In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.
Just casually asking for a roughly 80 Billion dollar pay raise. But at this point would Tesla be better off without him?
If I was a shareholder or board member and heard “I don’t want to grow the company in ways you want with out a raise” I’d hear it as “he’s no longer doing the job we hired him for. Publicly going against our wishes.” Which is a short cut to getting fired in any other job on the planet.
In the 5 years I’ve owned my Model 3 it’s never needed any service. Only new tires. They are not even remotely as bad of a car as clickbait sites make them out to be. Yeah yeah Teslas aren’t perfect, but no car is. Be realistic.
It being associated with Musk and his crazy rants is annoying though. Almost annoying enough to trade it in, but I don’t particularly want to spend a bunch of money and getting rid of an almost like-new working car.
Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).
On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.
I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.
I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.
I’m being realistic. You’re embarrassed by it and association with Musk.
Musk is genuinely a bad person who is pushing bogus race science and other horrible unequivocal bullshit.
It’s great that it hasn’t needed service, but my point stands: once it needs service, you will be handing money to Elon Musk.
If you want him to go away that badly, there are things you could do. Like trading in your vehicle for another EV. There’s other brands, who are not run by a racist, misogynist, ableist, megalomaniacs.
You can complain on the internet all you want, but if you’re unwilling to find a way to not give him money, you’re just one more person with Elon’s foot stuck up your ass.
With all due respect my 2021 Model 3 is a gargantuan piece of shit. Every interior joint and connection squeaks, the range is and has always been far below stated range, both seats rattle, the wood trim has basically disintegrated, and my car only has 21k in it. I’d trade however my interest rate is 2.5%. I hate the car, the company, and Musk, but until interest rates drop I’m not trading. But hey it’s never needed service so yay for me. My 2012 Prius was a better built car than the Tesla Model 3, by miles.
Yeah if I could buy a similar car with the same features at the same price from a manufacturer like Toyota, the choice for better build quality is obvious. However up until basically this year that has not been the case. My only real complaint with my M3 is the terrible paint they use. But I can live with it.
Point to me to a similarly specced ev for a comparable price in the US taking into consideration federal tax rebate and dealership bullshit fees. There still ain’t anything this year. It will happen but we aren’t there yet.
Once the other care companies started making electrics, I wondered why anyone was still going with Tesla. Car companies have so many more decades of taking care of build issues.
At least in the US the charging network has been a huge differentiator. I’ve heard from a few people doing road-trips in non-Teslas and having trouble with the multitude of charging networks. Superchargers can get busy but I’ve never had a problem with them or gotten stranded. Hopefully NACS will improve this situation for all brands.
Interest rates and depreciation make that a losing bargain, better to get the utility out of it now that the trade in is low and interest rates are high
As much as I hate Musk, I don’t have $10k+ to burn on making a statement.
Sure, if the car market was flush with used EVs, swapping one used car for another might not hurt as much. But right now it’s slim pickings if you want a used EV that isn’t a Telsa, that is similarly spec’ed to a Tesla.
Just run the thing into the ground and charge on non-Tesla infrastructure as much as reasonably possible.
As opposed to dunking on him, I am going to outline why he can’t do anything but cry about it:
Once you IPO in Delaware like Tesla did, you can’t issue a second class stock
At least not without liquidating your assets and re-incorporating, which means all shareholders have to agree and this certainly means shareholders will hold a smaller bag, this will go to court (probably in Delaware, a state Elon has little chance of winning given how Twitter/X turned out), and the process will be impeded. This is not an overnight process.
This is compounded by the fact that Tesla’s stock value pretty much comes from Elon’s manipulation and grandstanding, so anything that reveals this will cause the boat to rock, so anything he does will impact the stock price, which impacts his wealth.
Nobody will loan him money to buy more stock. If he could, he wouldn’t be crying about it. Or, more than likely, he could get it, but it means coming from MBS or similarly questionable sources and he’s on such good footing with them over how Twitter/X is going. This will increase the scrutiny he’s getting from the DOJ or the people at CIA who may drop a sword on his head.
He has at least two loyalists on his board: Kimbal Musk and JB Straubel. James Murdoch can no longer be considered one since its his other publication, the Wall Street Journal, that went to press about his drug issues.
Long and short, Elon has been reduced to begging. We could be watching the end of his tenure at Tesla, but this fucker is full of surprises.
You think he’d bother with legal and responsible methods of getting his way?
My first thought is he’d threaten to tank Tesla stock by using Twitter to screw it over and sink the price. It fucks him but why would he care when he still owns SpaceX and Twitter?
He’s been using Twitter to manipulate shares and crypto for years. He now owns Twitter and can manipulate even more so will use it to bully Tesla’s board for more equity.
I mean he “can do nothing but cry about it” in the same way anyone can do nothing about a request for a raise. He can say he will quit if they don’t give it to him.
Explained nicely by Common Sense Skeptic in their video on the subject. TLDW is that Musk is low on stocks, around 12%, and he’s demanding to be given more (total 25%) or he walks. Reason he wants 25% is so that he can still be in charge of company with other people who proxy his power.
He’s already out with 12.9% of stocks, we wants in for free claiming he’ll walk out with other parts of the company and people if they don’t oblige. If you are thinking that this behavior is not legal you’d be right and I can’t wait for trade commission to step on him.
If I made a threat like this as CEO when I also work two other jobs with a now clearly defined conflict of interest, I would ABSOLUTELY be fired by the board!
Guy is probably getting scared of his board members and is wanting to secure himself from being outed. There’s a reason why we are now hearing about his drug problem, and those stories are likely coming from his board members.
He created a massive failure with a cult following? Because that’s what the PT cruiser was. The difference with the cybertruck being that it won’t sell to rental companies on account of the price.
“It was a novelty car, and like all novelty items the enthusiasm faded,” says Keenan Mayo, associate editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, who wrote an obituary of sorts for the Cruiser. “The only people who were really buying it for much of the last decade were the rental car companies because it was cheap.”
The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.
The Cybertruck is… pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it’s failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.
If they could get someone boring like Tim Apple Cook, that just runs the company very well and profitably… Tesla would be sitting pretty good with their dominant place in the Electric market. The only reason most people dont pick tesla for an EV is literally Elon.
The problem with Tesla is the problem Apple had for many years: Your CEO is the reason for the stock price. Apple had a plan for succession that saved them in the end, and they’ve never been better. Tesla has nothing. They are basically a carbon credit company run by a sycophant, and without Elon, they are nothing but a carbon credit company. If he departs, the stock price will crater/adjust.
Last time we had a CEO get fired because they were bad was the OpenAI fiasco and that proved that we no longer live in reality, because Sam was back in a week.
Apple had a plan, but Apple also had the iPhone and the MacBook. Literally the best smartphones and laptops you can buy.
Tesla does have the best EVs and, in the US, charging network. I think saying “tesla has nothing” is a bit disingenuous. Outside of China, no company is even close to Tesla.
Custom AI silicon designed by the designer of Apple’s M1 chip. It’s designed for training. They are about to scale it massively to create the Dojo supercomputer. They look to be on par with NVidia on performance/$. No small feat, and means they arent reliant on NVidia
They have custom inferrence chips used in all of their cars and their android robot. It gets fantastic performance per watt. My 5 year old car has first-gen inferrence chips and it’s still getting better with software… meaning it hasnt reached its potential. The latest chip design is probably much better, but I dont know much about it
They have possibly the best humanoid hands and arms that will work with this AI goodness.
Their walking and navigation is looking to be top notch… We’ll see
FSD really is incredible. I drive with it and it improves every year.
Tesla solar is still a thing. The model 3 kinda derailed development a while back and it never really recovered. I think competitors are doing well and Tesla sees better returns on their other projects. Tesla needs to bring down their Solar prices which they just dont seem to be doing. Im guessing they dont want to scale manufacturing yet.
They have some of the largest casting machines on the planet and press out the frames of their cars for far cheaper than their competition can stamp and weld theirs. Stellantis and Toyota are adopting this manufactiring strategy as fast as they can, but they are a year or maybe 2 behind. I suspect Ford, VW and GM are adopting this too.
Tesla factory floors are much more efficient at iterating and improving. Their in-house software for managing workers and workflow development are unique to Tesla. Just look at the efficient packaging of their HVAC system after dozens of iterations every year for a couple years. It’s by far the best HVAC in the car world.
They have developed a lithium clay extraction process that vastly reduces chemical waste and water usage. They’re still 5 or so years out from implementing this in even a small capacity and clay extraction isnt guaranteed to be superior to spodumene. I expect the efforts they’re putting to this will pay off in 15 years.
They own lithium clay rights in Nevada where some of the richest Lithium clay deposits are. I think theyre doing permitting for mining, which will probably take to the end of the decade. Mining’s crazy
They offer the best price for grid-scale batteries and are growing that business faster than their cars grew. Hawaii just replaced their last coal peaker plant with Tesla batteries. California and Australia are saving a lot of money with them. The batteries pay for themselves when used to replace peaker plants and stuff to maintain frequency.
They are growing so-called virtual power plants and have been doing extremely well in a few test locations in Texas, Australia and Puerto Rico. I think the UK too?
After funding and working with the inventor of the lithium battery’s team they’ve been getting first looks at new battery chemistry. The thick walls of their 4680 are designed with adding silicon in mind. I suspect theyre testing this out at Kato road production facility.
They’ve collected a bunch of battery manufacturing patents over the years and their dry-electrode process is providing very good economics. Getting them to scale has been excruciatingly slow, but they’re about to triple capacity this year in Texas and I think are starting development of another iteration of their 4680 battery production process at their Kato road facility right now.
They are on track for becoming a top-three battery manufacturer by the end of the decade.
GM and Ford’s battery packs are like 5 years behind tesla’s. Tesla packs more battery in less volume using less weight with better thermals and ridgidity. Their packs are a lot cheaper to produce too.
Tesla claims they have a ferro magnet motor in development. We’ll see. If so, watch out for very cheap electric cars with no rare-earths or cobalt
They just signed deals with BP and an another conglomerate to sell chargers for the other business’ charging infrastructure. More volume means cheaper manufacturing for their own charging stations too.
All cars will soon have the NACS plug so everyone will be able to charge at a Tesla station… Which is the largest and most reliable charging network in the world.
Battery prices keep falling. Gas cars are going to have to compete with cheaper electric by the end of the decade. Tesla isnt competing with other electric car makers so much as it’s competing with fossil fuels. Electric will win this. The faster the better
Elon has contributed to these only in a “we’re gonna fund these wild ideas!” Way. Like Edison. He’s smart and avoided bad projects and embraced fast failing to great success… Things are maturing and I dont think there’s much value to get from Elon…
Tesla will be fine without Elon. I’d argue better.
The only fear of Elon leaving would be big oil investors buying control and derailing things… I dont think that’ll happen though. I think enough investors are in it specifically to eliminate fossil fuel dependency.
The fear of Elon staying is he drags Tesla into his edgelord bullshit and uses it to dick over the world as hard as he and some dictator/billionaire friends can… Which seems more likely
After he derailed the CA bullet train with his hyperloop hyperbole and joked on twitter abould the Bolivian coup, I dont trust his ass one bit.
Unfortunately, idiot Elon gets his grubby fingers ALL OVER every last piece of tech in the Tesla. It’s ALL shoddily engineered because of him. Like simple, time tested engineering concepts like redundancy? Elon would fire you. He eliminated redundancy in their FSD, choosing to rely solely on computer vision and machine learning. He literally had a good design for the sensor modules and got rid of it. Tim Cook doesn’t sabotage Apple’s engineering team like that.
The lidar removal really pissed me off. At best, a Tesla can “see” as well as the human driver. It seems to me that half of the point of using a computer to drive a vehicle should be that it can easily access sensors that us meat bags don’t have access to.
Plus the stupid central instrument cluster in Model 3s and Model Ys is beyond idiotic.
I can feel the disgust of the car being related to Elon Musk, but at least the newer Teslas are actually great cars. Not sure where this idea of poor quality comes from. My previous car was a Toyota and I don’t really miss it at all.
When I was making my choice of an EV, Polestars were too expensive and the Hyundais were too synthwave and gray. Volkswagens were shit. Tesla was practically the only choice.
I do hope there will be more serious competition the next time I have to choose. But I’m hoping I won’t have to make that choice in at least 5 years.
Tesla cars also have notoriously poor build quality, especially for the price; if you must buy an electric car, at this point, as far as I can tell, Hyundai cars are much better built. (Of course, we do need to remember that electric cars do not solve the problem of car dependency.)
Well, so much for the altruist Elon Musk who uses his genius intellect to make the world a better place out of the goodness of his heart and the shared benefit of humanity. if he actually gave a shit, he wouldn’t care if his compensation package was $1. He would supposedly be doing the work he is the most passionate about and cares the most about.
Nah. Richest man in the world says it’s more important that he gets paid first. He’s always been a fraud.
If you only read the headline (and maybe even this specific article) you miss the point.
He’s saying he doesn’t trust Tesla to develop AI/Robotics if he doesn’t have enough control (shares), as he’s afraid what they’ll do with AI otherwise, and without another compensation package that would give him that control, he’s going to hold Tesla back on the AI front and do it in a company he has control of (him saying this is probably breaking numerous laws as well, especially given he has an AI company)
It’s his same AI is going to doom the world if it’s not done right, and only I can protect us, though this isn’t really something new.
But as to your point, it isn’t actually about the money, it’s about more control of Tesla. He doesn’t actually care about the money and if there was a way to give him more voting control without giving him more shares, he’d be okay with that too, but that in itself isn’t a simple feat or necessarily possible.
But FUCK HIM, he gave up that control to piss it away on Twitter. If keeping control of Tesla was so important, you shouldn’t have fucked up, and fucked over all the shareholders in the process with Twitter.
Edit: Also - Even though he met every tranche of his existing compensation plan, it was a 10 year plan. It hasn’t been 10 years yet, so again, FUCK OFF, until those 10 years are up.
He doesn’t need to own 25% of tesla’s shares to be given 25% of voting power. It’s very common for different classes of shares for a company to exist that have entirely different voting rights.
I believe in order for that to work, the shares have to be set up for that during IPO. I’m not sure of any company that’s done it mid-flight (but I could be wrong).
Add comment