I had built this whole E-Commerce platform for him and his company (I single-handedly did all the coding, infrastructure, etc. Not taking any credit for their incredible sales team.) that was running in multiple countries, bringing in millions in sales.

But I started getting pretty bored once it was stable enough and just running and started seeking greener pastures.

And he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both. And he said I was a builder at heart. So I hate maintaining things. Which is why, when I helped hire my replacement, he was VERY much a maintainer, and he flourished in that second phase since it had reached maturity.

Using that framework, I think that the ratio of builders to maintainers at Tesla is not healthy right now. It seems VERY healthy at SpaceX, for example. They're innovating on new technology AND on efficiencies of the existing tech and logistics.

The builders got them to where they are (I'm still a generally happy Model 3 owner), but the maintainers are the ones who make the maintenance and service experience great, incrementally improve manufacturing, parts availability, all those unsexy things that have more to do with logistics, building superchargers etc.

Because they are too lopsided with builders, they keep inventing new stuff instead of continuing to innovate with EVs. For a while there were enough builder type challenges with manufacturing but even those challenges seem to be exhausted.

I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.

I don't think he understands that and there's really not anything I can do about it but move on.

There was a huge wake-up call as they kept working with this brilliant chef who all but refused to write down recipes, share processes, or do anything but run his restaurant the way he always had. He just couldn’t see that going from restaurant to franchise was an entirely different thing than running a great restaurant.

If I remember correctly, ultimately despite a bunch of different creative approaches, they had to back off.

I think about that a lot when businesses want to go from building to scaling.

I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.

It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining.

It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.

The way I see it is these companies need it, but it is impossible to satiate that need, so they must find the next best thing.

If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole. It is also impossible to staff all those positions with top talent at scale.

Raw talent and engineering is replaced with heuristics and policies and red tape.

It becomes like sailors operating a ship made with forgotten technology. They each have superstitions and operational knowledge about their little part, but nobody has the ship schematics.

Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.

It is impossible to know every detail, but it is certainly possible to understand and comprehend it. The ability to zoom out and zoom in is essential for senior leadership (even if some people appear unfit based on this criteria). Of course it works only if your organization is… ehm… organized and doesn’t look like a bunch of unicorns of all sorts and colors, so that you can extrapolate the methods of work of one team to another.

This will be the downfall of modern society. When nobody remains who understands all the tech we rely on it's only a matter of time before the whole house of cards comes down.

But the progression is not necessarily the same time scale for the product and the person. Maybe it was in the past, before computing.

People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator.

It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.

The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.

I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.

Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.

Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.

At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.

I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.

I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.

What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.

Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.

Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.

The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.

There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.

I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.

I wonder if they did a calculation to determine if this course of action will actually save more carbon emissions than it will cause in the form of road destruction and the need for refinishing them from the increased weight.

It's not being mentioned because it's a dumpster fire.

It has delivery rates that today are 30% of their contractual obligations for 2017, seven years ago now.

Pepsi, Sysco, UPS and Walmart have or are all given up and gone to competitors.

Musk even implies that the outlook won't improve there. Blames battery availability, actually.

EV trucks should have a shoe-in for lot tenders, it works well with the recharge cycle, would work with drop in batteries, etc., but Musk wants his on the Interstate, regardless of feasibility.

He's also managed to convince the faithful that no-one else is doing or capable of doing commercial sized EVs, despite BYD having 60,000 electric buses operating, and others.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.

It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.

IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.

Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.

While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.

Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley

And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking.

With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently.

Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.

I think the problem most people have with the BMW trick is that they include the feature physically, but disable it. That does almost smell like rent seeking, but I think it does not quite get there. Manufacturers routinely hold back a bit and don't deliver maximum capability. For reasons like emissions, or longevity, whatever. This isn't much different IMO, if you're not paying anything for it then the fact that they included it anyway is immaterial.

Probably the most common kind of rent everyone thinks of, property rental, is also not rent-seeking. There is value in what is being provided.

To go back to a car analogy, it would be like BMW engaging the brakes on your car and then charging you a fee release them so you could drive (even better, making it legally required to pay the fee in order to drive on public roads). They're not providing any value at all, and then demanding money for it.

Example: a utility company lobbies for a law requiring utilities to charge a junk fee.

Non-example: I charge someone to live in my spare bedroom.

Tesla is offering use of something they built (Superchargers, self-driving software, etc.) in exchange for a fee. They aren't gaming the system to force anyone to pay. You might not like the pricing model, but there's nothing economically wrong with it.

[*] and more and more all the rest of them as well.

And in the context of this news I don't see much innovation just some cost-cutting to continue to prop up some moonshots to the detriment of the automaker portion of Tesla.

Would Optimus survive as its own startup ?

Tesla isn’t building a robot because a scrappy team in the company discovered an opportunity for innovation. They’re doing it because the CEO suddenly demanded it between doses of amphetamines.

Tesla would look like a big company with a startup mentality if they were pumping out new automotive products that made some level of sense.

Hyundai and Kia more closely resemble what this would look like in a large company. All their new cars have unique bespoke designs and a laser focus on giving customers a compelling offering in every category.

But car sales are down across the entire market, this isn't exclusive to Tesla or EV's. Interest rates are just too high for your average consumers and discretionary spending continues to drop. It's myopic to think Tesla are doing something wrong without looking at the state of things.

They aren’t at the point of disrupting themselves, this is like if Google terminated search in 2004. It’s idiotic, period.

The answer is probably for big companies to let themselves get big but then start investing in the startup ecosystem. New things that aren't a good fit for BigCo should be done in actual startups.

I think trying to put everything under one umbrella is actively harmful. In its most extreme it gives you the Soviet politburo. I've speculated before that the real reason that capitalism seems to work better is because of this multiplicity of organizations allowing the system to route around dysfunction. When everything is all one big corporation (as it was in the USSR) dysfunction in any area becomes fatal and cannot be recovered from.

Tesla is the perfect example of going corporate.

The ark is almost Shakespearean. Pioneering renegade builds an empire, lets it go to his head, and leads two thirds of it to ruin. I just hope spacex escapes the same fate.

I trust her, and think she’s a capable pair of hands.

SpaceX's path is also economically rational. No cyber space yachts. Just rapidly improving customer cadence, capability expansion, and margin bumps.

Tesla, on the other hand, could really use his creativeness, practical realism and will-to-succeed focus again.

Her age is relevant when discussing the future of SpaceX, considering the median retirement age.

That's just the standard tech everyone likes in cars in the year 2024. There's also the lack of physical windshield wiper controls, physical highbeams, or physical climate control buttons. (Everything is tablet-only for the ultimate cheapness / low-end experience).

----------

The funny thing is that we're in a situation where a 2016-era Model 3 has a better driving experience than the refresh. Well, you know, until they software-disabled the Ultrasonics and RADAR units to make the older model worse.

They did have it years ago. That's the insult.

Elon is specifically removing features and trying to sell a worse car to people. Here we are nearly a decade later and people are seriously asking "what's wrong with a Tesla??"

Well, have yall seen what the Highland Refresh has ___removed___? That's my point, its a worse car now.

Of course now they've gutted this team perhaps that won't be the case for long

That and the phone key never working, especially when it was raining and I was holding a child and groceries… that was it for me. Traded it in for a gas car. I’m not pumped about oil changes but at least the company won’t be able to remotely deploy bugs to my working car features

I've never had auto sensing wipers, and am curious. Do they actually make enough of a difference to be worth the added hardware?

The manual wipers with controls on one of the steering column stalks in my car are so little effort to use that I usually am not even aware of it. I see rain on the windshield and then I see the wipers deal with it and have to infer that I must have started them because that is much more likely than someone surreptitiously install an after-market automatic wiper system.

About the only time auto wipers are handy is when you're driving through an area where the precipitation is highly inconsistent, torrential downpour one minute, a light sprinkle the next.

Of course, Tesla doubled down on their automatic wipers by removing the stalk. -_- In my 2019 Model 3, I can't change wiper behavior on the stalk, though there is a button on the end that if I press, it forces a single wipe, or continuously wipes if I hold the button. It also causes the display to show the wiper speed adjustment UI, and allows me to tilt one of the steering wheel controls to change the setting, so I don't HAVE to use the touch screen. But tbh, I'd still rather just have a stalk with a knob that sets the setting.

They have a shortcut but still requires you to look at the screen in the middle. I don’t know how this car is considered safe

You didn't even mention any of - fuel mileage, road noise, driver fatigue, comfort of seats, performance of HVAC, visibility, crash safety, passenger comfort and entertainment, storage volume, leg room. You know, transporting meat sacks safely, comfortably and cheaply.

I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important. Personally I think they're a distraction from the fact most cars today get the same horrible mileage they did 20 years ago.

If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

And that is what EVs are. So far they're mostly focusing on the core product and have not spent the time or money on the fluff.

I have expectations. If I just wanted to safely transport people from pointA to pointB reliably and efficiently, the answer is a Toyota Corolla Hybrid at nearly half the cost.

If you're competing against $40k vehicles, then I think its fair to compare to... I dunno, an Ioniq 6 or something? Full EV, faster charging, better tech, better road noise, etc. etc. etc.

Tesla's core product, the car, has worse safety, tech, and other features than any competitor. And with regards to the Highland update, it doesn't even add any of the recent innovations that are "fashionable" in today's day-and-age.

Its 2024. A freaking Corolla has some of the features I listed above, at again, nearly half the price of a typical Tesla. Tesla's tech stack is severely out of date even with the update.

> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

I think that's called a Ford Maverick. Ford Maverick ain't 70mpg, but its cheaper to drive than supercharger / fast chargers (where costs skyrocket for EVs to 30+ cents / kwhr).

Things like "pop out" door handles and steel body panels are fluff. A steering "yoke" is fluff. Side glass that can withstand a steel bearing is fluff. Constant (broken) FSD promises are fluff.

Features like a HUD or stalks on the steering wheel would make a driver's experience better and more comfortable. The former they never added, the latter they removed (probably to improve margin).

It is a normal, small, city car. Windscreen wipers on the usual stalks, knobs and buttons for climate control, etc. In part because it lacks some electronic safety features (lane-departure warning, automatic emergency braking) it has a very poor safety rating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Zoe

This one I actually think would have been somewhat useful, presuming it was cheap enough to actually use. I don't throw steel bearings at my car, but I would imagine that strength probably carries over to stuff falling out of trucks, rocks being flung by tires, etc.

It's not world-changing, but it would have been useful.

You can't fight physics. A gas-powered sedan weighed down by all the modern safety requirements can only get ~43mpg on the highway.

A hybrid boosts this to ~55mpg and also greatly improves city efficiency.

Above those numbers, you're looking at engines that are severely underpowered (1.0 liters) or is more EV than gas car.

> I personally think it's because vehicle manufacturers have spent the last ~20 years not really improving the core vehicle at all, and instead convincing people that massage seats and car play are actually important.

Well, yes. To please the American consumerist mindset, you have to keep inventing new features even if the new feature is a complete gimmick or just a subscription, or taking out physical buttons (e.g. all strictly negatives).

> If someone made a car that was comfortable, easy to drive, had plenty of storage and was super cheap to drive (like 3l/100km / ~70 US MPG) I'd be all over it.

At that point why not just wish for a magic horse that flies or something. 70 MPG is an EV number. You'll never get a gas car that gets that mileage.

Meanwhile in 1988 (36 years ago!) one could buy a Honda CRX that got 49mpg on the highway.

Weight is indeed the enemy here. To cut energy consumption and emissions we need to rethink the madness of 4000lb+ cars. I want to buy a 1600lb car with mindblowing mpg numbers using modern engine technology.

My old 320d did those on the motorwaym and more sometimes. It wasn't the average, but given almost all my driving was motorway, it wasn't far off.

The fact that sales dropped off a cliff this year is also interesting. What meaningful happened in this period? More competition from other manufacturers in the EV space? Market saturation (the addressable market of people that would buy EVs was already covered)?

Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but how does him getting the $56B not crash TSLA stock and the ultimately the company? AFAIKT TSLA has only made about $32B in profit during it's entire existence as a company (and that could be an overestimate - I don't think it accounts for earlier losses which would take it closer to $27B). So why should Musk get almost 2X that? Why would any shareholder (other than Musk) vote for this kind of payout?

The vote is basically on if the shareholders want to honor musks 2018-2022 comp package, which was recently thrown out.

The deal was that if Elon got the stock to 600 billion for shareholders, he got to keep 50 billion.

All that being said, I would be pretty surprised if this outcome wasn't mentioned as a risk to the board or Musk. They're talking about paying him ~10% of the company's _market cap_ as a bonus, and almost double the revenue the company has made in its entire existence. I'm not terribly surprised that a judge looked at that and immediately thought "breach of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders".

That brings up an awful lot of questions. Does it really take $50B to motivate him, given that his wealth is largely denominated in TSLA stock anyways (meaning he suffers if the stock price drops)? Is there really no one who would do it for cheaper? Firing Elon and hiring a $200M/year CEO would save the company like $50B; why is the board so confident that Elon is going to provide more value to the company than saving $50B on labor costs?

Perhaps paying Elon is the right move to make. I'm dubious, but I'm also not a shareholder, so my opinion does and should mean basically nothing. I do hope that if the shareholders vote to approve the bonus, they're allowed to pay it out. They're adults, they should be allowed to do what they believe is in their best interest.

The question raised later was not if the shareholders were adults allowed to approve it, but if the information they were given about the board negotiators had sufficient disclosure.

Inadequate disclosure on paper legally opened the door to questioning if the negotiator of Health fiduciary duty to the shareholders.

My personal opinion is that a different CEO then Elon could not have generated 500 billion dollars of irrational hype. Additionally, I think that if Elon left in 2018, there could have been substantial reputational damage to Tesla.

Negotiations between two parties who both stand to profit heavily are tough. They are tough because Leverage is based on who is more willing to self-destruct and walk away

Could the board have negotiated a better deal if they weren't buddies? Probably, but that's why board composition matters.

The judge said they thought Musk would have made the milestones without the comp because he already had skin in the game.

Ex-post facto recontacting is just icky overall.

Public companies are strange creatures. You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.

No, you'd expect it to be tied to the market's assessment of the company's total lifetime value. That will hopefully be informed by revenue and profit, but isn't limited to those, as disruptive companies might be round the corner about to wipe it out, or vice versa.

Which is probably a bit counterintuitive for most people. At least for me it was.

Would the same apply to unicorns? Probably not, because they're special.

So this is beyond bonkers for me - literally about to hand cash over while holding my nose, but then they kill one of the major reasons I was willing to overlook Musks behavior?

Seriously, WTF is this guy on, and more importantly, how much? Nobody sober and sane would do this.

Yo do throw bossy tantrums that way. I mean, he flat out wrote he made an example of the sacked team:

> “Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard-core about headcount and cost reduction,” he wrote in the email seen by The Information, which also announced the end of the public policy team led by departed executive Rohan Patel. “While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so.”

But sure, it was a planned move by a genius CEO.

You picked my curiosity here. What exactly is there to patent here? AI training is being done a computer and that computer happen to be physically located inside a car. How do you patent the location of a computer?

Except Elon seems to have confused this with "driving innovation." The two __can__ correlate, but do not need to. Like I think it is fair to say that Tesla did push the other manufacturers to start pushing electric cars, but it is hard for me to argue that Tesla led the way through innovation. Not that they didn't do innovative stuff, but that the contribution here wasn't all that large.

The cheaper CT and whatever else he's promising will never see the light of day...

And he's delivered 36 of 100 Semis promised for 2017, and has basically implied there's little chance of that situation changing (blaming battery availability).

Try planning a trip from Seattle to Madison, WI and let me know how normal that feels for you.

Try driving from Mt Shasta to Sacramento in 115 degree heat and see how many fast chargers are working on I-5

I don’t think I would call EVs mainstream until your average renter has access to a home charger. It simply will never be mainstream if people have to worry about when they’ll be able to get their next charge.

All new apartment construction and shopping centers near us includes some EV chargers, so renters are slowly catching up. We're getting there. Until then it will be driven by homeowners and fleets.

The vast majority of apartments still have no EV chargers and simply aren't moving to get them installed at all.

I myself was in the market for an EV but would have trouble charging at my apartment. I messaged my apartment complex about installing EV support and whether they considered it and they basically sent a 1 sentence email which can be summarized as "lol no".

When temps are above 110, which is at least a month of normal summer weather, you will be lucky to have 2/5 chargers operating at those sites. And they will be throttled to 30kW which is a pitiful fraction of the advertised 350kW rate

EA didn’t install the transformers in the shade. They don’t work, period. This was my experience two summers in a row.

Imagine having kids and a dog in your car for a road trip and having to park for over an hour in direct sunlight at 3pm while you squeeze enough charge to limp through the wastelands of NorCal. And I-5 is still your best route.

I haven’t even tried the ride east through Idaho and Montana. In winter it will be much riskier and you have to put a lot more faith that the station is working as expected. The mountains and freezing temps will also add a huge variance to your estimated range.

We stayed at Leavenworth,WA in a cabin and there were exactly two EA fast chargers at a Safeway on the mountain. Woke up one morning in 20 degree cold with 25% charge and wasn’t sure I could even make it

My definition of mainstream: nearly all major automotive companies offer EVs that are mass marketed.

EV charging is essential to owning an EV. Almost all EV manufacturers ask that you keep your EV plugged in practically as much as possible for battery health. In most apartment dwelling this is currently not a possibility and there isn't enough incentive for many existing complexes to install anything in much of the country.

CA has only 1 fast charging station per 5 gas stations, and they are by far the most kitted out state

And the biggest footprint of those is Tesla, which still is restricted to only Teslas

And a fill up with gas takes 5 minutes compared to up to 45 minutes at DCFC, assuming you aren’t waiting for one.

So yes “all major automotive companies offer EVs” but the mainstream experience that drivers expect is nowhere near there for an EV unless you own a home and have installed a charger.

Something tells me there isn't a chance in hell of that happening.

Insanely wealthy person is not interested in “making money per se”?

Nobody amasses this wealth without being financially obsessed. No amount of ‘effective altruism’-esque “I need more money so I can do more amazing things” justifies it, especially when you put so much on the line to…buy a social network and as a vanity project.

Elon Musk is not a God.

Most of the ones I know consider money as a tool that can be used towards something, not as a goal by itself.

And if you need a massive amount of money to achieve a goal, you obsess about money. Elon (ostensibly) isn't building soup kitchens and community gardens.

> How many high net worth individuals do you know / have you met?

If you don't think wealthy people obsess over money, I'd honestly wonder how many YOU have met. Not fretting over small amounts of money, or not being ridiculously frugal does not mean that wealthy people do not stress over money.

I'm sorry just... what? Being in a position to sell products to a robust and demanding market is a bad thing? What in the Business Major brain are we saying here?

And frankly calling their products "mature technology" feels like a stretch given Tesla is regularly stubbing it's toe on pretty benign design problems that numerous other automakers have had nailed down for decades.

Fast-forward to 2024, while SpaceX is still delivering science fiction, Tesla is now an EV automaker among many- you can buy EV cars from any automaker and there is a deluge of cheap brands coming from China. Is Musk interested in owning and running a regular car company? I don't think so. I think he's desperate to find something else that is cool enough and incredibly high risk and high returns. Maybe using the capital and infrastructure from Tesla itself- and humanoid robotics seems a good candidate.

Because we can't buy vehicles from the Chinese competition.

>However Tesla is still far ahead of the competition

Are they?

Did anyone catch the recent All In Podcast? They were talking about Tesla's robotaxi lead, so Calacanis showed them a video of Waymo operating robotaxis today and Chamath and Sacks had literally never seen it before; "This is amazing!".

Pretty easy to believe Tesla is the leader when you don't know what's out there.

FYI - because Chamath and Sacks haven't heard of Waymo operating robo taxis before (which is mind-blowing that they didn't know that considering a good portion of their job is an alternative take on the news) does not mean the rest of the world doesn't.

Tesla is indeed way ahead on self-driving.

In terms of Chinese EVs - that will certainly bring in a lot more competition but they aren't the same class of vehicles. It's like comparing fiat 500 and an audi a6.

For actual self driving, Tesla is going to need a fully revamped sensor package on the car, as well as major updates to their core software. Id be shocked if they are operating revenue service within even a few years

How are steep and hilly roads of San Francisco similar in style to flat, grid-like roads of Phoenix?

... Why on earth would anyone listen to this? I mean, based on this, it's people who don't know even the very basics of the market talking about it anyway.

(I'm still struggling with the idea of _Jason Calacanis_ being the voice of reason, in any context...)

And he has to make this gamble because Tesla's fundamentals as a car company is going down the drain and its entire valuation hinges on the fact that they are not just a car company. That's why he's constantly announcing new products (robotaxis, humanoid robots) that are nowhere close to materializing, making visits to China to ink HD maps deal with Baidu for FSD and claiming to spend $10B on AI infrastructure this year.

He seems to be in forever stock pump mode, so much so that Tesla's best product till date might just be its stock.

A lot of companies seem to be gutting everything to the point where their only product is their stock.

The problem is, while that worked well for a good 10 or 20 years, it seems that people are now starting to catch on to the scheme. But I'm not sure that means that you can just stop doing it. As someone elsewhere in the thread pointed out, dragging things out as much as you can is probably preferable to a sudden and brutal value correction for just about everyone with actual skin in the game.

Doesn't answer your problem issue - though the real dollar cost of investment and training is lower.

Given that, while using it you do not regain any time or attention that you would have otherwise spent driving. That doesn't mean it isn't impressive. A car that can drive itself like a 15-year-old on their first outing with a fresh learner's permit that needs constant coaching from a parent or instructor is very impressive, just not useful.

I will say that in clear conditions on long highway trips, basic Autopilot does have utility. It does allow you to divert some attention from keeping the car between the lines and matching the speed of the car in front, and use that attention to keep an eye on the large traffic picture, and arrive to your destination slightly less fatigued. Using FSD on city streets seems like the opposite of that to me, an increase in stress and workload that currently provides no practical utility.

E.g. Waymo was at 17,311 miles per disengagement (human takeover) in their 2023 report, and they're not even the top. Zoox was the top at 177,602 miles per disengagement, which is shockingly good if they're not gaming those numbers with tiny service areas or something.

I don't think Tesla publishes their disengagement data, but what I can find crowdsourced from their users is pretty bad relative to the above. The most optimistic number I could find was from 2022 at ~400 miles per disengagement. That's not even very good for 2022; Mercedes-Benz was at 1,400 miles per disengagement, and I didn't even know they had a self-driving division. Nissan was at 149 miles/disengagement, which makes Nissan their closest competitor by capabilities (the next highest after Tesla was QCraft.ai at 863 miles/disengagement, no idea who they are).

There was a time when HN would recognise technological acheievement on its own merit, without allowing personal politics to cloud our judgement.

But sadly, we're in a perverse era of political tribalism where FSD is bad because https://elonbad.com/

It will get better but definitely does not live up to the “full self driving” marketing hype. That kills the magic.

Meanwhile look at Waymo. They don’t make a lot of noise. They take safety really seriously and keep on improving actual “self driving cars” city by city. Zero people dead.

I’ve sat in both. FSD was a great demo, but Waymo truly felt like magic. No driver at all!

It has a very long way to go before it is better than a human. We won’t know the true stats until it is allowed to operate without supervision.

Source: https://www.teslafsdtracker.com/Main

For this statement to be correct, we’d need to have full disclosure of all travel using FSD at any point, accidents which happened anytime FSD was active or had been recently deactivated (for example, that guy who fell asleep counts even if FSD deactivated a minute before the vehicle crashed), and be able to compare that to the same trips driven by human drivers. You especially need to avoid including incidents in the human stats which are in conditions where FSD would do even worse.

FSD will be "close to magic" when it's 11pm on a Pittsburgh night in January, with the snow coming down, road markings barely visible, if at all, and it still gets you home.

If FSD didn't work in those conditions, and this encouraged you to wait it out, then it might have just saved your life (or the lives of other road users).

It's a sad state of affairs - though I imagine its mostly cross-over of younger generations blending in their polarizing reddit politics over here. It is a dilutive process unfortunately.

I also (personally) know of several non-ML offers that were substantially higher than FAANG. Though even within FAANG only Meta and maybe Google (and Amazon at hogher levels) are very competitive. Meta and Google likely have better growth prospects though with better refreshers, bonuses, stock growth, etc. But up front Tesla AI offers are definitely very strong. Even then I'm not sure its worth the stress.

August '15: Uber announces its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish the Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in Pittsburgh, focusing on self-driving technology research and development.

May '16: Uber begins testing its self-driving Ford Fusion vehicles in Pittsburgh, marking its first public demonstration of autonomous vehicle technology.

August '16: Uber acquires Otto, a self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineers. This ended up with a lawsuit over stolen IP that was a large setback from what I remember.

Sept. '16: Uber launches its first self-driving ride-hailing service in Pittsburgh, using a fleet of modified Ford Fusion's. Safety drivers are present in each car to take control if needed.

December '16: Uber starts testing its self-driving cars in San Francisco without obtaining the necessary permits from the CA DMV. The DMV revokes the registration of Uber's test vehicles, forcing the company to halt its operations in the city.

March '17: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Arizona, taking advantage of the state's friendly regulations for autonomous vehicle testing.

March '18: A fatal accident occurs in Tempe, Arizona, when an Uber self-driving vehicle strikes and kills a pedestrian. Uber suspends its self-driving testing program across all cities in the aftermath of the incident.

July '18: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in Pittsburgh, with additional safety measures and limitations on the vehicles' operating conditions.

March '19: Uber receives a $1 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, Toyota, and DENSO for its self-driving unit, valuing the division at $7.25 billion.

June '19: Uber resumes its self-driving tests in San Francisco, having obtained the necessary permits from the California DMV.

Dec '20: Uber sells its ATG division to Aurora, a self-driving vehicle startup, in a deal valued at $4 billion. As part of the agreement, Uber invests $400 million in Aurora and retains a 26% stake in the combined company.

Also, after work on the Model 2 was canceled and reopened, I can't see Daniel Ho and his teams departure as a long-considered choice, to put it mildly.

Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...

I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.

Musk’s value add is as the celebrity CEO; the Jobsian ideal taken to its natural conclusion. He’s supposed to be this forward-looking visionary and having him at the helm of your company is supposed to make it forward-looking by proxy.

This is all well and good until the celebrity CEO fries his brain with Special K and builds a bubble of yes-men around him. Then it becomes a massive liability.

At the same time tho: remember https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

if the media reaction to that had been "tesla ceo pulls private driving detail in attempt to discredit journalist" it would have formed a much more obvious through-line with the Top Gear "tesla ceo pulls battery telemetry to sue comedy show" from years prior and "tesla employees can watch you have sex in your car" from years later.

See Also the ongoing excuse of "autopilot was not engaged when the crash happened" or Tesla's insurance charging more if you drive at night. https://electrek.co/2023/09/15/musk-wanted-to-use-tesla-came... Things add up to: Elon Musk does not believe in any sort of right to your privacy.

Like in general while his public persona has gotten less reasonable over the years there's a lot of things that could/should be reported as "patterns of behavior" that, in the early days got reported as if they happened in a vacuum which let it seem reasonable at the time.

So now that media is interested in Elon the question is what changed. Did Elon lapse on marketing? More likely is that he is giving off similar messaging but the media receiving it has decided to focus on other things.

To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:

• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)

• To manufacture the charging equipment

• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.

• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.

• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc

• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.

• To provide customer support.

If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.

I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.

I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.

I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.

Customer support would likely be Tesla.

If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.

Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.

Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:

1. Locations 2. Quantity of locations 3. Quality (high charging rates) 4. User experience / design of hardware - software 5. Realtime reporting and navigation 6. Uptime of network

The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.

Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.

Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.

Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.