Almost everything that is happening in US politics was telegraphed beforehand if you were looking carefully enough. If Musk's current level of influence and his actions are a surprise to anyone, I'd politely suggest that they augment their sources of information.
I've listened to a history podcast about the robber barons and how following the backlash and dismantlement of the Standard oil, industrialist started buying articles, sometime even newspapers to sell their stories, and in the US, it worked wonderfully. You still have the brand "Quaker" that was born at the time, and probably a dozen other, where they manipulated their own famillial history to build an image, and hide the fact that children died in their mine or that they just had 20 redneck strikers killed. It's not as bad today, but building a personal brand by buying puff articles, fondations. Buying goodwill and influence was always present since at least that time (Honestly, Berkshire Hathaway made at least some of its money on WB reputation, so tech billionaires are not the only kind of CEO who do it)
> He always had it? Money give influence naturally.
Not as much as he has now: he was famously frustrated by the California state government's Covid lockdown mandates, and was pretty powerless against them. That frustration is probably what led him to buy influence in the Trump campaign,and later administration. Money can take you so far, political power will take you further for imposing your will on others.
The "Shock-and-awe"/blitzkrieg strategy is another force-multiplier. By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
" By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot."
This is a risky strategy if it is later determined that Musk broke laws with DOGE and is arrested and convicted.
The current doctrine is those - and any other - rules don't apply to the president in his official capacity. SCOTUS declared that it's legal when the president does it.
I'm not going to be as extreme as saying "california has integrity". But California was wise to prioritize its people over a robber baron who's just mad his cars weren't selling. He probably still couldn't buy off CA to this day.
Switching to a side of fellow billionaire politicians was simply a way to be among his own people, with similar levels of empathy for the working class.
>By moving much faster than the bureaucracy and legal system can respond, the question on whether he has the power or authority to do the things he's doing may become moot.
I think long term someone is going to shut down his shenanigans for good. Maybe even Trump himself will throw him under the bus. But I do wonder how deep he can get and what his consequences are. Like, could he simply leak government data to Russia/China and only get away with a fine? He's not military, but Court Mashals have given the death sentence over much more mild causes.
I liked Elon until about 2018. Since then he's gradually degraded from "interesting founder" to "guy who picks fights about weird topics on the internet" to "absurdist oligarch actively working to destroy institutions which support average Americans."
I certainly suspect that there were always elements of what he's become that just weren't as publicly apparent.
I stopped liking Musk when his first wife's tell-all "I Was a Starter Wife" came out in Marie Claire in 2010. Yes, penned by a disgruntled former spouse, it felt nonetheless authentic and immediately believable, and all the events since have generally confirmed her characterization of him.
As so often, it's how they treat the women around them that tells you a lot about men.
What did you like about him until 2018? He is not some visionary or genius or even smart. Neither is/was he a decent person to deal with (read up on his PayPal days). He is however, extraordinarily ruthless and thin skinned.
So what is it that you saw in him that you liked him?
This. He is definitely not a genius and not even smart. He can’t formulate any interesting, original thoughts. He parrots, daily, dumb ideas and state propaganda (for example, russia) without any critical thinking.
The average person on the street is smarter than him.
My Tesla drives itself virtually everywhere. All I have to do is look out the window, which I'd do anyway. The only times I control my Tesla are when pulling in and out of my garage and when I need to get it going so FSD can take over (and occasionally when parking).
Whether he was serious about buying Twitter or not, he put himself in the position where he was legally required to complete the offer to purchase. Nobody forced him into that blunder.
The only reason he tried to get out of it was because tech stocks tanked shortly after the bid and he knew he could have gotten it for far cheaper than the $44B. The entire time it was happening I was convinced that if he could get out of the bid he would immediately make another one for around $30B and still buy his favorite addiction. People like him and their motivations aren't that hard to read.
He wasn't _forced_ to buy anything. He was forced to pay what he promised for it.
"Bid" was hypothesis's word, not mine, so whatever "gotcha" you think you're springing on me, send it elsewhere.
Yes, I know how bids work, at least approximately. It wasn't a bid in the strict sense. It was an offer to buy, which Twitter accepted, and then Musk tried to withdraw the offer (because of too much of the traffic being bots, IIRC). The judge did not allow Musk to withdraw, because there was no such "subject to" in his offer.
You're forgetting how the Twitter acquisition actually went. Almost immediately after the contract was signed he started trying to weasel out of it with various absurd excuses. He only stopped trying to violate the purchase contract once it became clear he was almost certain to lose in court.
He is breaking the law, full stop. Sorry but you don't get to do that in a Republic without consequence. Process matters when it comes to regulation, because without it you get unchecked power and tyranny.
If pre-Musk twitter was in the hands of censorship, what is it now? By all accounts it is a bot-infested echo chamber for his own bizarre obsessions where dissent is quickly stamped out.
He founded (for some definition) the two most impressive American corporations of the century and tweeted a lot to build a direct connection to people.
> I’m wondering under what definition he “founded” Tesla rather than being the investor who took it over years later kicking the founders out?
I wouldn't call him a founder precisely because of this, but at the same time they produced, I forget the exact number, but less than 200 individual vehicles before he took over.
The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.
(Although, given he's ranted about the difficulties of being a public company and having to listen to shareholders, I'm not sure how much this happened because of him rather than despite him).
> The company was seen as a financial disaster, a pipe dream, and a money sink for a very long time, and he did actually make it profitable.
Pretty much mainly on government money - without it, it would've gone bust long ago. Specifically the policies of Obama and those pesk environmentalists he seems to dislike so much.
Probably, but making a sucessful transition to eco-friendly vehicles was the point of that government money, and at the time batteries were much more expensive.
(The price of batteries is also why, at the time he went for batteries, the zeitgeist was hydrogen).
The founders who went for batteries were all about heavy acceleration at the time, which Hydrogen couldn’t really do.
He took over 5 years in when they already had the Roadster in production and the model S design was largely finalized with the goal of ever cheaper and more mass market cars over time.
The cyber truck’s look and buying solar city were definitely under his leadership, other moves are less clear.
Cybertruck seems to represent him making all the same fundamental mistakes that were present in the original design of the Roadster, by being too expensive to produce. (Compare the price as announced vs. as delivered, and that's not justifiable by inflation).
The reports I've seen say Musk took an active role within the company starting in 2004 (Eberhard was asked to leave in 2007), including overseeing Roadster product design from the beginning (but I've not seen citations for this), and was behind the idea of using the sports car to fund the development of mainstream vehicles.
As I understand it, the first Roadster to be delivered was to Musk and in Feb 2008? So between Eberhard and Musk as CEO.
The best I can do for citations is this, but this is Musk writing on Tesla's blog — I would like to say crucially the date stamp is before Eberhard was pushed out in 2007… but the oldest archive copy is 2010 not 2006 when the blog post claims to have been written, and when the guy himself has a trust deficit I think it's worth being open about this discrepancy: https://web.archive.org/web/20100802142703/http://www.teslam...
So him paying people somehow changes what happened?
“In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for slander and libel. As per NBC Bay Area, the lawsuit was settled, and as a condition of the settlement, Musk and two other Tesla executives, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, are now allowed to call themselves co-founders, in addition to Eberhard and Tarpenning.”
He had zero involvement for ~1 year, invested some money and then five years later he’s CEO. That’s hardly the definition of founding anything.
I wonder how much each company spends internally on damage control/mitigation re: Musk. I don't think he's as much of a chaos monkey as Trump, but I try not to pay attention to him so I could be missing things.
There is this weird revisionist history now that Musk is hated to dismiss all Tesla's accomplishments as meaningless. The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. That is both impressive and huge net positive for humanity in a way that is an extremely rare achievement for any startup.
I completely agree with you and will add that it super interesting to watch everyone completely rewrite his accomplishments because they don't like him and his politics now.
The amount of people who try and discredit the insane things he's managed to pull off is fascinating.
I can fully understand peoples hatred of him, but to write off the literal things he has accomplished is such completely revisionist and post truth. Noone in here will like this but he probably qualifies as schumpeters definition of entrepreneur of our century unless he destroys everything in the next time period which isnt zero but a low probability.
There is no “disruption”. In either the common vernacular or especially not in the “innovator’s Dilemna” definition. EVs still make a small percent of the market in the US and the rest of the industry in the US are backing away from their EV investments.
You don’t see in the auto industry the type of “disruption” you saw from Apple and the iPhone where everyone jumped on the bandwagon, abandoned their old phones and most of the previous smart phone makers went out of business. While Apple’s market share worldwide isn’t that great, they take most of the profits. Tesla is doing neither.
> The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did.
This isn't clear to me. Maybe in the US? but in Europe, there should be no new CO2-emitting cars by 2035. There's a global trend to move to EV due to climate change that has little to do with Tesla.
You are pointing to a disrupted market as evidence that the market didn't need to be disrupted. A quick search suggest that EU ban on CO2-emitting cars was from 2022, 5 years after Tesla started selling the Model 3. The global trend toward EVs was largely started by Tesla showing that EVs were a viable product with real demand.
I don't think this is correct. See this article from July 2017 [1] Banning petrol cars was already discussed, it mentioned many car constructors, but not mention of Tesla. At that time, 27,903 Tesla cars were sold in Europe [2], so the market wasn't disrupted at all.
> France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced.
> The Netherlands has mooted a 2025 ban for diesel and petrol cars, and some federal states in Germany are keen on a 2030 phase-out.
> India, where scores of cities are blighted by dangerous air pollution, is mulling the idea of no longer selling petrol or diesel cars by 2030, and said it wants to introduce electric cars in “a very big way”.
That July 2017 article you linked cites Volvo committing to switch their fleet to all electrics and hybrids. If you click on that hyperlink you will find this paragraph:
>Of Elon Musk’s Tesla, whose ‘mass market’ Model 3 is expected to roll off the production line later this week, Samuelsson [Volvo's chief executive] said: “It’s a tough competitor. But with this decision we are really becoming the second premium car maker in the world which will also be all-electrified.”
The EU followed France. France followed Volvo. Volvo followed Tesla. Tesla was the spark.
I would say US government and more specifically California was the spark, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to start this industry.
I am all for it, he took advantage of a program specifically created to be taken advantage of. But I am not sure if it wasn't for the the tax related benefits, carbon emission credits, and the damn HOV lane access Tesla would be here.
No France didn’t have meaningful ev traction. California and Tesla pushed out the market for EVs. Paris agreement helped Im sure but Tesla really did bring the EV market muscle - its undeniable.
EVs have been around since the 90s but there was a collective effort to restrict their growth and production.
>EVs were already a common sight in France way before Tesla.
I can't say I'm an expert on French automotive sales. It is possible they have always had a small market for EVs going back years, but there clearly was an inflection point that occurred after Tesla had proved there was widespread demand for EVs with 2020 being the first year that EVs made up more than 2% of new car sales in France.[1]
Okay and the GUI was started by Apple as far as PCs. Where did that leave Apple as far as the PC market compared to Microsoft?
And “disruption” doesn’t mean whet you think it means. Were any of the existing car manufacturers ever threatened by Tesla as far as market share and revenue like what happened to RIM and Nokia in the smart phone space?
>Were any of the existing car manufacturers ever threatened by Tesla
Yes, that is why almost all of them started heavily investing in EVs after Tesla proved they were a viable product. You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
> You seem to believe that "disruption" can only come from wild financial success. All it means in this context is that they blazed a new trail for others established players to follow.
That’s not at all what “disruption” means according to “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.
Yes and Microsoft would never have embraced the GUI if it weren’t for Apple and other AI companies would never have embraced LLMs if it weren’t for OpenAI.
But that doesn’t justify Teslas value. In the words of the AI industry - “there is no moat” around EVs
Genuinely can't tell if you are trying to be sarcastic with the first sentence, but I'll just point out that Tesla can both have accomplished a lot as a company, been a net benefit for humanity, be wildly overvalued as a company, and have no real moat. They were the first automaker to put substantial money into selling EVs as a business and that gave them a first mover advantage that has now largely disappeared (but still exists in certain areas such as still having the best charging network).
I’m saying simply it no more matters in nerd circles than Mac geeks arguing about Apple bringing the GUI to personal computers when it was almost dead in the late 90s.
It is just as meaningless now on HN as it was then on comp.sys.mac.advocacy back then
They arent meaningless, Tesla did some pretty cool shit. And then they shipped a very small quantity of cars that have poor maintenance and the kind of vendor lockin that we get shitty at John Deere for.
The issue isnt that Tesla did stuff. Its that its all historical stuff that doesnt justify its current market price.
If I was to invest in a car company I would want them shipping millions of cars, not a "net positive for humanity" and a couple hundred thousand janky cars.
> If I was to invest in a car company I would want them shipping millions of cars
Tesla shipped 1.2 million of the Model Y alone in 2023, making it the best selling car worldwide. They sell about half as many cars as Ford, at 9x the profit margin.
I was merely correcting someone who was wrong on the internet, because Tesla does not in fact ship "a couple hundred thousand janky cars", as OP claimed.
> Consumer Reports‘ annual reliability rankings have been released, and with data from 24 brands and over 300,000 vehicles, Tesla fell near the bottom (19/24) along with Mercedes-Benz, Jeep, Volkswagen, GMC, and Chevrolet. Electric vehicles overall also placed poorly, being the second least reliable category of vehicles. Hybrids/plugin hybrids, especially those from Toyota, were found to be the most reliable.
Also the idea of the “best selling car” is meaningless. That’s like when Apple has “the best selling phone” when other manufacturers like Samsung sell a dozen types of phones.
I remember when the original iMac was the best selling model of computer among all brands. A title Apple retained until, IIRC, they offered multiple colour options.
MacOS was still something like 5% or so of the overall market.
Funny aside, the narrative is usually that Apple was struggling between the time Jobs left and he returned between 1984 and 1997. The truth is that their market cap was larger than Microsoft’s through 1992-93 and they were the largest or second largest computer seller around 1991-94. The bottom didn’t fall out until Windows 95 and Apple manufacturing low end computers no one wanted.
It is probably telling that multiple people here think that the only relevant framing of "impressive" is as an investment. And that is only made stranger by the fact that Tesla has been objectively a hugely successful investment in terms of performance, no matter how many people dislike their cars, Musk, and the company's fundamentals or they think there is some hypothetical crash that is right around the corner.
And to make it explicit, I dislike Musk as much as the next guy and I absolutely would not invest in Tesla at this point, but we shouldn't let that bias our view of history.
I know hundreds of people are trying to codify musks legacy at this point.
>Tesla has been objectively a hugely successful investment in terms of performance
But the only thing he cant dance out of is that he is an absolutely impressive showman. I mean even in the emails OpenAI released, he very talked his way into a controlling interest in OpenAI.
I just feel like, heaps of Tesla investors are going to be left holding the bags when the shine wears off.
That said, if I saw a story about Musk wising up a little bit and hiring someone to rejuvenate his PR I would probably spread some money amongst all of his businesses.
>The traditional auto industry would have never embraced EVs to the extent they have if someone did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did.
Unless you have some sort of way to investigate alternate timelines, there is zero evidence of this claim, including the absurd "never" claim. Many of the innovations that made EVs possible -- for instance rapid advances in battery tech along with the computational improvements to go with them -- came from outside the auto industry. And for that matter the automotive industry had been iterating on EV tech for decades before Elon started dumping money to buy himself credibility. The first lithium-ion EV came out in 1998.
The auto industry was getting there. The blip of Tesla had little impact on the overall timeline, and it certainly isn't a "huge net positive" for humanity. It's a barely noticeable nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Elon, in his absolutely desperate need to constantly be The Subject, has a brilliance in choose the inflection point for buying into something. If it's the emerging hot new thing, Elon will appear with big bags of cash demanding that he be acknolwedged as the leader that made it all happen.
That doesn’t explain Twitter or the fact that Tesla sells are decreasing and that its market share is declining. Its profits are a nothingburger.
Contrast that with Apple, outside of the US and a few other high income countries that is market share may be neglible. But at least it’s taking most of the profit and by far is the most profitable phone maker
facts! except did not disrupt the market in a way like Tesla did. I am not sure this really counts as distruption - not sure 8.1% of the market qualifies as distruption… perhaps it does if the trend continues like it did outside of the US
The fact that it's worth more than all the other automakers combined.
> the other manufacturers are catching up
Re-read what you wrote, and consider how preposterous it is that automakers founded more than a century ago are now "catching up" to a company that sold its first car in 2008.
No doubt he needs to distance himself from the company so that his political career stops impacting it so directly. The business is over valued but still very impressive. Yes the software is controversial, but the hardware is fantastic and a decade ahead of what other domestic automakers are doing. They’re also profitable and have a long term vision to innovate unlike many industry peers who chase the government mandate du jour.
There is nothing about Tesla that is even one year ahead of EVs. My wife and I travel a lot and haven’t owned our own car since late 2022 until late last year and tried a lot of different EVs. They were all just as good as the Tesla and had a better infotainment system.
Tesla is not as profitable as Toyota, GM or Volkswagen and their profit is trending down. There is nothing justifying their market cap based on their profit or even 5 year expected profit.
Tesla has made a lot of promises that they haven’t come close to fulfilling and Musk right now is the definition of regulatory capture
Tesla and the Chinese manufacturers are not playing in anything near the same league. Making cheap EV's is in no way "outcompeting" Tesla. Rather, Tesla has shown that it can handily outcompete traditional luxury auto companies, beating them at their own game.
The Innovator's Dilemma is about new, disruptive technologies causing large, established, incumbent firms to fail. Are the Chinese EV makers developing new technologies?
That’s exactly the opposite of the Innovator’s Dilemna. That’s the startup bros definition they use in pitch decks. But not Clay Christenson’s definition
It’s about products coming into the market at the low end that are “good enough” when the current leaders “over serve” the market - “low end disruption”. Examples are PCs -> mainframes, Linux x86 servers -> Unix boxes, digital cameras/phones -> regular cameras and even smart phones to PCs
Surprisingly enough, another facet of the Innovator’s dilemma is that low end disruption partially happens because the companies involved are not vertically integrated like Tesla and each part of the supply chain focuses on optimizing their components and have scale efficiencies because the low end market has more volume.
We see that now with Chinese ODMs in the EV space. We saw that before with x86 PCs vs Macs and to an extent with smart phones. Apple is kind of unique as a vertically integrated company. But even they don’t make their own processors or manufacturer their own devices
He didn't found PayPal either. He founded X.com, and they happened to merge with Confinity who owned the brand PayPal. Confinity existed before X.com (and had better brand recognition with PayPal), and if Musk would've had it his way, PayPal as brand wouldn't exist post-merge; it would have been called X.com.
