https://twitter.com/JeremyMonjo/status/1527837400265035777
I doubt I’m going to be able to understand much of Ludicrous, but I may have to read it anyways. From a longer thread:
Journalists are like investors, but instead of money they bet their time and effort. What I saw at the battery swap station was so at odds with the image of Tesla in 2015, I knew there was a good chance investing in scrutiny of Tesla would pay off. It did. https://t.co/Cun6267Vup
— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 20, 2022
sitting calmly in my burning car, waiting for the youtube video to load so i can learn about the emergency manual door release button hidden under the window switches, thinking about what chumps people are for buying cars with "handles" pic.twitter.com/iry1VtaWol
— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) May 21, 2022
Tesla is the hottest car on the market.
Because it literally catches fire. https://t.co/pDhiTy2bgo
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) May 22, 2022
“Elon Musk’s Crash Course”: 3 key arguments from the Tesla documentary https://t.co/1mpeNuu4Xs
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 20, 2022
Teslabros getting FURIOUS that anyone may suggest it might be somewhat difficult to exit one in an emergency if the power goes out. Really to own the libs I think they all need to drive into a lake or inlet or fjord to show how ANYONE can do it
— HatKicksSandOnDershReaders (@Popehat) May 21, 2022
Tesla is going to be the next WeWork.
If you look at the history of Tesla's stock price, it was never based on car sales. It's always been based on hype from Musk and a vision for a future.
That vision was appealing to many, including liberal environmentally-conscious nerds.
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) May 22, 2022
2/ But with the Twitter acquisition, Musk has gone full alt-right. And where the previous stock price required the press to mirror fantastical, illogical claims about autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and a magical future? Expect more skepticism.
3/ Tesla’s stock price is completely divorced from any kind of financial reality. It’s worth MAYBE $150, and even at the new low if not worth $680. People are going to start digging into stock market questions, like “How profitable is each car Tesla sells?”
4/ An army of utterly unethical Tesla-hype media (profiting from their own investments) has convinced people to look past these fundamental valuation questions for a long time. Those days are coming to an end where more of the mass public sees Musk for the fraud he is.
5/ So, please bookmark this Tweet. Expect a Tesla stock crash soon. It’s going to go the way of WeWork, Theranos, Luna and all these other great scams of the 21st century. It will eventually settle of a fair valuation. Probably around $100.
6/ Quick addendum: My main comparison here is to WEWORK. It’s literally the first sentence. WeWork is still around, selling office space. Secondly, in comparing Tesla to Theranos, I specifically mean the silencing of critics. Tesla has a long history of attacking journalists.
7/ I read Musk’s recent announcement of a legal attack team as further intention to sue critics. Additionally, there are armies of financially-motivated Tesla propagandists hyping the stock. Theranos silenced critics and investors paid a steep price. The comparison is fair.
if your tesla catches fire you should consider yourself honored to be locked inside it. why should your tesla go to the duat alone
— flglmn (@flglmn) May 21, 2022
Not only do Tesla's provide a free Viking funeral, they decide for themselves when you've peaked and should be glad to go out in a blaze of glory
— Django Wexler (@DjangoWexler) May 21, 2022
randy khan
I suspect that Tesla’s real contribution, in the end, will have been getting all the big car companies – the ones with huge teams of people working on safety issues – to take electric cars seriously. And maybe it will turn out to be a good supplier of batteries to the real car makers, although the self-igniting cars maybe aren’t a good advertisement for the batteries, either.
randy khan
I actually came here to comment on Cole’s latest letter to the jackals, mostly to say that, in addition to the word picture that I perhaps would be better off not having in my head, I really appreciate the level of communication from him and WaterGirl on what’s happening and not happening. I know those updates are very frustrating to write, given the actual lack of information being made available, but they really contribute to the feeling that the people who run BJ have our backs.
Steeplejack
That whole Niedermeyer Twitter thread is good. Recommended.
JPL
‘@Randy, This is good news for Ford and GM. It might benefit Rivian, but I’m not sure that one gets off the ground.
debbie
Free Viking funeral!
zhena gogolia
‘@randy khan: I just commented downstairs that that was an excellent essay from John.
pacem appellant
I have a vested interest in the marketability of EVs(*). I cannot stand Musk, but the two things that I will complain about the loudest are:
1) Convincing everyone that self-driving was just around the corner(**)
2) tainting the broader EV market with his exploding cars(***)
* I work at an EV car company (not Tesla)
** It’s not. It’s never coming. Not ever.
*** Every exploding Tesla is one fewer car we’ll sell because a consumer sees a burning Tesla, thinks EV, and says juck it, I’m getting an ICE
zhena gogolia
‘@Steeplejack: I have/had zero interest in Musk, but I read Vanity Fair to my husband as he cooks, and we read everything regardless of whether we’re interested. So I read a profile of Grimes, of whom I had barely heard. When I finished the article, I said, “Well, she’s in an abusive relationship, isn’t she now?”
zhena gogolia
‘@pacem appellant: That is MADDENING.
Baud
That’s how a billionaire rolls coal.
Urza
That last tweet is magnificent.
MagdaInBlack
‘@zhena gogolia : I read that article too, and jeez. He’s a flake, she’s a flake, the whole thing is just weird.
And I cannot stand Musk. He’s a creep.
WaterGirl
‘@randy khan
The latest update will be up here in a few minutes. At least with John and me, you don’t get bullshit word salad, except that we pass along the 355 word salad for full disclosure.
randy khan
‘@WaterGirl
If nothing else, the commentary on the word salad makes the updates worth reading.
Roger Moore
I had Tesla stock from about 2015 until 2020. I thought Tesla was doing something good in getting EVs taken seriously, and I think Musk had a clever idea in targeting the high-end luxury market rather than the low-end economy segment. It was a good use of the limited supply of batteries, and it made electric cars seem cool and desirable rather than frumpy and shrill.
That said, I saw Tesla as being a very long-term investment. They were potentially going to make it big if they were able to become the dominant EV manufacturer and then EVs took over the market. I don’t know for sure how much of Tesla’s low stock valuation was really because of short interest and how much was a realistic evaluation of their profitability, but the price was pretty stagnant for a long time. When the shorts finally lost their nerve, there was a short squeeze that drove up the price, and I figured it was a good time to sell, since the stock seemed overvalued to me. Instead, it kept going up to the ridiculous prices it was selling at earlier this year. It really should be selling for something a lot closer its early 2020 price than its current price.
JWR
From the @PopeHat tweet: “Really to own the libs I think they all need to drive into a lake or inlet or fjord to show how ANYONE can do it”
It’s like all those Republicans voting in multiple locations or engaging in other voter crimes just to prove how easy it is to “rig” an election by doing actual voter fraud.
Except… the fraudsters always get caught! Go figure.
mrmoshpotato
If Elon goes down for this horse thing
??
Did it come out that he sucked off Mr. Ed?
Gin & Tonic
” It really should be selling for something a lot closer its early 2020 price than its current price.”
Elon’s working on that.
Jinchi
‘@pacem appellant
“1) Convincing everyone that self-driving was just around the corner(**)”
It seems like just yesterday, self-driving car advocates were lobbying to get humans banned from driving:
“Every year, about twenty million people die or suffer serious horrific (and permanent) injury every year, worldwide. With self-driving cars, a McKinsey study estimates that this number will be reduced by 90% using self-driving cars. ” – https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilsahota/2020/10/12/the-real-question-when-do-we-ban-human-drivers/?sh=7f506ec82baa
The credulousness of the media on this point was just incredible.
Roger Moore
‘@mrmoshpotato
He supposedly sexually harassed a flight attendant and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage. She did not appreciate this and wound up getting a $250,000 settlement. Plenty of people have pointed out that Musk just recently said something about never paying anyone off if his cause was just, so he can’t claim he was just paying her off to make her shut up.
Roger Moore
‘@Jinchi
If we reach the point where self-driving cars are massively safer than human drivers, I’ll be willing to talk about requiring them. Obviously we have a lot of work to get to that point.
pacem appellant
‘@Jinchi
And because of this hubris and the media’s credulous parroting of Telsa’s fabricated marketing slides, every single car company has an ADI team working on the unachievable goal of full SD. It’s just a phenomenal waste of money and resources.
Roger Moore
‘@pacem appellant
I don’t object to the car companies working on driving assistants and even targeting complete driving automation. Tesla’s description of their driving assistance system as “full self-driving” borders on fraud. Even worse, it has a cost in blood. Every time someone gets into an accident because they trusted Tesla’s self-driving claims, that’s blood on Musk’s hands.
cain
‘@randy khan – I think Tesla (let’s deassociate that fucker from the people doing the real work) is putting together the charging network. Being able to go in an electric car for long distance – that’s a pretty challenging lift.
That and starting the electric car industry – with gas prices pretty high, I think we will see many who will buy one for just going around the city.
Finally, most of us software developers know better than to trust software. It’s always full of bugs and corner cases that are relatively endless. It could be the code, it could be the compiler, it could libraries that depend on it – so many damn factors.
scav
‘@Roger Moore
Maybe that’s what the rolling crematoria are for: evaporating or at least toasting all the blood before it can adhere to Musk’s lily-white fingers.
CaseyL
I’ve told this story a few times, but: I worked as a temp for an auto repair place that repaired Teslas. It was an eye-opening experience, in the sense that I – who had rather liked Teslas, and was happy to learn more about them – decided never ever to buy one. They are flimsy cars, one, and that whole PIN-to-get-in and PIN-to-start and the whole car’s computer locking up if you don’t get the PINs right, just struck me as completely nuts.
And that was before all this… ungodly mess with Musk being a complete creeper and his cars bursting into flames WHILE LOCKING PEOPLE INSIDE.
Holy shitskies, kids.
Roger Moore
‘@CaseyL
There are good reasons car companies aren’t run like software companies, and Musk’s desire to run Tesla like one should be a red flag. “Move fast and break things” is a sensible approach when the worst thing that can crash is your social media app, not when it’s a car.
RSA
‘@Jinchi: People tend to see a natural progression from no automation to partial automation to full automation, with incremental improvements to efficiency, safety, or what-have-you along the way. This may be the case for some kinds of tasks, especially in a controlled environment, but for driving on the road it doesn’t work that way at all. We have decades of data to help us understand the no-automation case (people driving around without assistance of computers beyond ABS and so forth), and we have pretty good models and simulations for the full automation case (a networked computer in every vehicle, communicating with every other nearby vehicle). But in the middle? This is where the hardest problems lie, from an artificial intelligence perspective.
At the level of car-driver interfaces, we still don’t have a detailed understanding of the best ways for humans and robots (i.e. self-driving cars) to share control or even keep each other informed of the current state of the world. At the system level, we can expect decades in which we have a mix of AI-enabled cars and human-controlled cars, and we don’t have great models to predict how they will interact with each other.
It’s the wild West right now, roughly speaking, where we just can’t say a lot with certainty. But then, we have snake oil salesmen coming around to say that everything will be fine if we hand over some money. And people *want* to believe them.
Chetan Murthy
Roger Moore: My investment advisor put me in TSLA stocks a long time ago, and when I took over managing my retirement money, I was …. disturbed. Got out years ago, long before the stock went to the moon. And while sure I felt a little envious at times, I always also felt like “I don’t understand how he intends to support this valuation, and I’m not going to go all greater-fool on this”. So I stayed out. Gotta say, I’m glad I did, though I guess I’m invested in TSLA thru index funds in my 401k and such.
Ah, well.
Jinchi
‘@Roger Moore: “If we reach the point where self-driving cars are massively safer than human drivers, I’ll be willing to talk about requiring them.”
You and me both, but I lost faith in the tech industry to solve this problem when they declared they’d already managed it. Every time they insist things will get better with os updates I get more leery of the whole project.
Now Musk tells us he’ll only turn on the “full self-driving” option for Tesla-certified responsible drivers. Which makes zero sense, why would you need a responsible human driver if the car could handle itself?
Roger Moore
‘@Chetan Murthy
I hope I don’t sound like I’m sad I sold my Tesla rather than holding on and riding it to the moon. I made a very good profit on it, and that is real money rather than just paper profits. When it comes to investing, I’ll take modest realized profits over dramatic paper ones any day. I think it’s also important not to dwell too much on the smart things you could have done. Anyone could make a fortune in the market with the benefit of hindsight. Those of us in the real world will have to settle for something more modest.
Jinchi
‘@RSA: “But in the middle? This is where the hardest problems lie, from an artificial intelligence perspective.”
This is where the real solution lies, though. I think trying to replace the human with the AI is a mistake being made because developers are trying to find a short-cut. Humans are incredibly sophisticated in ways that computers simply aren’t and vice versa.
Especially when the developers start discussing ‘trolley problem’ questions, like under what conditions the vehicle will decide to sacrifice you and your family.
Jerzy Russian
Theranos is the dude that put of those stones in his glove and killed off half of all life in the universe? As bad as Musk is I don’t think he is that bad, and the comparison is unfair.
The Moar You Know
The manufacturers that come out on top will be the ones who already know how to make cars, not these companies that are learning from the ground up. Ford’s electric F150 is going to ruin Tesla.
RSA
‘@Jinchi: “This is where the real solution lies, though. I think trying to replace the human with the AI is a mistake being made because developers are trying to find a short-cut. Humans are incredibly sophisticated in ways that computers simply aren’t and vice versa.”
No disagreement here. You make a great point about ethics that also tends to fly under the radar in discussion of self-driving cars. Performance is just one issue when it comes to driving. Another, equally important but impossible to quantify, is responsibility for undesired outcomes. We’re all okay assigning responsibility to people who cause crashes or absolving people who got into unavoidable accidents. But we don’t have general agreement on who if anyone is morally responsible for a machine’s autonomous actions. (“We” to include AI researchers, ethicists, lawyers, and so forth, as well as the general public.)
RaflW
‘@pacem appellant
re slef-driving “It’s not. It’s never coming. Not ever.”
I hope that’s correct. To be selfish, it only really needs to be correct for about 30 years (25? 37? you get the idea).
I will gladly get on a train. I will fly. I’ll let other people drive me, though TBH that doesn’t happen a lot. But I am a driver. I want to drive. I do about 95% of our household’s driving more than 15 minutes from home.
A self-driving car is an outer circle of hell for me. Sooo boring. And I can’t read in a car. Never have been able to avoid motion sickness. Trains are fine. Busses okay. Cars. Nope! I can look at a map. I could probably look at a photo album. But not pages of text. Nausea city.
Major Major Major Major
Fuckem, I believe the saying goes
Ruckus
G&T
Elon’s working on that.
Seems like he’s doing his best in this regard.
Soprano2
‘@ Jerzy; Theranos is the company run by Elizabeth Holmes, who lied to everyone about having a machine that could get all kinds of information from a drop of blood. She’s going to jail. You’re thinking of Thantos.
Ian R
One of the annoying effects of the last decade of self-driving car hype is that it kept a lot of people from getting CDLs. Even the more realistic versions of the hype have basically boiled down to, “Well, last-mile is hard, but highway is relatively easy, so long-haul truckers are soon to be a thing of the past.”
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who would have gone into trucking saw that message everywhere and did something else, and now it’s darn hard to hire enough drivers.
Betsy
Electric cars won’t save us. Driving and cars are still terrible. Rubber tires masivelybpollute on a mind-boggling scale. Highways and streets designed for cars gut every city and town. Cars ruin everything. Electric cars are just a way to pretend they don’t and let us continue our car addiction.
The way to the future is Dutch. Bikes, trains, trams, buses, and yes cars, on roads sized for a vastly smaller mode split.
Betsy
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSduMF1eM-SPTSOOxVgvBwaSJIKTQdSrGY7OQ&usqp=CAU
moops
I like the level of smarts in my Tesla S. The stock assistance. It watches all around me, beeps when it thinks there is something that needs my attention and shows what it is worried about in the animation display. It will apply the brakes if I’m taking liberties with pedestrians or bikes, and it is actually better than I am at judging that the cars ahead of me have aggressively decelerated. I mostly let it maintain my position in that lane on highways. I’ve pushed my attention to obstacles and further look-ahead and behind functions. Its vision system is not good at obstacles on the road, but humans are very good at that. It is also not good at judging when accelerating is the correct defensive driving maneuver and I’ll take over. The take over logic is smooth now (wasn’t initially).
We are a team driving the car. I’m less mentally tired after driving and together we are safer. That is all we should expect from such systems for the next few decades and I wish the company marketed this aspect instead of the hyped vaporware options.
moops
“Ford’s electric F150 is going to ruin Tesla.”
North American car companies have not covered themselves in glory over the decades either. Despite huge advantages they have also snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I suspect Ford took their time with the electric F150 and it will sell well, but we gotta put fewer trucks on the road. 1/5 of the buyers need to own a truck with this power. I saw an electric Jeep the other day and thought about what the Wh/m mileage that knobby tired brick shaped vehicle could manage. We are going to rapidly run out of electricity supply if these electric trucks take off.