.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    October 5, 2018 at 2:16 am

    @Mnemosyne: There’s somebody else whose supporters wish he wouldn’t tweet so much, with his tiny fingers.

  7. 7.

    Chetan Murthy

    October 5, 2018 at 2:17 am

    @Mnemosyne: Back in the day on The Oil Drum, I remember a series of posts about Hughes and his inventions that revolutionized drilling. Apparently, unlike Musk, he actually -was- an inventor, and a successful one. Then he got rich, went nuts, and the rest is cinema fodder.

  8. 8.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    October 5, 2018 at 2:26 am

    @Chetan Murthy: Though he inherited his father’s company, he was an innovator and inventor and it paid off for him big time.

  9. 9.

    M. Bouffant

    October 5, 2018 at 2:34 am

    @Chetan Murthy: That was Hughes’ father, actually. Not that Howard Jr. didn’t do a better job w/ his daddy’s money than, oh, say … Donald Trump.

  10. 10.

    Martin

    October 5, 2018 at 2:36 am

    @Fair Economist: I disagree. Once they got the Falcon 9 to a point where propulsive landings looked feasible, they were well into incremental improvement mode, and needed to build stability to earn more important contracts. The Dragon crewed module is ambitious, but SpaceX is pretty well seasoned now. They have a lot of talent there. The risk for SpaceX is that they’ve stopped development of the Falcon 9, they put a bunch of money into the Heavy, but don’t appear to have any long term plan for it, and are now investing heavy in BFR yet many of the BFR ideas don’t really make a ton of sense.

    As for Tesla, that company is a colossal mess. They have a factory rated for 500,000 vehicles a year and can’t even manage to get half of that out of it. They’ve seriously overpromised on Autopilot to the point of legal issues. The design and build of the cars is at times baffling.

    Propulsive landing of a rocket is industry changing because the cost bottleneck on launches it the cost and manufacturing capacity of building the rocket, and they’ve eliminated that for most launches. But EVs are not industry changing. In many ways they’re easier to make than conventional cars. They moved the industry into EVs faster than otherwise would have happened, but that’s about it. Chevy is already outproducing them with the Bolt, which is cheaper to buy and overall a much better car. And GMs Cruise system now appears to be better overall than Autopilot even. Had Tesla gotten an experienced automaker leading the company, then maybe they’d have the space to let Musk innovate, but right now he’s just trying to get an assembly line working.

  11. 11.

    Chetan Murthy

    October 5, 2018 at 2:41 am

    @M. Bouffant: O.I.C. Sorry, I clearly misremembered. Gah!

  12. 12.

    M. Bouffant

    October 5, 2018 at 2:48 am

    @Martin: “BFR”: Big Fucking Rocket?

  13. 13.

    Martin

    October 5, 2018 at 2:53 am

    @Beautifulplumage: No, I think that’s true. To a large degree, it’s not that these people are smarter than others, it’s that they’re confident enough to take the risk with their ideas. That abundance of confidence applies to other areas as well, of course.

    It looks like they’re smarter because of survivor bias. All the confident people with bad ideas flamed out before we could learn about them. Doesn’t mean they weren’t as smart.

  14. 14.

    The Dangerman

    October 5, 2018 at 2:58 am

    @Martin:

    As for Tesla, that company is a colossal mess.

    Just one example, a personal favorite, is I keep an eye out for their charging locations. They are placed in some simply awful places and a key attribute is there often isn’t a single car hooked up to be charged. There were all sorts of Tesla Stations at the South End of Baker, CA, the other day. Not a single car.

    Now, Baker makes some sense with the LA to Vegas thing. Still, I’ve seen these charging places in locations where I doubt they are ever used. Now, maybe those things are cheap and more marketing than operations, but still …

  15. 15.

    Beautifulplumage

    October 5, 2018 at 2:58 am

    OT what is up with chrome browser? On my anddroid phone it keeps giving me tests to prove I’m not a rrrooobbbottt (with only busses-crosswalks-traffic signals. .oh my!).

    This a setting thing? Appreciate the info.

  16. 16.

    Beautifulplumage

    October 5, 2018 at 3:06 am

    @Martin:Thanks. I’m also specifically thinking of folks who assume their expertise in science/engineering/sales/etc. automatically means they can run a business “on their own”*.

    * knowing they need a workforce but that they can be CEO/Chairperson/Head Guru all by their lonesome.

  17. 17.

    Sister Golden Bear

    October 5, 2018 at 3:08 am

    @Beautifulplumage: I’ve got a number of relatives who are engineers, and work with programmers.* Lots of not-as-brilliant-as-they-think-they-are people are also convinced that they are “brilliant” at any and every other endeavor.

    Yes, #NotAllProgrammers, but a far too many of them, especially the white hetero techbros.

    ETA: Look Ma, an edit! Top of the world!

  18. 18.

    Chetan Murthy

    October 5, 2018 at 3:09 am

    Watching [again, it just never gets old] the Shitlord boarding Air Force One with TP stuck on his shoe ….. I remembered an episode of House MD wherein House’s diagnostic spiel includes the observation that the [male] patient obviously doesn’t have a life partner, b/c he’s dressed so awfully that clearly nobody cares how he dresses — nobody cared to correct anything in his dress.

    It made me think about Shitmidas, and how nobody actually cares about him. [totally deserved, no pity/sympathy whatsoever] If he had -any- redeeming qualifies, maybe somebody would care about him enough to ensure that he went out in the world not trailing a bit of TP off his shoe …..

    But nobody does. Remarkable, that somebody can become President of our country, with literally not one person caring about them at all. There’s something cosmic about the idea, ISTM.

  19. 19.

    Martin

    October 5, 2018 at 3:11 am

    @M. Bouffant: Yeah, basically. Technically it’s ‘Big Falcon Rocket’, but Musk makes no bones about what the F really stands for.

    It’s a seriously ambitious idea. Basically a Saturn V/SLS size rocket, capable of 100t to low earth orbit in fully reusable mode. Both stages are capable of propulsive landing on earth. What’s more, for large payloads outside of Earth orbit, the 2nd stage would be refueled when in orbit. Now, that’s been done before with the Orbital Express mission, but that was a much smaller operation. The ISS gets refueled, and while the craft is larger than the BFR, the amount of fuel being transferred is relatively small – just enough for station keeping and a few other things.

    If that wasn’t enough, Musk’s idea is to send the BFR to Mars, land it propulsively (it’s harder to land on Mars because despite the lower gravity has very little atmosphere to slow the craft down, so that has to happen with fuel) and then manufacture fuel on the surface of mars, refuel the craft so it can leave again. All of this is possible, but the sheer number of untried things combined with the size of these efforts makes it all rather risky. And SpaceX hasn’t yet done a single manned mission.

    This is roughly as ambitious as Apollo, but from a privately owned company, not a nation state in a political battle with another nation state.

  20. 20.

    James P Heartney

    October 5, 2018 at 3:54 am

    @Martin:
    Chevy is already outproducing them with the Bolt, which is cheaper to buy and overall a much better car.
    This is about as wrong as possible. In Q3 alone, Tesla delivered over 80,000 Model 3s. Chevy Bolt deliveries for all of 2018 YTD are less than 12,000. As to “better car,” you must be joking. The Bolt is a $37,000 hatch with low-to-mid level finish, no access to a nationwide supercharging network, and plenty of inventory on GM lots. The Model 3 is a luxury sedan (all currently produced M3s are the long-range variant, and most are the all-wheel-drive and/or performance versions) with several hundred thousand buyers having put a deposit down, and every one that Tesla builds is already sold. And Tesla has yet to even start selling the Model 3 overseas.

  21. 21.

    Bess

    October 5, 2018 at 3:59 am

    @Martin:

    As for Tesla, that company is a colossal mess. They have a factory rated for 500,000 vehicles a year and can’t even manage to get half of that out of it.

    83,000 EVs manufactured in Q3 2018.

    83,000 x 4 = 332.000 which is 66% of 500,000

    They’ve seriously overpromised on Autopilot to the point of legal issues.

    Data just released –

    Earlier this year, when we made the decision to begin publishing our safety data on a regular basis, we designed and introduced a completely new telemetry stream for our vehicles to facilitate these reports. This new data stream allows us to gather the most critical fleet-wide statistics from the exact moment a crash-related event is detected by our system. While there are still some unique cases in which crash data may not be available to us through this channel, we believe this system currently provides the best framework for safety reporting on an ongoing basis.

    Here’s a look at the data we’re able to report for Q3:

    Over the past quarter, we’ve registered one accident or crash-like event for every 3.34 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged.

    For those driving without Autopilot, we registered one accident or crash-like event for every 1.92 million miles driven.

    By comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) most recent data shows that in the United States, there is an automobile crash every 492,000 miles. While NHTSA’s data includes accidents that have occurred, our records include accidents as well as near misses (what we are calling crash-like events).

    The design and build of the cars is at times baffling.

    Pretty much the quickest production cars ever. Only a couple faster like a multi-million dollar Bugatti.

    Following in the Model S path the Model 3 just got a perfect crash test score. I don’t think there are any ICEVs that have scored a perfect 5 across to board. Perhaps one of the Volvos.

    Tesla, in September, massively outsold all the other luxury brands (BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.) in the US. The Tesla 3 was the fourth highest selling cars in the US in the month. Only the Camry, Civic and Accord sold more cars, and only slightly more. While costing less than half as much.

    Highest owner satisfaction in the business.

    Baffling…..

  22. 22.

    mikefromDublin

    October 5, 2018 at 4:01 am

    idk, im made a ton off of tesla…got in at under 100, sold at 300, just bought this last dip and made another 15% in 3 days.

    So please Musk, keep up the tweets.

    I honestly don’t get the musk hate. The solarcity/tesla combo of solar shingles => powerwall batteries => powering up your car and home is an environmentalists dream. Establishing a company disrupting the auto industry and revolutionizing space exploration driven by a dream is great.

    I don’t give two hoots at his outbursts at the shortselling hedgefunders. I’d taunt losers betting on my company to fail as well if I were in his position.

    btw….this sites comment section is nearly unusable for me ……non stop trying to get updates from advertisements slows it to a screeching halt

  23. 23.

    Quaker in a Basement

    October 5, 2018 at 4:34 am

    @mikefromDublin: Yeah, I call bullshit on these guys who are supposedly losing their life savings because of Musk’s tweets. Tesla stock is volatile. Over the last five years, it has fluctuated between $100 and $400 a share. Anyone losing money on the stock is engaged in short-term speculation, not long-term investing.

  24. 24.

    Tracy Ratcliff

    October 5, 2018 at 9:25 am

    I stipulate that Musk is a techbro whose only redeeming quality for lefties is that he believes that global warming i an existential threat. I repeat that Musk needs to take two months vacation away from his businesses and the internet. But I still am smelling “BUT HER EMAILS” when it comes to Musk.

    Anne didn’t link to another story on Ars Technica yesterday. A PR agency with Boeing as a client was astroturfing op-eds to newspapers in districts with senators on the space committee calling for NASA to delay or stop the SpaceX program to send astronauts to the International Space Station aboard their Dragon space capsule. Those op-eds went out just after Boeing had an accident with their space capsule that will require months of redesign. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

    For some of the other comments on the thread:

    SpaceX has stopped developing the Falcon 9 because they’re involved in the “commercial crew” program I just mentioned. To meet NASA regulations for “man-rating”, the launch rocket design must be stable. As it is, the Falcon 9 is much cheaper than any other launcher in that market segment, and has killed the Russian commercial launch market. The only competitor on the horizon is Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn whenever it gets operational, possibly in two yeas but probably longer.

    Tesla’s problems with the Model 3 were predictable. Lots of car companies have failed to make the jump from hand-manufacture to production line. Musk thought he could automate his way through, but the robots failed to meet expectations. However Tesla did make third-quarter production goals (barely) so Tesla has another quarter of cash-flow crunch before the Model 3 revenues should ease the pressure.

  25. 25.

    Petorado

    October 5, 2018 at 10:44 am

    I’ve found great wisdom in the nugget that alcohol brings out a person’s inner a**hole. Case in point — Brett Kavanaugh. Twitter is now the new alcohol. Thanks for making us aware of this Elon and Donald!

  26. 26.

    Fred Fnord

    October 5, 2018 at 6:51 pm

    @Sister Golden Bear: Hey! I resemble that remark!

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