Elon Musk is great at promising stuff, and then terrible at executing. For every promise he fulfills there are 20 that he doesn't. But sure, the guy who flies private everywhere and shitposts more than I do is "working 100 hour weeks" and "cares for the environment."
"Reaction" is the key word here. The opposite of a fanboy is not a hater, it is the person who doesn't care. The fanboy and the hater are two sides of the same coin - they both develop an obsession with a person and define their personalities as a function of this person. Whether that function is love or hate is secondary.
The way out of his is to ignore him, or judge him by his work. He sells cars - really good cars. For example, they have the best range and are incredibly safe. Your emotional reaction won't make you car's range go down, or make you any less safe in a crash.
And any thread that involves him; I'm not good at this, but I'm trying. The reason Elon Musk inspires such hate is because he is constantly PRing (generously) unverifiable claims, but rarely gets any consequences from it. If he would let his work speak for itself, there would be less haters; his companies are clearly doing some things well.
It's kind of a Steve Jobs thing, but Jobs rarely made forward looking claims -- sure his claims of invention were irritating to some, but they were about a product that existed at the time of the claim.
His behavior of overpromising and underdelivering is a deliberate strategy to drive productivity within his employee base. You may not like that approach, but it seems to have worked.
You may judge him to be "terrible at executing" if you compare his output with his promised output. If you compare his absolute output with that of a common industrious person, you'll find he scores off the charts.
From transactions like SolarCity to calling divers pedophiles to allowing Autopilot to even be deployed en masse.
There's nothing wrong with taking risks and failing. There is something wrong with taking investor money and using it to bail out an unrelated company.
Anyone buying into Musk's vision understands that they're buying into all of it, for better or worse. Either that, or they're too dumb to be entrusted with large amounts of money, and markets have a way of handling that situation quickly and efficiently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabhol_Power_Station
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2002/01/01/b...
They are only remembered for their financial "innovations" which was ultimately their downfall. But to suggest they didn't make anything tangible is false. They even had a "Netflix" style streaming service setup with Block Buster at one point.
Enron accomplished nothing that wouldn't have happened without them, in one form or another. Agree with him or not, Musk tackles things that either wouldn't happen at all without him, or that would happen too slowly to matter.
The reality is, we need both kinds of companies, but we also need them to behave ethically.
They were not some hedge fund merely shuffling paper around. GE is a very apt comparison.
I went for dinner to my in-laws a few months ago and my mother-in-law asked if I had heard about the Tesla that caught fire in Shanghai. I said, yeah but did you hear about all the combustion cars that had combusted that day. She had not of course. Didn't even know "normal" cars catch fire. Nothing against her in particular (she had seen it on a mainstream TV news program), I've had similar conversations with coworkers, aquiantances, on social media, etc.
My example may seem low-value, but I've seen lots of very long and detailed discussions around here about Tesla's "Executive Exodus", which fall into the exact same selection bias pitfall.
I think it's true that Musk went in and tried to save SolarCity by assuming control and changing the course. That was news at the time where it happened. He did the same to Tesla, actually. It's also true that he's always talking about visions.
The headline of this article starts with: "He (Musk) is full of shit".
Why?
Because that's a quote from a single person she interviewed, who is a disgruntled ex-employee of Tesla with a history of ranging against Tesla and Musk (to quote the article "Since then, he had taken to sending Elon Musk emails and point-blank tweets, describing the pain the layoffs were causing.").
(as a total aside, if you've heard about a laid off low-level employee angrily tweeting and e-mailing a CEO of Fortune 500 company (116 to be exact) you would probably think "an unstable person" not "a good subject expert to interview").
Instead of treating "Musk is full of shit" as a fact, she should could ask herself "is Musk really full of shit"?
Should could do it by asking more people what they think about Musk, more Tesla employees, including those that are still happily employed.
This article is clearly sourced from the most vocal, the most virulent Tesla haters (the self-proclaimed members of $TSLAQ on Twitter).
You can easily find even more people very happy with Tesla's products and I'm sure there are plenty of employees who think highly of Musk.
But it's clearly a hit piece, not interested in presenting a balanced account.
The part about Walmart lawsuit doesn't mention Tesla's response (which paints Walmart in a very bad light) or subsequent joint statement from Walmart and Tesla where they make nice.
Your uninformed mother-in-law may have actually had a better handle on things by not being a major fan and not internalizing the Tesla PR response.
The perfect defense against truth in any form.
You don't think Musk believes he can do anything? He always over-promises but that's not exactly the same as a con artist.
Stop worrying about what is hip and trendy and trying to dismiss things that sounds like other things. You don't even try to parse and respond to any facts or details from this story at all, you're just being lazy.
For better or worse, secular understandings and political understandings don't always jive. Now that political attitudes have changed, it seems obvious that early adopters will struggle, as their affordability is often based on those same subsidies. This is the only frame of reference in my mind that is terribly important when it comes to the success or failure of many of the properties that Musk runs. The fact that he's kept them going in the current political and social environments is really a credit, I think.
He's not building fossil fuel based vehicles. He's not building coal plants. He's keeping the space race alive. The general dislike of this guy seems personal. There are far larger financial crimes to go after, but Musk made himself a target. Damn, I wouldn't doubt that he does some of it on purpose.
That isn't a reason to not go after Musk.
Executives at all levels need to be made an example of when they commit a crime. Otherwise it encourages others to do the same.
In the end he takes a lot of risks, but it’s only by looking at both successes and failures that you can judge his approach is reasonable.
No one cares about a great UI if people's roofs are catching fire. With all the positives and negatives weighed and accounted for, there is simply more negative things going on with the company right now than positive.
As to success, quietly selling 1/3 as many Model 3’s as Toyota Camry’s is what success looks like. Nobody cheers for the 292,371 car to roll off the assembly plant. It’s simply boring and not really worth talking about outside of boardrooms and climate change projections.
I don't hate Musk at all. I love what he does and what he has done. But he plays a ridiculously high-risk game, and that could risk destroying all the great things he built.
Or, hear me out, there's something to what these "haters" have been saying for years. Which is more likely?
I don't think Musk was trying to harm anyone-- I think he doesn't realize he's human and he can't actually juggle 44 million balls at once. And I think even if he drops some balls, we're all better off for the ones he juggles successfully.
If the collateral cost of a revitalized space industry and a growing electric car industry is $750million wasted in NY State, that seems like a small price to pay.
You have an obligation as CEO (and Chairman at the time) to be ethical and legal in your actions.
Tesla is one of the many cases of Silicon Valley syndrome where you run a company at negative profit forever while claiming to make all these substantial advances (some laudable, others stupid) in an attempt to disrupt something that's been working for decades for specific reasons. There's a reason car assembly lines aren't fully automated. There's a reason car companies don't allow customers to pre-order a vehicle. There's a reason dealership networks exist.
Musk isn't some fantastical genius with a solution to everything. Everyone before Musk was as smart and as talented, so his active refusal to really learn from anyone before him is what causes him so much headache. In fact, I'd argue that his contract with NASA probably saved SpaceX because that's one avenue where he didn't ignore a previously, well established business.
The public may have thought that electric cars were all but dead. But smart people knew that their time had not yet come.
Oh, and look! Excepting high end niches that Tesla figured out, and government subsidies, that timeline from 20 years ago looks to come true pretty much on schedule.
I admire Elon Musk. Without him, reusable rockets wouldn't have happened for many more years. But electric cars would have happened with or without him.
And since companies were actually trying to make money, and cars were becoming more fuel efficient, there wasn't the demand. In fact, there still isn't that high of a demand for electric cars these days.
I'm not discounting that Tesla made some innovations. But people make it out like Tesla radically changed the functionality of the electric car when it's still largely the same technology, just more advanced.
To give an example, the Nissan Leaf was out well before people even heard of Tesla, and that was one of the most popular and widely sold electric vehicles. At the time, Tesla only had the 100k Roadster.
Other improvements drive the capacity even higher through packaging innovations and possible manufacturing improvements as well.
I highly doubt it was due to range anxiety. Even the early Tesla roadster could, at most, go 200 miles. That's nothing on a gasoline engine.
The Nissan Leaf does not look that ugly. It looked like your standard hatchback for the time.
Batteries did improve but its not like Tesla had access to better batteries than GM (at least in their early days).
1955; drag coefficient 0.36:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_DS
Since then we've come quite a bit further, the TM3 has 0.23, which is a substantial improvement but neither car looks ugly.
All I heard was comment of "SpaceX Steamroller" from industry insiders. The companies that could have invested in rocket reusability decided to sit by and do nothing. It's not like it's an impossible physical achievement either.
That anyone proposed resuable rockets before Musk? Use Google. You're naive if you think otherwise.
>at a fraction of the price per launch of whatever existed before.
There's no evidence that these resuable rockets are a "fraction" of the cost to re-launch. In fact, the cost is likely the reason that no one else has done it; it doesn't make economic sense, not because it's impossible.
Everything is done a certain way until it isn't but that historically is past the point of "about damn time" and "why'd take so long". Doing what is right and what is smart are often very different things — and I am not claiming Musk is doing either, but this certainly didn't convince me of the opposite.
The only notable thing here is that hating on Musk is really popular these days. So the failed gambles (this, falcon doors, the initial overautomation of the Model 3 production, etc) will be highlighted and mocked, while the successful gambles will go unmentioned or incorporated as a matter-of-fact developments.
Running Tesla stories through a selection bias filter is really useful, as it'll discard most stories that pop up.