Also, that post was by no means the only place where Musk articulated the overall plan. That was just the first time I know that they described it in recognizable detail. They continued to refine the ideas as time went on. I can Google-vomit a better history if you like, but it doesn’t seem productive. Or you can search for Tesla Whitestar and Bluestar if you want a more detailed timeline of Model S and 3 (respectively) concepts and development.
You used the term “business plan”. A business plan—even a very simple, top level one—has an executive summary, descirption of busniess focus, some kind of market analysis of consumer needs and technology requirements, an organizational plan, a sales strategy, financial goals, and funding requirements. That short list is basically an executive summary, and the longer page that you linked to is sort of a stream of consciousness combination of business focus and technical description.
Now, given the number of venture capitalists who invested in Tesla (of which Musk is actually one; although many people don’t realize it, he neither founded the company nor came up with the basic concepts that became the Tesla Roadster, and he actually drove out the original founders, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpinning) I’m sure that a more detailed business plan exists, and like all business plans it has probably changed radically since conception, but that it neither here nor there. The point is that the CEO should be concerned with presenting and promoting the overall vision to investors and potential customers, not spending time on a manufacturing floor debugging production problems and working 120 hours while giving his opinion on topics he knows nothing about and toking up on podcasts with a conspiracy theorist.
I could personally care less what drugs Musk ingests, and if there were not an ongoing investor concern with his increasingly erratic behavior it would just be passed off as another Silicon Valley Bro doing the overaged frat kid thing, but Musk’s antics are bringing a lot of negative attention at a time that the company is struggling to expand its capability in an attempt to catch up to production goals it has blown past repeatedly. It’s not a good look for a guy whose entire job should be to be the face of the company and reassure investors and customers to the long term potential of the company.
Stranger
I said basic business plan, and more importantly, I was responding directly to your statement of providing an overall practicable vision for the development of the company. Quibble all you want whether the 2006 post counts as a “basic business plan” or not, but it is clearly a *vision *for development that they executed on without a significant change in focus over more than a decade. Hence your “0 for 3” claim seems dubious to me.
Musk was being fairly obtuse there. But let’s not pretend that there isn’t an immense amount of BS tagged with “nano”, especially in the battery industry. And direct personal experience suggestions that anyone calling themselves a nanotechnologist deserves an *extremely *critical eye. I have little doubt that Tesla gets a hundred nano-whatever proposals a week from cranks.
C’mon, Stranger, I know you’re better than this :).
It’s not mock, nor outrage. More like disappointment. I am a Tesla fanboy. I bought a model X. I have multiple tesla home batteries. I bought the tesla solar panels. I evangelize about the products. But Musk’s behavior is bad for business. The result of him smoking weed is predictable, and the outcome was surely to be bad. As a result, he shouldn’t have done it not because smoking weed is bad, but because the outcome is bad.
It’s not that weed is bad, it’s that it demonstrates poor judgment. That’s bad.
But it only reflects poor judgment because we have this bizarre emperor-has-no-clothes attitude toward drug use. Even though the majority of US adults have tried MJ; even though it’s legal in many states, and a strong majority of voters support legalization; even though there’s an immense body of evidence that MJ is less damaging and addictive than other, completely normalized drugs (alcohol); somehow as long as there’s the *perception *that some people might conceivably be concerned, people have to be on their toes so as not to offend anyone. If the American public had a healthy view of MJ, and no one was promoting a false front, there would be no problem at all. It would be exactly like drinking a glass of whiskey.
Most of my opinion here, I’ll grant, is from some very general views on the nature of public perception. And annoyance that we don’t have more “children” laughing at nude emperors. At the same time, I do recognize that we live in a world where perception is reality (I don’t have to like it, though).
I will happily acknowledge that Musk probably doesn’t think through the optics (god, I hate that word) of his actions. He’s probably incapable of even doing that kind of mental calculation; I’ve certainly encountered plenty of people in that category in the tech industry.
A CEO’s job is almost entirely about managing perceptions, both public and internal. By that measure, Musk has utterly failed. Whether the self-professed “fanboys” like him is irrelevant; he owes his employees leadership and his investors vision and fiscal stability. His recent actions and statements offer neither. And as someone who has been dealing with Elon Musk in peripheral fashion for nearly a decade, I’ll say that none of this erratic behavior is new or surprising; he has been mercurial and bombastic long before Tesla was promising to revolutionize the automotive industry, and has a history of vastly overpromising capability while failing to deliver in a timely manner. He’s hardly alome in this—that is basically the Silicon Valley mantra—but it doesn’t play so well when dealing with actual hardware. Musk isn’t Elizabeth Holmes, but he also isn’t Steve Jobs or Wernher von Braun. Hell, he’s not even William Shockley. He’s a promoter of what is largely his own self-professed genius, based on the technical work of others.
Stranger
…there are people rotting in jail for life for possession of small amounts of marijuana. And while those people are rotting in jail one of the richest men in America is smoking away in a public forum, like drinking a glass of whiskey.
If you are serious about marijuana reform then the poster child for it shouldn’t be privileged millionaires like Elon Musk.
The inconsistency is stupid and unjust. But the reality is that in the US, some states have made cannabis more-or-less legal (it is still illegal under Federal law), while in others it is not.
Musk’s podcast took place in California, where cannabis is legal. I believe the normalization of cannabis is only a good thing, even if he is a billionaire. In fact, from the perspective of cannabis normalization (not so much Tesla), it is an extremely positive thing to have a public figure use it in an entirely normal setting. It’s a drug that people can use recreationally like alcohol, and is not just for criminals or stoners or otherwise.
California in particular is freeing prisoners for marijuana crimes as well as clearing convictions. This will not erase every past injustice, but it is a good start. The more normalized the perception of cannabis, the greater the rate that additional states will reform their own laws.
After reading what I would call his “envisioned business endeavor” it sounds like it was written by someone with a youthful perspective. There is a child-like quality to it. It reads like someone who is bi-polar. He’s smart and highly motivated on an obsessive level.
If he is bi-polar then he is at a much higher risk for drug addiction and suicide. It’s easy to speculate on such things but we can go back and look at his tweets or the idea that he would sleep under a conference table as reason to wonder. He definitely has some issues going on. Unfortunately he may also suffer from Howard Hugh’s Syndrome. That’s a disease of the wallet that insulates the carrier from proper care.
This tangent about whether marijuana use is or should be illegal is irrelevant; the point is that even aside from toking up on a podcast and talking anout how his brain won’t stop, Musk has behaved in an erratic, mercurial fashion that does not give stockholders and investors confidence in the stability of the company, which has consistently failed to meet the production targets necessary to achieve even marginal profitability, all while the Tesla burns though capital, has experienced a revolvong door of C-level execs, and attempted to get retroactive discounts from suppliers. (Good luck with that; once a supplier has cash in hand getting them to part with it is like taking raw hamburger from a pit bull.)
As CEO, Musk’s job isn’t making unfounded accusations of pedophelia, announcing every half-baked notion that goes through his head, or to micromanage company operations and ‘fix’ production-line problems. His job is to promote a positive vision of the company, assure investors of its ultimate viability, and recruit and retain high level executive talent to actually do the job of finance and operations. Getting intoxicated in public view, trying to insert himself everywhere, expounding on his poor comprehension of science and philosophy, and generally being an immature ass-clown are not activities that further the essential responsibilities of that tole.
Stranger
I presume Elon has a security clearance by virtue of his position with SpaceX; I can’t see any way he should be allowed to keep it at this point.
Just got back from Fremont; they’re holding a delivery event with a ton of Model 3s that they’re selling more in dealership style (in the sense that you can drive away with it then if they have the one you want). A friend is getting an AWD Model 3 and thought they might have one matching his specs. They were out of non-perf AWD models, so he’s waiting about a week longer, but in any case they seem to be selling them at a prodigious rate. Hard to tell exactly but I’d say one was driving off every 5-10 minutes. I’d guess that they’re trying to sell as many as they can via this model to take the load off the delivery centers (which seem to be overloaded at this point).
Also saw more car carriers than I think I’d ever seen in one place… 30+ of them parked on every nearby street.
I’d say they’re burning through money and need to raise more before Elon makes things worse.
They seriously need to cough up some money and anchor their position. All the major car companies are driving hard to the hoop to bring out new EV’s and they won’t make people wait 2 years for delivery.
Tesla needs to make money NOW. They simply don’t have the infrastructure to withstand a major mechanical recall and they don’t have the research funds to compete against the new cars coming out. And if they can’t convert over to the next generation of batteries then their flagship battery factory becomes a huge financial loss. They will have to buy the new battery and write off the factory.
What does this mean? Who needs to cough up whose money?
Tesla needs to sell cars. They’re doing so. Whether they’ll sell enough cars in Q3 to balance their expenses is an open question. However, it seems likely to me that they’ll at least come close, and make up the remainder with ZEV credits. Some will call it a cheat to make the books but money is money.
Growing any company at high rates exposes bottlenecks. Tesla’s current bottleneck appears to be distribution, so anything they can do to streamline it or at least take some load off of other bottleneck points is a good thing. The Fremont event appeared to be going well and was clearly more efficient than the normal process–for example, there was no one-on-one handholding through the car’s features; instead, they had a seating area showing videos. Not as nice and personal as when I bought mine, but good enough and clearly took less manpower. They also did prep work for future deliveries (my friend got all his details in order for his).
I finally saw the white interior up close. It’s cool in a spaceshippy way, but I like the black interior better. No regrets there.
I don’t know if you’re alluding to reports that the Air Force is looking into Musk’s clearance, because it turns out to have been fabricated by Charles Gasparino of Fox Business News.
That is not to say, of course, that there won’t be an investigation, or even that it couldn’t result into a loss of clearance. The Feds can revoke clearance for any number of arbitrary and capricious reasons, including marijuana use. But it is ultimately discretionary.
Of course it’s irrelevant; that’s what makes it a tangent. I acknowledged this in the very post you responded to.
I don’t think anyone can deny that Musk succeeds in promoting a positive vision for the company. There is always an immense positive response to just about every real PR event they do, and have particularly taken the spotlight from the Model 3 onward. The Semi, 2020 Roadster, solar shingles, “big battery”, etc. have all generated immensely positive press.
Given that Tesla still appears to be massively overvalued relative to realistic future earnings, I think it’s also hard to claim that investors aren’t, overall, fairly sure of Tesla’s future viability. Recent events have damaged that confidence but it is still at crazy-high levels compared to almost every other company.
It would be nice if Tesla had less executive churn, but they nevertheless have deep internal reserves. I have high hopes for Jerome Guillen, who was recently promoted to President, Automotive. This is not quite Shotwell’s equivalent role, but it’s a step in the right direction. Guillen was responsible for the “big tent”, which by all accounts was an incredible achievement given the timeframe. It looks to me like Guillen has a personality and drive compatible with Musk; the entire idea behind the tent was a kind of high-risk/high-payoff venture. Guillen pulled it off in a few weeks. He’s been at Tesla for 8 years, so I don’t think there will be any great surprises with regard to workload or culture.
I wasn’t aware of any Fox News reporting in the matter, but it did occur to me that someone selling junk bonds, using Ambien on a regular basis, smokes pot on video, is increasingly leveraged on foreign investments, calls people pedophiles and asks to be sued, etc. is not someone who would ever qualify for a security clearance if they weren’t Elon Musk. So I guess it is a coincidence in terms of timing, but you seem to be implying that it would be capricious for his clearance to be revoked. To the contrary, it would be following the letter of the law to question his clearance.
By “the Feds” I assume you mean the Defense Security Service, which has explicit guidelines regarding eligibility and clear guidance about what comprises “adverse information”, e.g that pertaining to illegal activities or compromising personal and financial information. It is made explicitly clear in the initial briefing and every security refresher that marijuana possession and use is a violation of Federal statutes even in states where medical or recreational use is permitted, and is grounds for revocation of a clearance. Regardless of how you feel about marijuana or other drug criminalization this is neither “capricious” nor “arbitrary”.
Now it isn’t as if Elon Musk hypothetically having his clearnace (if he holds one) revoked is going to have any impact whatsoever on Tesla, which currently does no work with the Department of Defense, and even with SpaceX it isn’t as if Musk is involved at any working level with National Reconnoissance Office payloads or mission requirements, so the practical impact of a revoked clearance would be nil. However, getting intoxicated on camera, pontificating about how being inside his head is like a “never-ending explosion”, getting into a public fight over some personal ego-spat and making unfounded and slanderous claims, et cetera, are all things that a stable and responsible business executive would avoid doing because they give the appearance of emotional instability, a deficit of personal self-control, and a lack of foresight.
If all Musk had done is take a hit off of a blunt and otherwise seemed in control, the public response would have been a collective, “Huh…well, I guess they’re doing that now in California.” But in combination with all of Musk’s other recent outbursts, off the cuff business statements, and other reported behaviors, it resulted in a significant drop in investor confidence and yet more executives fleeing the company after just a few months on the job. A company can have innovative concepts and a great product but still go down the tubes without stable leadership which Tesla gives every appearance of not having.
Stranger
They’re bleeding money.
they needed to sell cars a year ago.
Tesla’s bottleneck is Musk. You see it as stumbling toward a vision. I and many others see the bottlenecks as unnecessary screw-ups that hurt the company.
Regardless of how you feel about marijuana there is a problem with the CEO of any company getting high during an interview. It’s only a matter of degrees whether it’s beer or crack cocaine. It was a massively stupid thing to do.
“Oh but it was only pot” completely misses the point.