Maybe petty and I know it will hurt Musk as much as slingshot against Godzilla.
But we’re looking at an EV purchase next year and my wife and I have ruled out Teslas. We also want to liquidate our Tesla stock position as soon as possible. Perhaps we should have done so when Elon himself did at its peak early this year, but that’s bridge under the water. Really want nothing to do with this guy anymore.
I recently liquidated all my Tesla positions. I also plan to sell my Tesla next year. Was originally planning on a new Tesla but I have ruled them out completely too. The company has gone from being my favorite to the one I dislike the most in the span of a year.
Teslas being charged nightly on a power grid that's still largely powered by gas/coal is really just a status symbol. ...and with the limited range and limited lifespan, it was never a good financial investment either.
No, this isn’t really true. Even on a coal grid EVs are much more efficient than ICE cars. Tesla also kicked the major manufacturers into gear (finally) so in most ways it was a good investment. I think Musk is a fool and I’m disappointed in what he’s done to Twitter, but I won’t take that away from him. This does not, however, mean Tesla is essential or properly-valued going forward.
The actual question is: why was he able to walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers. I’m starting to think that the answer is not Musk’s personal competence.
This kind of argument is always a cesspool, but this argument is just outrageously spun, and frankly you should be deeply ashamed to have made it. You're taking a technically true fact about one loan and using it to imply that other competing manufacturers didn't receive comparable government assistance in the same time period, which is beyond laughably wrong.
I mean, come on, GM was literally insolvent in 2009 and exists today only because of a government bailout!
I’m not sure if you realized it but you just further answered OPs question and validated my point at the same time.
GM did receive bailouts and I never even implied otherwise.
So you have existing automakers (GM) who were already in a weak position due to the 2008 crisis and used the bailouts merely to keep *current* operations afloat. I’m not saying it was right for them to be bailed out but that’s what happened. Importantly, it didn’t put them in position to spend a lot of money on EV development, it was life support.
On the other hand you have a startup (Tesla) who was running out of runway to fund their product development of EVs. In this case they could put 100% of the bailout towards EV development. That was just the start, the billions in government subsidies that followed allowed them to not only pay back that loan ultimately but got them to where they are today (a bit of securities fraud helped as well). This wasn’t just life support it was a lot of runway for a startup.
Hopefully the above makes it obvious that government subsidies are indeed the primary answer to why he was able to “walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers” as without them Tesla wouldn’t even exist.
That's just not true. GM had lots and lots of R&D going on, and that bailout absolutely kept the lights on. This was expressly listed as one of the reasons the government needed to step in, so that the US wouldn't "fall behind", etc... You're imagining a distinction where none exists (e.g. by being hyperspecific about "assistance via DOE loan to keep product development on a consumer EV running" -- something GM didn't "technically" get, simply because it wasn't a product focus for them).
If you want to argue that Tesla required government assistance to bring EVs to market, that's fine. If you argue that they weren't recipients of exactly the same kind of assistance offered to other parties in the market, you're way, way off.
The nerds, like the people who founded Tesla before Musk bought in, had done the sums and realised battery EVs were the future.
Governments around the world funded the initial rollout, a bunch of environmental orgs helped, another bunch of private businesses making chargers or charging networks or charging apps. Literally millions of people worked to make this ahppen.
Musk just happened to be a loud mouthed asshole with lots of money and onnections that backed the right horse at the right time and ended up with even more money.
Elon Musk did not found Tesla. He bought it once the Tesla Roadster was already a product.
What he did was "walk in" and put his name on things.
I've recently seen an anecdote from someone (claiming to be) a SpaceX veteran that at least there, there were whole structures in place within the company to "manage" Musk: people who would tailor information to his biases and moods, ideas presented to him in such a way that he could claim they were his, idiotic ideas of his that got conveniently forgotten, that sort of thing.
I've also seen multiple people point out that at Tesla and SpaceX, his narcissistic whims were always constrained by the physical: any changes to manufacturing processes both had to respect the laws of physics, and would take some time to physically build new components, retool the machines for different outputs, etc.
None of this holds at Twitter.
Thus, he's like a well-respected writer who has always had really good editors, but has become successful enough that he can now claim he doesn't need them.....and now everyone can see just how much those editors were doing for his work.
I believe, with few exceptions, that charging EV cars from the power grid consumes overall less power than the equivalent travel distance from ICE cars. If that premise is not true (it would be extremely hard to truly calculate the fully loaded costs of either) then much of the argument for EVs doesn't exist.
During the whole time of high gas prices over the last few months, I haven't refilled my hybrid- I've driven 8900 miles on 2.75 tanks of gas (14.5 gallons) and the rest has been electric charging. I am curious but have not computed whether this saved me any money, as electricity prices here are fairly high, but it's been wonderful to stay away from the gas station.
Even if that was the case I disagree. Not spewing particle-filled exhaust gases in my neighborhood is wort a lot. I believe caring for the local environment is as important as for the global env.
I'd wait to change opinions based on recent stories, those tend to be heavily distorted. Instead look up events that happened months ago and judge based on those (eg calling Thai diver a pedo).
Might give you the same result in this case, but it's a good rule to follow.
Oh I agree. The Twitter fiasco is just the final nail in the coffin after cringing at his antics and generally being disgusted with him for some time now.
and he wasn't just a diver- he was the recognized expert on the cave, having mapped it. He was also in close communication with the people organizing the rescue and was one of the few people who could say to Musk: "Thanks, but you're not helping"
I wonder why Richard Stanton, leader of the international rescue diving team, urged Musk to facilitate the construction of the vehicle as a back-up, in case flooding worsened. (Quoting from wiki here)
Because in an emergency, you sometimes don't have time, so you solicit options from many people, have them all work on their solutions in parallel, then choose the best one?
If you go back and look at Musk's tweets, it's pretty clear he didn't know what he was talking about it in terms of what would work.
I took that stance with my Tesla stocks when he ridiculed the person who saved boys from Thailand Cave. He put technology ahead of humans, something that I am not comfortable with.
My view has changed back and forth, his values being incompatible with mine, and his risk taking abilities which are sometimes good.
The cave is a bad example of putting technology ahead of humans. He actually tried to do something that would help some humans (the head diver of the rescue operation told him it was worth working on) in that case.
You could say he put his ego above harm to someone's reputation, but I don't think you could sat he put technology above people there.
Who do you consider the head diver then? I figured the guy that lead the mapping of the caves and the rescues the head diver personally, but I'm open to understand other people's opinions.
I do the same. Hate to be that guy, but I had a strong dislike for him when he first got hyped up years ago, this is just reaffirming an old decision. Does my boycott matter in any way? Yes, to me. That's sufficient.
I am in the same boat as you. I would hate to know that I spent thousands to help enshrine this petty guy's fortune and lower the bar for tech worker treatment.
I was a consultant at Twitter. The engineers there love complexity. They created layers and layers just to justify their positions so they can have fuel to burn to climb up the ladder. Most of the stuff they built is unnecessary and that effort could have been spent elsewhere. The managers enabled this because they needed the efforts to climb up as well. There was an in-group bias there that kept opposing voices away which creates deep valleys of blindness that crack the company eventually. Which is what happened, Twitter was dead weight for a long time. Glad Elon is there to shake things up. Jack was not effective anymore. Actually the culture he enabled is what brought Twitter to the point it was.
This happens everywhere so nothing new here. Especially when tech investment has been free for such a long time. Maybe even this economic downturn wont disrupt the tech investment machine. We will see next year.
If Twitter goes public again. I will be the first to buy shares. Since it will actually be a good play going forward.
The company is not made or broken whether or not the software is a bit more complicated than it has to be.
Making it a bit simpler will not change the company.
Moreover, it's very doubtful if they are in a position to magically untangle all of that and make things a bit simpler.
Most of the value of Twitter will come from revenues, growth and other things.
It's entirely possible that Musk could turn things around, but it's also very risky. It's debatable whether the people will perform in a coherent manner for him, that advertisers will come back, that his ideas will pan out.
And after all of that - he bought Twitter at the peak! He's holding the bag! Twitter would be worth maybe 40% of what it was at the peak, just by market forces alone - so he has to climb up to that big valuation to break even.
It's entirely plausible, but there is nothing obvious about this situation, and it's not an 'architectural' issue.
Finally, I will say that just because you thought things were overly complex, does not mean they were. Things are sometime a bit more complicated. Maybe, maybe not.
So then explain why the first people to go were in content moderation, trust & safety? That _is_ Twitter’s product after all (brand safety for advertisers), and he gutted that faster than the engineering teams.
"Some people at Twitter were dead weight" does not logically lead to "therefore all Musk's firings at Twitter are A Good Thing, Actually."
Anyone going into nearly any company and firing 3/4 of the staff is practically guaranteed to result in some nontrivial number of people being fired who were not pulling their weight.
People aren't hating on Musk specifically for firing people. We're hating on him for firing people indiscriminately, treating the remainder like shit (demanding people work long hours constantly is unjustifiable, no matter what you think of the personalities of those workers), and making himself the center and focus of Twitter.
Same. I made this decision 18 months ago when I was thinking about an EV.
The good thing is there are decent alternatives now that, in many ways, are superior. I've delayed my decision anyway as I happen not to really need one right now and so I hope my delay results in better technology.
Note: for those who cannot wait, Hyundai ioniq 5 is the one. I was so close to pulling the trigger on that beauty. Test drove it. Loved it. Excellent all around package with the added bonus that it looks far better than the model 3 (which looks horribly dated every time I see it now).
Exactly! I might have expected him to be an anti-humanist because he made such a point of loving humanity. Perhaps he does but he dislikes people intently based on his actions. I think all of these things are true simultaneously:
- There were many engineers at Twitter building overly complex things. Twitter was overdue for a classic re-org.
- There are many individuals on the Twitter platform that were enabling the cancel culture and impacting free speech.
- There are many trolls on the platform, enabled by many bots, impacting narratives and in some cases influencing politics.
- Elon's narrative of Twitter's content moderation skewing liberal is false. Facts consistently have a liberal bias, despite a few notable exceptions.
- Twitter content moderation was not wrong. In order to have a free society and free speech, we must be intolerant of intolerance (Karl Popper).
- Elon seems personally oligopolistic, anti-democracy, and a throwback to the gilded age. He reminds me of Henry Ford, there is a clear lack of empathy here.
- While I will watch SpaceX with great enthusiasm, I will not be buying a Tesla.
I like the Nissan Leaf and the Kia EV6, I do think Tesla make some questionable decisions for some real world needs where actual car makers know better.
Nissan(in recent years after quietly selling the company) and Kia are crap tier auto makers, nothing like Toyota and Honda. As someone who has two Nissans right now, both of them with CVTs prone to break in under 100k miles, it pains me to hear them called actual auto makers that know better.
Consumer Reports recommends the 2023 Kia EV6 with an overall score of 91, a road test score of 90, a predicted reliability rating of Excellent (5/5), and a predicted consumer satisfaction rating of Excellent (5/5).[1]
The top-rated 2023 Tesla vehicle is the Model 3, which has an overall score of 78, a road test score of 82, a predicted reliability rating of Average (3/5), and a predicted owner satisfaction rating of Very Good (4/5).[2]
The 2023 Tesla Models Y, S, and X have overall scores of 73, 62, and 52, respectively.
Consumer reports and similar really doesn't and can't give you a good sense of long term reliability. Nissan and Kia have longstanding reputations for cheaping out on things that matter to reliability that no "predicted reliability score" should ever be able to counter. The word predicted is them admitting they have no idea yet.
I almost bought a tesla. I was really excited at the idea of driving over to the factory and picking up my car (I live close by). Then my friend pointed out that Model Ys had had some delivery problems and pointed me at https://github.com/polymorphic/tesla-model-y-checklist
After doing a bit of research I cancelled my order and bought a toyota because the out-the-door build quality is not something I need to worry about at all.
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Then we can look at the reliability of this year's models. The 2022 Kia EV6 has a reliability rating of Excellent (5/5).
The 2022 Tesla Models 3, S, X, and Y have reliability ratings of Very Good (4/5), Good (3/5), N/A (not enough data), and Good (3/5), respectively.
Consumer Reports does tend to rate Toyota vehicles higher than models from most other makes in general, but the Kia EV6 in particular has been evaluated to be an excellent vehicle.
You're completely missing my point. I was speaking of long term reliability. "reliability scores" of this years models tell you very little about long term reliability and maintenance costs! The not so good auto makers have problems that manifest in a small number of years, often right after the warranty period runs out. Reliable cars are expected to have a lifetime of a couple of decades!
The Kia EV6 was introduced in 2021 (model year 2022), so your criticism of this particular model is not backed up by any data. Historically, Kia and Tesla have similar reliability, while Nissan beats both.
Nonsense, most of my family and the people in the town I grew up in kept cars for 10+ years or 200-300k miles if they could. Some of my wealthier relatives drove 25-30 year old pickup trucks. If you don't think cars need to last 10+ years you're completely out of touch with regular people. Even if you're a rich person that buys a new car every few years reliability should matter to you, because lack of it costs you money. Reliability and maintenance costs over time are the reason a Toyota/Honda depreciates very slowly while a luxury car like a BMW/Mercedes depreciates like milk. The latter will cost the next owner a fortune in maintenance to keep running properly. If anything longevity should be far more of a priority nowadays since a) modern manufacturing makes it easier to produce long lasting vehicles than when we were children and b) anyone shopping for EVs and/or interested in environmentalism should be demanding longevity to reduce waste.
10+ years != “decades”, and the actual data is that cars last an average of about 12 years. Your relatives with 25-30 year old vehicles are the outliers here.
I would like to understand how in your mind Kia is a "crap tier" auto maker. Maybe that's from a European context speaking but Kia has an excellent reputation here (Austria) particularly because they offer one of the longest warranty periods (7 years). The EV6 in particular is a very sought after car.
Kia entered the 'western' market by basically selling the cheapest new cars you could buy. While this bought them much needed market share, it also gave them a reputation for being cheap, crappy and unreliable. While 'modern' Kia has moved beyond this, and as you say, the EV6 is been getting pretty great reviews, the memory of those days of cheap unreliable cars still linger.
When they became popular in America in the late 90s and early 00s they were the absolute lowest price cars on the road and had a corresponding reputation for quality/reliability. They were what you bought if you wanted to buy new, but couldn't afford to pay for Japanese reliability. Friends that bought them new had major mechanical problems within a few years. Their gutter reputation is what led them to offer the 7 year warranty, to try to signal quality and reassure people that the problems they would inevitably experience would be fixed by the company. I'm sure they've gotten far better than then, but they're still nowhere close to Toyota/Honda in reputation. When there exist manufacturers that have been building cars that are reliable for decades, for decades, for only a few thousand dollars more, I am loath to consider buying from anyone else.
I guess. Lord knows I'm not happy with what's happening at Twitter either. But... Tesla is a mature manufacturer with 100k employees now, and they all feel they're doing good work and making great products.
And they're right, frankly. One of the things you'll discover if you start looking seriously at your EV purchase is that the other manufacturers just aren't measuring up, both in specifics (performance, range, seat count, cargo capacity, etc...) and in qualitative stuff (fart noises, navigation experience, watch it drive itself, frankly just supercharging alone would be a decisionmaker vs. the CCS network in North America).
My first instinct was: Is it being shattered in the eyes of normal people though?
But I think you may be right. 200 MM users is not enough to truly matter I suppose, but who _really_ cares about Twitter? Journalists. They're spreading this stuff that's going on in a bubble they're in way beyond it.
A lot of people really care about Twitter. It's the nexus of communication for a lot of marginalized groups. Game development, art and a lot of other independent, entrepreneurial and hobbyist communities network through Twitter. A lot of interesting feeds show content there that isn't centralized anywhere else on the web.
I get being cynical about social media but let's actually maybe care about the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater. Twitter is more than just journalists and political shitposting.
< It's the nexus of communication for a lot of marginalized groups.
Huh, my impression is that it was used mostly by the ultra privileged elites. Celebrities, wannabe celebrities, politicians, authors, "journalists", marketing executives, and such. I've never met a regular person that touches Twitter.
To be fair, that clearly represents a bubble viewpoint of its own and it shows you don't use Twitter. You also may find that a lot of people in your real world social circle do use Twitter but don't publicise it, because they're using aliases and it's not exactly something you mention in most company.
My feed has consistently been full of interesting people doing real things, not those you listed with the exception of authors.
I tried to follow a number of prominent scientists, people doing programming language research, and various other technical topics to experience what you describe. Almost every single one of the people I followed devolved into commenting on politics and niche social issues more so than the technical topics I followed them for, so I gave up. There were only a handful of exceptions like one person that makes commentary about niche literature I enjoy. The format and culture of Twitter seem to inherently discourage thoughtful discussion and amplify politics, rage, and zingers/gotchas.
While I, personally, have never paid much attention to Twitter, I'm friends and acquaintances with a lot of people for whom it has been a lifeline—mostly queer people, people of color, and, indeed, other marginalized groups.
I'm not entirely sure—since, as I said, I don't use Twitter. My main guess, however, is that it's broadcast.
Those other places you have to go looking for. If you're on Twitter, and already following some people within your groups, you're likely to see them retweet other people in the group, and over time build out your network that way. I would presume the algorithm will also notice your preference for such accounts, and recommend others, but without personal experience with the Twitter algorithm, that's also just a guess.
I think Musk's mistake was to openly embrace conservative opinions and fringe conspiracy theories (his since deleted tweet about Paul Pelosi for instance). I already know of people in more liberal circles that would never buy one of his cars, just like they don't buy "my pillows" or go to Hobby Lobby. It's a big target demographic for EVs and doesn't bode too well for Tesla in the current political climate.
But we’re looking at an EV purchase next year and my wife and I have ruled out Teslas. We also want to liquidate our Tesla stock position as soon as possible. Perhaps we should have done so when Elon himself did at its peak early this year, but that’s bridge under the water. Really want nothing to do with this guy anymore.