If you’re a true Musk-hater, I’d suggest reading Atrios’ many, many posts about Elon (here’s today’s). I’m fairly indifferent to the asshole, and certainly no expert, but I know a bullshitting wannabe engineer when I see one.
His great success at Tesla was mainly grasping, correctly, that consumers with a lot of money will spend some of it on electric cars at a price point that Detroit and Japan were afraid of crossing. That said, is Tesla really successful? They had a bad Q2 in part because dumbshit Elon had them buy a bunch of shitcoin. The novelty of a luxury electric vehicle will probably wear off, and the next wave of electric car buyers (myself among them) are probably looking for reliability and value for money, both of which are issues with Tesla. He’s been over-promising and under-delivering on self-driving for years, and Tesla’s much-hyped solar roof is also way behind schedule.
But let’s also look at SpaceX and specifically at Starlink, his satellite Internet effort. It’s big news with digital nomads, so I’ve been following it, and, my take is that we’re in self-driving Tesla territory here. Starlink requires massive clouds of low-earth-orbit satellites to function, and right now they’ve orbited 2,500. They’re going to need 30,000. Still, as with most Musk projects, they’re already way ahead of their skis. What I’m hearing in the RV community is that the “RV offering” of Starlink is massively oversubscribed in some areas, and basically unusable. Also, customer support is horrible, and there’s real doubt that Musk can orbit 30,000 satellites in a way that will let us still see the sky. As with Tesla, the question arises about the number of people who will actually buy this product once it is priced at a point where SpaceX can make money. Starlink just unveiled a marine offering that costs $5,000 a month, while their current terrestrial offering is under $200/month. I’m guessing that the real price point will be well over $200, scaring off a lot of subscribers.
His stupid Twitter sideshow only illustrates what a capricious and careless fucker he is. I laughed reading this thread from an appellate lawyer who thinks that Musk may actually be on the hook for “specific performance”, i.e., actually buying Twitter. Who knows, but if Twitter can dangle that over his head, odds are he’s going to pay the $1 billion breakup fee for an acquisition that anyone who’s watched this fool operate knew wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, there’s the idiocy of requiring people to work in the office, as well as the sexual harassment and general assholery. This will lead to a drip, drip, drip loss of his best staff to competitors in this job market. There’s often talk of “flame out” when someone like Musk fails, but I expect it will be more of a long-term diminution, ending in acquisition of his grossly overvalued companies by industry competition for pennies on the dollar.
Saturday Morning Open Thread: Spread The Good News
PaulB
It’s not as simple as just paying the $1 billion breakup fee. The terms of the contract are such that he can be required to purchase Twitter at his asking price, should the courts so rule. That was pointed out to me yesterday here, when I made the same mistake.
Edited to add that it was jackal glc who pointed this out to me.
mistermix
@PaulB: Yeah, just to be clear: that’s what the lawyer I quoted in the post says — “specific performance” means buying Twitter. My point is that a credible threat of specific performance will mean he probably will at minimum cough up the breakup fee, which I assume he thought he’d walk away without paying.
PaulB
@mistermix: Ah, sorry. I read the bit about the breakup fee and thought you were making the same mistake I was.
Too early here on the west coast. But hey, at least I fulfilled my lifelong ambition of being the first responder to a Balloon-Juice thread, even if that first response was me sticking my foot firmly in my mouth.
mistermix
@PaulB: No worries. You’ve already exerted more mental energy that Musk did when he decided to buy Twitter.
PaulB
@mistermix: :)
germy shoemangler
germy shoemangler
PaulB
One thing I’m curious about: what is the specific mechanism that allows people like Musk (and Trump and, in the UK, BoJo) to rise to the top and garner such publicity and such lack of scrutiny of reality, to fail upward over and over again?
In the cases I’m familiar with, the truth was available to anyone who cared to dig but most of our media utterly failed to do so. Why are we making these assholes our “heroes” and is there anything we can do to stop the next asshole from ascending the platform?
different-church-lady
All I know is I see a eff-ton of Teslas in my modest near-burb and wonder where these people are getting their money from. And I’d rather they be spending it on that instead of a chrome-encrusted Ford F-300000 that will never pick up anything bigger than a Starbucks order.
RepubAnon
I’d guess Musk’s fall will be more like dropping a seed crystal into a hyper-saturated solution: once Musk loses to Twitter, there’ll be a class action suit over the self driving RSN (Real Soon Now) promises, then over deaths in Tesla “self-driving” accidents, and so on.
Musk will end up like the Far Side cartoon where a giant cockroach is slumped next to some drunks saying “I had it all big office, beautiful wife – then one day someone said ‘Hey, he’s just a giant cockroach!”
germy shoemangler
@PaulB:
America loves an asshole
Mike in NC
Fuck Elon Musk. Anyway, the best show on TV these days is “For All Mankind” on Apple, an alternate history of the space race in which the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon in the 1970s, and both are now in a race to land on Mars in the 1990s. There is a female president in the White House who has Nixon’s portrait hanging above the Oval Office fireplace.
Episode 4 last night had the Soviet spaceship in trouble, so the Americans went to rescue five cosmonauts, but things quickly went sideways for everybody. I need to watch it again!
Barbara
The main issue with electric vehicles is accessible charging — for driving longer distances and for people in apartment buildings. Tesla is far ahead of anyone else because it built a network, whereas others keep waiting for economic initiatives comparable to gas stations, which are not owned or run by automobile manufacturers. That line has yet to be crossed.
Ken
Is this the part where we learn that there’s a difference between having billions, and having assets that (marked-to-market) exceed liabilities by billions?
(Or I should say, “we are reminded” — it will be the business press that is once again surprised by this.)
WhatsMyNym
@germy shoemangler:
There’s a sucker born every minute.
Geminid
I think Tesla stock has leveled off at about $720 a share. But the Price-to-Earnings ratio is still above 100 to one. Toyota’s P/E was 10.5 last time I checked. Even if the company wasn’t experiencing manufacturing and service problems, I would not want to own Tesla stock.
Mike in NC
@PaulB: We have an infinite supply of corrupt assholes with designs on the White House: Abbott, DeSantis, Cruz, Noem, Cotton, etc. and they are beloved by the Beltway Media.
Splitting Image
@PaulB:
The underlying ideology behind modern conservatism is that rules are for little people. Therefore, if you break the rules successfully, you must be one of the big people. QED.
different-church-lady
@PaulB: Shamelessness is somehow disarming.
debbie
Listened to his statement on the news just now and his defense was weak sauce. He’s b.s.ing his way through it.
Kristine
@PaulB: I’ll never forget a long ago cartoon–iirc Arlo & Janis–in which Janis and a co-worker are discussing a questionable management decision and Janis says “They’re rich white guys. They must know what they’re doing.”
I think it boils down to wealth worship, even if the wealth is inherited. For some reason, way too many people equate it with intelligence.
HinTN
I have Starlink and I’m really pleased. I get reliable service and decent speed with no throttling like HughesNet.
Unless you’re planning to take your RV where there’s no cell service, I’d go with Nomad or one of the other cell service aggregators. I had it here in the boondocks and while the speed could be good it frequently wasn’t.
I wouldn’t have a Tesla if you gave it to me. I just bought a Hybrid RAV4 after looking at the all electric Volkswagen. Decided the infrastructure here in the south ain’t quite ready to support travel beyond the home charge radius.
Carlo Graziani
I’ll say this about Musk, then pull the hatch shut over my head and hide:
He is without question a World-class olympic-medaling asshole, and has always been. I’ve reserved judgment because occasionally, some World-class assholes who undoubtedly wound up forfeiting their immortal souls and burning in Hell nonetheless left behind legacies of value to the nation. The robber-baron industrialists of the late 19th-early 20th Century come to mind.
And the difference between Musk and the other wealthy dickheads of our age is that while people such as Bezos or Zuckerberg basically built nothing but websites, with at best some logistics to sell other people’s stuff, Musk channeled his asshole qualities into being an actual industrialist. If you think about how rare that is, in our era, particularly in the United States, one has to at least place him in a separate category from those other bros.
He certainly does overpromise, and there can be no possible doubt that he’s a legend in his own mind, and a liability to his two companies because of that. Tesla and SpaceX shareholders would probably be better off without him.
But look. SpaceX is a viable private space cargo launch company! Such a thing never existed before. I used to work on an astrophysics space mission, and saw enough of NASA’s launch procurement culture to despair that humans would ever solve the problem of getting to low-Earth orbit economically: NASA’s “solution” was the Space Shuttle, originally billed as “launch too cheap to meter”, but which in the end turned out to be so expensive that had there been free gold ingots available in low-Earth orbit, it would not have paid to go fetch them with the Shuttle. NASA deliberately choked off small-launch alternatives, and channeled commercial launch to large contractors using cost-plus contracts guaranteed to haemorrage money.
Musk was the first person to focus single-mindedly on price-per-payload-pound-to-LEO. He did it on spec, with mostly private funding. And SpaceX succeeded so well that its tech advantage over competitors such as Boeing actually make it a monopoly threat. That is a real industrial accomplishment. Starlink is bullshit, and may get him fired, but SpaceX is real, and will be a leading industrial corporation in the US long after Musk is gone.
One could say similar things about Tesla. Yes, those cars were aimed at trendy hipsters, but there was no mass market for battery-electric cars at all when Tesla got underway. It was a terrible gamble to assume that one would come into being. If it took a huckster with slick marketing to iPhone-wielding Silicon-Valley tech-bros to create one, well, so what? It’s not as if GM or Ford had better ideas at the time, or even much interest. Also, keep in mind that behind Tesla there are also large infrastructural investments in battery R&D and manufacturing, which are desperately needed right now, and which probably got started a few years earlier than they might have without Musk being an asshole in this space too.
To be clear, again, I don’t like him either. As far as his politics or his personality are concerned, I wouldn’t piss down his throat if his heart were on fire (another great James Carville quote). But he’s built some stuff that I think we’ll come to appreciate, when he’s been cast into The Lake of Fire for his sins.
OK, that’s enough. I see the incoming on radar already :-)
Suzanne
Musk is trying to become famous, a different kind of wealth. I find him an utterly familiar and uninteresting personality type.
HinTN
@mistermix: lol, I guess he was caught in his 54.20 brain fog.
Jager
One of the auto writers said, the new electric Mercedes makes the Tesla S seem like a historical relic. Ford’s electric F 150 stopped all conversation about the Tesla pickup.
Old Man Shadow
He is the king of mediocre, fugly assholes out there and they all want to be him.
Gin & Tonic
Those of you who are not reading Bloomberg’s Matt Levine on this subject are really missing out.
pacem appellant
I am here for the Musk hate! As a massive EV fan, I have to give Musk/Telsa credit for one thing: making EVs look like cars and proving there was a market for normal-looking EVs. My original Nissan Leaf looks like a Simpsons-esque nightmare. BMW still hasn’t learned that people what cars to look like cars, even EVs. Other than that, the man is trash.
My biggest gripe is that he over-delivers on a technology that WILL NEVER WORK (fully self-driving). And his company still hasn’t paid a price for false advertising or in court for the many accidents and fatalities it’s caused.
But that still doesn’t excuse his numerous SEC violations. He’s petty. He don’t know what free speech actually is and prefers to defend fascists. He’s polluting my skies with worthless satellites. He’s a narcissist of the highest caliber.
HinTN
@Carlo Graziani: Musk did a lot to push battery technology forward. That’s his greatest legacy. (I understand the attendant environmental issues but we’ve got to stop pushing carbon into the atmosphere.)
Van Buren
@PaulB: My guess is that the media would rather send out PR pieces than spend the time, money, and energy to do actual journalism.
prostratedragon
@PaulB: As if there were any need to dig!
When I say we have a cultural problem to solve I mean precisely this lionizing of banal fools as if they were “entertaining.” Professional clowns don’t expect us to get their acts without setting the context.
apocalipstick
@Ken: I still say that Elon Musk is the incarnation of Enron: grift all the way down.
HinTN
@pacem appellant:
My limited understanding is that those worthless satellites made the internet work in Ukraine when their other infrastructure got shut off.
Spanky
@Carlo Graziani: The fact is, NASA was doing perfectly fine in the LEO business. Delta IVs were basically the VW Beetle of space launches. The Shuttle was foisted on NASA by the DoD, primarily so they could launch their big-ass spy satellites without making much fuss.
Starlink is well on its way to fucking up the night sky. Fortunately, multi-exposure earth-based research astronomy can pretty much just chuck out the frames with Starlinks running through them, but the average citizen in her back yard will be screwed.
Cacti
Americans love a huckster, and Musk is one of the greatest ones who ever lived.
Another Scott
I assume that Elon thought he could have fun messing with Twitter with Tesla’s ever increasing stock price. Plus, his cachet and ability to grab eyeballs would mean that all the rubes would bid up Twitter’s value and he’d make a killing when he dumped it a few months/years later.
Of course, Tesla’s stock tanking, and Twitter’s stock tanking, and the lack of an actual business plan for Twitter making money (still), and getting way out over his skis in the purchase contact, and all the rest, means that he’s going to have to cough up real money.
It’s all a sideshow, but I hope Twitter’s lawyers make him cry and make him pay them a lot. He did real damage to their company (but it’s probably impossible to actually prove in court). Make him buy them, quit ASAP, and start something new.
There’s a Model 3 down the street, and a Model S a street over, and even a Plaid (with out of state plates) down another street. I’ve never seen the Plaid being driven. The cars don’t seem to attract that much attention any more (the Model S is 10 years old now) – I have a feeling that Tesla is going to be crushed by the auto giants in the next 5-10 years and Musk doesn’t seem to care (unsurprisingly, given his apparent personality).
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barbara
@Jager: We test drove Volvo’s new EV and liked it a lot but we have owned a Tesla for nine years and the answers we received about charging were not reassuring, like not at all.
Baud
@Barbara:
Charging at home or away from home?
Bill
I’ve heard Tesla doesn’t actually make money from car sales, it’s more tax breaks carbon offsets or something ? Is this right ? What actually is the business model ?
Betsy
Transportation planners just point and mock Elongated Muskrat all the time. His tunnels for cars are only his fourth or fifth stupidest idea.
Also everything tunneling has to be idiotic rubber-tire “pods” because he (like other techbros) can’t bring himself to say “train”.
See the Adam Something channel on YouTube for takedown after takedown, here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ACXaFyB_-8s — quite entertaining.
The guy is a complete charlatan.
Sebastian
@Carlo Graziani:
Carlo, you know how much I value your opinion but you are dead wrong on SpaceX. It’s not a shame, you are in good company. I myself thought exactly the same.
I recommend the YouTube channel Common Sense Sceptic for a deep dive into why.
In short, the reusability of stage 1 leads to massive architectural compromises, limiting the the type of payload and mission that can be performed. Musk was not the first to think of it.
Full disclosure, I am one of the leaders of TeslaQ, the Twitter community predicting Tesla’s and Musk’s downfall.
Jinchi
There was a science fiction short story long ago about a wealthy tycoon who manages to distort the night sky in a way that the stars spell out his name. (He has a heart attack when, plan complete, he realizes that it’s been misspelled.)
In any case, I’m not sure Elon cares if you can see the sky. He’ll be perfectly content to gaze at his personal constellation flying overhead, demonstrating his rightful place in the order of the universe.
Ksmiami
@Carlo Graziani: we are in agreement- I prefer Musk to the little hobgoblin at Facebook who basically stole our information and monetized it. That’s it. That’s the entire Facebook concept
trollhattan
@Carlo Graziani: Considering we relied on Russia to get hoomans to and home from ISS having Space X replace their role is damn timely. Not to mention cheaper. IDK how much of that success can be credited to Musk, since he acquires companies rather than creating them.
Ukraine is hugely grateful for Skylink because Russia (them, again) cannot jam it. Evidently the signals war in Ukraine is intense and ever-evolving.
Tesla is ubiquitous on California roads, guessing this is the only place that’s true. We need to redouble efforts to expand the charging infrastructure so folks stop considering ICE cars entirely, when shopping for their next one.
Sebastian
@Bill:
Pumping the stock.
kalakal
sab
Any post about musk i skip.
Sebastian
@Spanky:
It also turned out that 5G interferes with Starlink, making it soon completely obsolete.
Another win for Mr. BackFire.
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani:
Good comment, but Orbital Sciences would like a word.
A lot of Musk’s success is a consequence of having a lot of money to invest at a time when the technology is mature enough to build a market. That’s not nothing, but it’s not once-a-generation genius or something.
This is often the case – it’s not the Philo T. Farnsworth and Xerox PARC that make the billions, but they’re the ones who actually have the idea and show what is possible. Fast followers have a real advantage in some respects…
Cheers,
Scott.
Sebastian
@Gin & Tonic:
Couldn’t agree more.
rikyrah
Musk shyt all over his natural customer base. Those fire-breathing MAGA heads are not going to buy an electric car. And, if they did, it would be the FORD 150 truck.
I know that, in a few years, I might go electric..
But, TESLA will never get a dime from me.
trollhattan
@Bill: Tesla ran through the federal EV tax credit cap so it no longer is available to new Tesla buyers. Other companies have not, to the best of my knowledge.
State and local credits might still be available and IDK about carpool lane stickers (in CA).
Gin & Tonic
@Ksmiami:
He didn’t steal it, you gave it to him.
StringOnAStick
It will be interesting to see if Musk starts selling off his Tesla stock; corporate officers have to report their buys/sells and that data is public though often “old”. Musk hates short sellers with a passion so he’s no doubt been avoiding doing any major sells but if he’s forced to pay a fee for backing out of the Twitter purchase, then he can blame his sells (and the stock price drop that will cause) on the ebil big gubmint. His fan boys will love it, being the anti gubmint libertoonian they are. His fan base isn’t likely to see much attrition but his wealth will decline, and hopefully that’s the start of much, much more. A guy that mentally twisted shouldn’t have the power his wealth confers, plus fuck him for being such a huge self indulgent prick.
debbie
@Ksmiami:
Instead, we get the honor of burning alive inside his cars. Product sucks even more for that. Get this figured out before going on market.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
A marketing friend calls FB “permission-based stalking.”
sab
Stepkids, fifteen years since they lived here, just got more junk mail than us. Seems a waste of money and trees.
RWeaver
I find him kind of gross, mostly because of his casual Starship Trooper-esq lite fascism, but I think what Carlo posts above gives credit where it’s due. As for Musk being a wannabe engineer… I happen to be good friends with a person who was TA for the Introduction to Materials Science course at UPenn (a course for which I built the multimedia courseware) and he says Musk stood out for the utter perfection of his submitted homework.
Barbara
@Baud: We charge at home. We have a single family house with a driveway, but if you are living in an apartment or traveling long distance you have to be really committed to advance planning to make an EV practical. I think a lot of manufacturers were waiting for Tesla to fail and only jumped into EVs when that didn’t happen. Ford150 is truly special. Ford also has enough dealers that it could use them to jump start a charging network, which is what Nissan does.
Jager
@Barbara:
The base Ford Electric F150 has a 230-mile battery. The average commuter in California drives 15,000 miles a year, that’s 65 charges a year.
Ksmiami
@Gin & Tonic: who you calling we ? I never fell for that trash site
sab
@debbie: I am not on Facebook. Why am I getting suggestive pornographic e-mails wanting me to hook up with lucious local women ( I am cis woman happily married.) Who is buying my phone number and more importantly who is selling it.
joel hanes
In 2020, Musk persnoally defied the California and SF Bay area COVID policies at the Tesla plant in Fremont, and a bunch of those unprotected employees got sick as a result, and some died.
Fuck him.
H.E.Wolf
“The higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of its ugly side.”
Steeplejack
@Carlo Graziani:
No flak from me, but I would disagree somewhat about Bezos. Admittedly as a by-blow of their retail business, Amazon became a leader in cloud computing. I haven’t checked the stats lately, but last I looked Amazon Web Services (AWS) is more profitable than Amazon retail and is bigger than its competitors, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Maybe that’s not being an “industrialist,” but in today’s economy it’s probably the equivalent.
Eunicecycle
@Kristine: that’s exactly what I think. Of course he has inherited wealth (like someone else we know) which gives him a head start.
debbie
@sab:
Putin, not Zuckerberg.
Immanentize
Copying from the morning thread #45:
There is really not a court on the land that would rule (in equity) that Musk would have to specifically perform. It is likely, however, that an equity court (like the Chancellory Court of Delaware) will go to some lengths to make Twitter “whole.” So yes to the agree break up fee, plus plenty of money to make up for the pump and dump aspects (or did Musk short Twitter?) of Elon’s behavior. Like denigrating the company and it’s leaders when he specifically contracted not to during the purchase phase.
Also, I have seen a lot of BS about the number of bots being Musk’s ace in the hole and that Twitter will regret the discovery in the case. This is non-lawyer Musk-stan bullshit. The number of bots, which was actually fairly accurately reported, is not an issue at all in the contract case. It is a reason Musk is public ally clinging to for a publicity stunt gone bad. As someone said, Musk only wins if the jury is made up of his children.
420 dudes!
Sebastian
@Jager:
Commercial fleet orders for F-150 are through the roof. As are the ones for the electric Ford Transit. The Ford Transit is AFAIK the best-selling commercial van in the US.
These cars slot in perfectly into an existing ecosystem. There are hundreds of 3rd party products and options to expand or modify the cargo area:
Racks, tools, frames, rails, etc using standard anchors, connectors at set distances and positions.
Ksmiami
@debbie: eh I still think Facebook has done more damage to the world than Musk’s overall the enterprise- Facebook is the reason democracy is struggling
Gin & Tonic
@Ksmiami: Then why did you say “our information?”
Ksmiami
@Gin & Tonic: I meant overall- but sorry for the confusion
Sebastian
This is a good place to start if you want to look deeper into this deal and Musk in general.
Barbara
@Jager: It can work. I’ve been making it work for nearly a decade, but it’s easier with the supercharger network. California is ahead of the game for charging accessibility, and Europe is really making strides, so that should help.
Ksmiami
@Gin & Tonic: honestly I hope Facebook dries up and shrivels away
Villago Delenda Est
The sooner this vile fraud is stripped of his citizenship and deported back to South Africa, the better.
Barbara
@Ksmiami: Agreed. Musk is mostly a sideshow when it comes to social impact. I have family members whose brains have turned to mush through Facebook. They aren’t racing to buy EVs or quoting Elon Musk.
Tim C,
Personal Anecdote about the Tesla vs other makers.
I own a Chevy Bolt EV, it has some issues with around a dozen catastrophic battery fires over around 150,000 vehicles. Chevy and LG are shelling out billions to deal with the issue. I’m getting a new battery installed and a full reset on the warranty. Chevy hasn’t been perfect on the issue, but they are doing things car makers are supposed to do.
My neighbor owns a Tesla model Y. It’s fine, but has plenty of evidence of shoddy workmanship, things slapped together quickly and sometimes mysteriously failing. He can’t get much help. He refuses to use the self-driving after a couple narrow misses.
Not feeling bad about my choice at all.
Immanentize
@Jager: I paid 100 bucks for a fixed price on a Cybertruck. It was going to be a graduation present for the Immp from college. Now it looks like his master’s and phd will be out before the all wheel, multi motor version of the truck. But there might be better infrastructure in four or five years? Anyhoo, my 100 bucks sure looks like a really good investment given inflation, etc. Buy it, sell it, buy a Ford for less.
pacem appellant
@HinTN: I read a news article to that effect. If true, awesome! It can be a cool, useful tech and still be a terrible idea, cost-ineffective, and sky pollution at the same time.
counterfactual
I’m with Carlos, and will add that there are enough documented reasons to hate Musk that there is no reason to make things up or denigrate his real accomplishments. That leads in the end to Qanon.
On Tesla: to my knowledge, the number of car companies in the last 80 years that have gone from “some guys in a garage” to international manufacturers consists of:
Tesla.
Yeah, Tesla stock is overvalued. But Tesla has relatively low debt, and does not have acres of internal-combustion engine factories to dispose of. Now and for the next five years, the limit on the number of electric vehicles you can build is batteries, and Tesla has more battery factories and leases on Nevada lithium, and should keep that advantage for at least 3 years.
On Starlink, the anecdote about RV service sounds like “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too popular.” And there are large warnings about limited capacity as you sign up. The marine service is targeted strait at the cruise lines, and they will happily pay half or less of what they’re currently paying for much, much less capacity. With cruise lines, oil rigs, research vessels and freighters, Starlink will do fine.
On SpaceX: it’s just not a “private industry vs. government” thing. Jeff Bezos has spent billions on Blue Origin over 20 years and has produced about six BE-4 engines.
I’ve said before, Elon ten years ago was the libertarian bro you could sometimes talk sense to, but in recent months has gone full MAGA.
Tom Levenson
@trollhattan: I don’t think that was what Bill was talking about. Tesla made a lot of money selling credits to car companies that IIRC, were all about fleet efficiency numbers. That’s different from the tax credits individual buyers could claim for purchasing an electric car.
I don’t know if that market still exists, and in any event, as more major car companies build electric cars, their fleet numbers will improve.
Tesla is currently producing cars at a very healthy profit margin. Everything else the company does ain’t quite so healthy, but the company as a whole is showing an operating profit, I believe. I loathe Musk and would not buy a Tesla for overdetermined reasons, but strictly as a running business, it is a successful car company for now.
Tom Levenson
@Jager: I believe the base Ford 150 EV is being sold to fleet buyers; the rest of us would be looking at a much more expensive vehicle w. a ~300 mile range. Still a lot of charges, to get 15,000 a year, but I think the calculation is that anyone using it as a working vehicle is unlikely to run up that kind of mileage in a single day, and will be able to charge at base/home overnight.
As a road tripping vehicle towing a fifth wheel, it ain’t a good option. But that’s not the main use case, I think. (Though I have no doubt someone will buy it for that, and then complain bitterly about how much money they spent to get a truck that doesn’t work for them.)
Immanentize
@Cacti:
76 rockets in the Texas sky,
110 type 3s close at hand,
… followed by rows and rows,
Of the finest Sats to glow,
And tweets from his very famous hand.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It seems like at one point Musk had the sense to at lest listing his marketing people, turning electric cars from the strange things there before into penis extenders is no mean feat, but Musk started believing his own hype.
pacem appellant
@Immanentize: Consider the Rivian R1T as well. It’s high-end, but it’s awesome. (I am speaking from experience and bias).
TheOtherHank
I think people are giving Elon credit for the things that the companies he bought do. He invested in Tesla and then sued his way into calling himself a “founder”. He invested in SpaceX and somehow got to be in charge. They were working on LEO well before he got there; Starlink might be something he pushed, but it’s going the way of Tesla’s self driving (another thing he pushed).
His two actual personal accomplishments (besides good luck in investing in promising companies early) are getting a BS in physics and starting a company that made “what to do in our town” websites for newspapers in the early days of the web. Everything else is just wise use of the money from his apartheid emerald family wealth and the proceeeds of having his website company get bought out.
randy khan
About Starlink:
I have nothing to say about whether it can be scaled successfully to meet demand. We will find out, though, because Starlink won a bunch of bids to provide broadband to unserved areas at the FCC, and it will actually have to meet specific deadlines to get the money.
That said, while 30,000 satellites seems like something that could blanket the sky and make it impossible to see the stars, that’s just not going to happen. The area of a sphere at 300 miles above the Earth (a typical height for low earth orbit, but actually a bit lower than what Starlink is using) is about 228 million square miles, so there would be about one satellite per 7,600 square miles (bigger than Connecticut, but a bit smaller than New Jersey). Since the satellites are about 22 feet long and not nearly that wide, it would be very hard to see them unless you were looking for them with a telescope.
Sebastian
@Tom Levenson:
Tom, I am afraid you have been completely misled on this. Tesla is anything but a healthy car company.
I am more than happy to discuss and dive as deep as you want.
Doug R
Can’t believe you missed this:
LA Times: Horrific allegations of racism prompt California lawsuit against Tesla
Immanentize
@Tom Levenson: Fleet cars/trucks get turned over rather quickly, usually two years tops. So, considering what you are saying, I would expect a rather robust used truck supply in a few years.
C Stars
@Mike in NC: Thanks for the recommendation, we are desperately looking for TV/books/escapism in this moment. The kids are hooked on Lower Decks and Mr. Stars and I have come to the end of our Hacks binge and now have to wait for each episode to come out (boo)
Mr. Stars had, for a moment, a year or two of boy-crush on Musk. It always grossed me out. YEARS ago, when I still subscribed to that fucking NYT (or whatever you jackals call it), I remember a profile of him in the magazine. It was before Tesla was a thing. He seemed like an asshole then and I have not been convinced otherwise, despite everyone in my immediate circle here in techie Bay Area getting stars in their eyes about him a few years ago.
Jinchi
@Carlo Graziani: I fully agree with your take in Musk. Some of his ideas a complete BS, like the Boring company, others are pretty solid, like Tesla and the infrastructure he builds to support it.
He’s otherwise a typical self absorbed billionaire who thinks he should rule the world, but he’s a damn site better than men like Peter Thiel or the gang who gave us bitcoin.
Immanentize
@pacem appellant: will do, thanks!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@PaulB: failing upwords is nothing new, meet Athanasius Kircher, the scientific genius of the 17th C who wrong about everything. The guy was so inept he almost killed himself like seven times.
Tom Levenson
@Sebastian: Happy to be corrected. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Musk hater, so to learn that he’s less successful than his already deflated hype status would warm the cockles of my desiccated heart.
I’m just going on what the company reports in its quarterlies. Those report that they’re producing at a greater than a million cars/year rate; they’ve an order book that they can’t fill; and they are, apparently, making an operating profit on each car they produce.
I do know that they have huge capital expenses that are ongoing, and that their model line is very narrow and despite promised (ha!) isn’t expanding anytime soon. (Cybertruck, where are you? Semi? Sub-$30K Model 2? Bueller…Buelller…Bueller?)
I don’t think they’ll be the top selling BEV company for much longer, though whether that’s 2025 or somewhat later I have no clue. But I’d love to hear your insight.
MisterForkbeard
@Barbara: Which EV was that? I just bought their new C40 a few moths ago and love it, while charging is available all over the place. But then, I live in California.
different-church-lady
I still say if Twitter dies it was all worth it.
C Stars
@pacem appellant: Do you have one? My parents are trying to buy one but I think they are on a waiting list or something. I saw one for the first time the other day and I must admit it LOOKED very cool.
Near us is a new showroom that just opened up for VinFast which is a new EV out of Vietnam.
Tom Levenson
@Immanentize: ;-)
Not a pickup guy myself–not much need for it on the mean-streets commute between Brookline and Cambridge, MA (which I do by bike anyway). But I could see a lot of people being happy with a used king-cab F-150 EV.
Tom Levenson
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: He was not wrong about everything, but the stuff he was right about was by accident, and he would usually lie down for a bit and be wrong again when he rose from his nap.
different-church-lady
@Ksmiami: Facebook unquestionably has a much much much worse damage-to-benefit ratio.
realbtl
Unless you frequently take long trips the solution to EV range anxiety is simple. Rent a hybrid for those 2 week family vacations.
Sebastian
@Tom Levenson:
It’s too much to put in here, you can follow me on Twitter @rako_sebastian for a deep dive but in short: they’ve been fudging their numbers for years and burning through cash at a ridiculous rate.
Their liabilities are astronomic and they are not investing in R&D, service network, or anything else that avoids costly remediation afterwards.
Tesla is the next Enron/WorldCom and PWC might follow the fate of Arthur Anderson.
Barbara
@MisterForkbeard: Not sure of model, it’s good to hear that charging hasn’t been an issue. It is highly localized. The other issue to be aware of is loss of battery range. That really hurt the Nissan Leaf.
MisterForkbeard
@Tim C,: I actually tried to buy a Bolt this winter. The dealerships wouldn’t sell it to me, as they were fixing the battery issues.
But it’s a solid, affordable EV with a responsive manufacturer. I would recommend one to a lot of first time EV buyers.
sab
@debbie: Putin has no chance with me icky but enlightening. When I clear it’s not anybody real. Just russian trolls.
MisterForkbeard
@realbtl: We have two cars – a hybrid with a 25mi EV range /300mi gas range…. and a 230mi EV.
We use the hybrid for daily and city driving. We use the EV when I need to drive to work (50+ mi away) and we use the hybrid for longer trips.
It’s a good setup. If we had to just have one car the EV or the Hybrid would work, but most families are dual car these days anyway.
Doug R
@C Stars: If the kiddos like Lower Decks they might dig Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and The Orville.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Carlo Graziani: Musk sure seems the way you describe him. I would also add.
C Stars
@Doug R: I’m trying to convince them that it’s time to start on Strange New Worlds. We’re still slowly making our way through DS9, so we have a lot of Star Trek going on right now. I will have to check out The Orville, thanks for the rec.
Sebastian
@MisterForkbeard:
The Chevy Bolt EUV (!) is the best small BEV on the market right now, hands down. You should check it out.
JaneE
I would add racism, or at least acceptance of racism to his list of issues. CA has a lawsuit over the harassment in a Tesla facility.
I will give Musk the credit for kickstarting the mainstream EV trend, but like many innovative technologies, the first isn’t always the best or the most successful, and even the best isn’t always the most successful. But I see lots and lots of Teslas on the road, much like you would see Prius two decades ago. I do wonder where they are charging up. One charging station at the edge of your range is not a trip I would want to do.
different-church-lady
White. South. African.
trollhattan
Something akin to selling GHG emissions credits to polluting corporations? Did not know about that one. The glorious free market sometimes needs a little congressional nudge, I guess.
The remaining $7,500 federal EV tax credits are listed in this article. Will be interested to see whether congress reboots the program as more manufacturers cap out. EVs remain a tiny sliver of total sales.
trollhattan
@MisterForkbeard:
We’ve had Bolts via Zipcar and they’re plenty zippy, the newest models are approaching 300 mi range.
I won’t call them “attractive” but as driving appliances they’re perfectly cromulent. Surprisingly roomy, so clever interior design.
Ksmiami
@Tom Levenson: unless you’re cutting through Allston- there are no mean streets between Brookline and Cambridge.
Sebastian
@JaneE:
Yeah, Tesla is the BlackBerry of electric cars.
Mai Naem mobile
@PaulB: I think the individual reporters get enamored with the wealth and at the same time get a little intimidated by it. This ofcourse makes these people even more powerful gaining them even more followers and power. It doesn’t help when you see what Peter Thiel did with Gawker.
Citizen Alan
@Mike in NC:
Well that makes a bit more sense. For weeks now, I had somehow conflated For All Mankind with To Serve Mankind, and thought that it was a series based on that one Twilight Zone episode (the IT’S A COOKBOOK!!!” episode). Which was a great episode of the Twilight Zone, but I thought it was a little thin for an entire series.:)
Another Scott
In other news, what if dark matter doesn’t exist?
TheConversation:
Neato. And very satisfying to my gut.
Now do Dark Energy. ;-)
(via phys.org/news)
Cheers,
Scott.
pacem appellant
@different-church-lady:
My prognostication is that the announcement of sale to Musk was the beginning of the end of Twitter. I made this prediction when the sale was first announced. So we’ll see if I’m a Cassandra or a crank soon enough.
Tom Levenson
@Sebastian: What’s weird to me about the EUV is how little extra cargo space it has inside compared to the regular Bolt. I guess the back seat is more comfortable for passengers.
We’re going to be buying a car fairly soon–depending on when our son a) gets his license and b) actually needs a car, which will be (most likely) our current ride, a 2013 plug-in Prius.
We’re almost certain to get an EV, with a small possibility of picking up a plug in hybrid, and certainly, at current pricing, the Bolt would be on our list. Not sure which one , though.
MisterForkbeard
@Sebastian: We ended up buying a Volvo C40 for the same purpose. Great car, super comfortable, high quality… and much more expensive. :/
pacem appellant
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I am in agreement with Atrios on this one. Self-driving is a fantasy technology. It will never happen.
Also, I’m happy to be wrong. And I try not to get hung up on it or self-righteous, but faux self-driving is killing people. I’m a people, and don’t want to wind up dead. Driving is perilous enough with distracted drivers. Non-drivers is that much worse.
Citizen Alan
@Kristine: That is absolutely right. And so called christians are the worst. Jesus Christ said point blank “A man cannot serve two masters or else he will love one and hate the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” People who claim to be christians and yet who exalt rich people regardless of the morals and character of those people are heretics.
Immanentize
@Ksmiami: Really? Where do you cross the Charles?!
Immanentize
@Sebastian: Tesla is sufficiently capitalized and has enough of a manufacturing base, that it will never go the way of Blackberry -+ I expect a larger car company to first create a strategic alliance, get rid of all the shit brained managers, then eventually take it over.
trollhattan
@MisterForkbeard: We found a 10YO C30 with less than 20k for the kid. PERFECT car for her and has a “soul” if you will, versus a high mileage Corolla or somesuch I was afraid we’d have to settle for. Solid, like a rolling bankvault.
Jesse
Now Twittergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? Tell me true.
Immanentize
@Another Scott:
Of course not — elephants and the great turtle explain that!
kalakal
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Kirchner sounds great. He had a Victorian rival, Dionysius Lardner who was a great science popularizer who kept getting in public spats with histories coolest engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel where he made a public complete and utter fool of himself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_Lardner
Citizen Alan
@Ksmiami:
Obligatory.
HinTN
@Sebastian:
That surely wins the internet for today.
Tom Levenson
@Ksmiami: ;-)
Carlo Graziani
@Another Scott: Oh, Man. Orbital Sciences if EVER a company that deserved to fail was dragged over the finish line by a government agency, OS was that company. Those assholes had much better lawyers than engineers, had a board of directors that served as a soft landing for NASA Launch Services officials, and sent more payloads into the drink or into unscheduled atmospheric disassembly while thay were sorting out their Pegasus launcher than just about any other launch company.
But they had a lock on that contract, and payloads in that class had no choice but line up to be their goddamned guinea pigs. They fucked up one of mine, a Gamma-Ray Burst mission called HETE (later “HETE I”, because we managed to embarrass NASA into building HETE II) when an improperly- charged battery failed to set off the explosive bolts that should have released the payload for deployment. When Orbital’s press release remarked that the launch was a “successful orbital insertion” but that the payload “failed to separate itself from the second stage”that was a moment that I could have commited a capital felony.
Orbital succeeded because NASA Launch Services systematically excluded all competition for that class of launch. I know, because we tried and failed to get a ride on available alternatives, and the underhanded, corrupt actions that NASA LS took to prevent that from happening ought to have landed someone in prison. But there was no point in rocking the boat if we wanted to get launched at all, and eventually we did get HETE II to orbit, on a Pegasus. I had no confidence that it would work, but fortunately that time it did.
Sebastian
@Immanentize:
I am already exhausted arguing on Twitter this Saturday morning
Sadly, they are not. If you want to dig deeper, this here is a decent place to start:
pacem appellant
@HinTN:
In a similar vein, I have stated:
I was rounded mocked on Eschaton forum for this take, but I feel more confident in it every day. Nothing Musk or Twitter is doing or saying is proving me wrong. When Comcast buys Twitter, I’m taking a victory lap.
Ken
@Another Scott: But that spoils yesterday’s XKCD!
(Also, observed gravitational lensing is consistent with dark matter, and not with the “gravity works differently at large scales” idea. Which come to think, is another XKCD.)
Ken
Now that I’ve scrolled past the post title a few times, I’ve decided that the discussion earlier this week was wrong. “Moist” isn’t a creepy word, but “musk” is — even without the name connotations.
Ksmiami
@Citizen Alan: love the cartoon – as an IBM baby who started using personal computers in the 70s… bbs’ in the 80s and the first xerox emails – well tech world was destined to be a dystopian nightmare on most levels. And no one worried about the consequences- it’s only going to get worse
Another Scott
@Ken: Something something … clear, simple, and wrong.
You’re no fun. ;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steve in the ATL
@mistermix: zing!
Urban Suburbanite
@Sebastian:
I believe it was Jalopnik (might have been Verge) that spent a lot of time digging into Tesla’s finances and operation. The conclusion was the company can’t and won’t hit its production goals, and is propped up by subsidies and creative accounting.
And this was way before Musk embarked on this dumbass buyout deal or the handjob horse became public knowledge.
WhatsMyNym
@Sebastian:
It’s funny you say that, Blackberry’s software has been used in over 200 million cars already.
El Cruzado
@Immanentize: Considering his parental practices I’d bet Musk loses if the jury is made of his children.
El Cruzado
Silicon Valley code monkey here. Everything ruled by Elon is widely known to be a dysfunctional hellhole with HR practices that make your average Evil HR person recoil in horror.
Some people still give it a shot due to excitement about being part of the EV revolution or whatever other revolutions the companies are about. Quite a few figured they will do their time and cash out on the skyrocketing share price. Some of the above two groups actually manage to stay around for a while.
With the overvaluation party seemingly over and quite a few other EV companies setting up shop in SV, it’s pretty much a “the last competent engineer out please turn off the lights” situation.
BTW if you think Tesla’s manufacturing Q&A practices leave something to be desired, hoo boy do I have news about their software Q&A practices.
MisterForkbeard
@El Cruzado: Yeah. I work for another big Silicon Valley tech corporation, and I can confirm the the Elon industries have a fairly poor reputation and they’re known burnout factories.
I haven’t known anyone that directly worked there for a few years, but the overall rumors haven’t changed.
Mai Naem mobile
Whether its stock manipulation or distraction from issues at Tesla Musk’s antics just smell scam to me.
Sister Golden Bear
@JaneE:
For the most part they’re charging at home. It requires a mindset shift — instead of going to the gas station when you run low, it’s more like your cellphone. You just charge it whenever you get home, so it’s always got a good amount of charge, at least for around town.
Tesla’s investment in their proprietary high-speed charging network was a key factor in their success. One reason I bought a Tesla* was the ubiquity of chargers meant I could do road trips and be confident I could do recharging stops as needed.
Plus, Tesla was the first to have an extensive high-speed charging network, which is a game changer. At worst, it takes about a half-hour to go from running on empty to 80% charge, and another 15 minutes to fully charge. (To protect the battery, the amount of power drops as the battery gets full, so it can take much longer. In fact, it’s more time efficient to make more frequent stops, but only charge from low to about 1/2 to 2/3, since you get the max speed from the charger. For my Tesla 3, that would be stopping for about 10-15 minutes every 100-150 miles.)
Don’t get me wrong, I now despise Musk (as opposed to thinking he was the typically blowhard billionaire), and Tesla seems to think they’ll maintain first-mover advantage forever, so they’re likely to become a has-been. But whether it was Musk — or more likely his underlings — they did do things that really jumpstarted the EV market when no one was.
*Before Musk went full Lex Luther, and before there were many alternatives, and before there were much in the way of third-party charging stations.
Sister Golden Bear
@trollhattan:
Honestly, as a designer, Tesla’s looks were one of the things that cause me to choose it others, especially given the limited number of EVs at the time. It’s still a bit of an issue. I understand why VW’s ID.4 is a crossover SUV (they very intentionally made it resemble the same class of ICE vehicles people were used to buying — but I really don’t want to drive something SUV-like. Unfortunately, I can’t remotely afford the sportier-looking EVs that have entered the market.
trollhattan
@Sister Golden Bear:
Model S looks “right” to me: good proportions that visually reduce its large size, graceful, sleek lines, nice small styling cues that don’t call too much attention to themselves. The others all look out of proportion to me, especially the very odd X, but all say “Tesla” at a distant glance so are doing their job in that regard.
Lucids are a whole other kettle of electric fish and it’s fun watching them go at Tesla from the upper bound of the price range. They have a very tall mountain to climb.
Another Scott
@Carlo Graziani: Oooh. Hit a nerve, did I?
:-D
Thanks for the history.
My dad worked on some docking radar on Gemini for Grumman, I think. He never talked about it, but I’ve got a clipping from the company newsletter about it around here somewhere.
Rocketry is a tough business. Government contracting is a tough business. Working with NASA launch windows is a tough business. I’m not surprised that there were issues with your missions – sorry that I brought back some old heartburn, but thanks for the story.
SpaceX has done some impressive things, but they didn’t appear fully-formed from Zeus’s Elon’s head was my poorly expressed point.
Appreciated!
Cheers,
Scott.
Azhrie139
@HinTN: That’s funny because I can’t find any evidence about this among battery scientists I know. Maybe he did in the context of fitting and sizing the technology for cars, but even that might be a stretch. Also among scientists is known that Tesla likes to “borrow” research.
Another Scott
@Azhrie139: No time to check my recollection, but Panasonic bought Sanyo for their Eneloop battery tech, and Tesla and Panasonic are partners on the car battery factories. A commitment to buy enough batteries from a factory is important (Apple bought up all the solid-state memory chips for their iPods, once upon a time), but it’s not the same as inventing them.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.