I'm so sick of this. Yes Gwynne is great, but to deny or downplay that Elon is by far the most important person at the company is just nonsense that she wouldn't even agree with.

I hate to talk against here because she is awesome. But this social trick where everytime SpaceX does anything, the Anti-Elon crowed have to truck out the 'actually its all the enlighted levelheaded female president' not the 'nasty meme-obscessed man child asshole' is actually responsable for all the success argument, its so fucking tiered and inaccurate.

You didn't go there fully but the amount of people who argue that SpaceX achieves what it does despite Elon is just stagering. People seem to believe any bullshit if it confirms their bias.

Again, I love Gwynne she is great and so are others who work at SpaceX now or have done in the past. They achieve what they do as a team, at the same time its no question who leads the team, who makes the most important choices, who owns and controls the company.

I actually like to use Gwynne Shotwell as a great example between Tesla and SpaceX.

There's no doubt that Elon is gifted from the engineering and vision side. But Gwynne is the one that actually (paraphrasing her words) turns his seemingly crazy vision into an actual project with milestones and how to get there. I think they complement each other really well.

You can see how much of a mess Tesla is, without having someone like that to complement Elon's skills. SpaceX (also because of the domain) seems like it is run by a grownup.

Tesla on the other hand seems like it's run by a bunch of people who excel at the tough engineering challenges (contrast the cars themselves with the service experience), but have less interest in the easier stuff (running a well stocked service center). Look at the way they confusingly change pricing so often.

Tesla needs an Elon Musk but they badly need a Gwynne Shotwell.

Tesla is a public company with many betting against it, trying to make it fail for any reason. Elon Musk deliberately takes the front seat and attract any criticism to protect those who work behind the scene.

It's been 2 years since Jérôme Guillen has become Tesla's President of Automotive. You wouldn't know.

> You can see how much of a mess Tesla is

Based on what objective metric?

Numerous manufacturing delays, the dismal perception of their service centers (I'm a part of Tesla owner groups and nothing gets people riled up like talking about their service experiences), the constantly changing prices, the consistently missed deadlines.

Let me be clear. I own a Model 3, and I love it. I also own Tesla stock. And I cheer when their sales go up.

My criticism is from wanting them to be better. They've got all the really difficult stuff right (the car is amazing, comfortable, and we all love it). It's the easy stuff that's "boring grown up stuff of running a business" where they need a lot of help.

> Numerous manufacturing delays

SpaceX has that and they have Gwynne. So do pretty much all other car manufactures, specifically with electric cars.

Having great service while scaling is insanely difficult. Just having some other influentual manager is not gone magically solve that incredibly difficult problem.

Overall the company has been anything but messy, rather they have been executing pretty well, better then most people expected.

For what it’s worth, I feel they are also doing things that are tougher than most other companies. And actually moving the industry forward in some ways.

I don’t know what people expected but I expect them to miss deadlines with the harder stuff where they’re trailblazers (like autopilot).

But building a reliable car is largely a solved problem. Even Elon has admitted they over engineered the manufacturing before they had to just use more people.

Tesla had issues with manufacturing, like everybody. That is why there are not more car companies. But they have mastered this and massively improved each generations, go look at the tear down of the 3 and the Y. They have managed to make China Model 3 cheaper and have achieved pretty good margin.

They continue to innovate and have been strategically investing in becoming a battery provider and building and expanding factories in all the important markets.

And building EV at good margin is defiantly not a solved problem.

That tweet was a very typical Muskian joke, goading the supporters of what he sees as an obviously crazy conspiracy theory. (See "Tesla bankwupt" for a more developed version.) It's probably the best indication he doesn't have anything to do with anything in Bolivia.

Besides the fact that even proponents of the theory can't come up with any better connection than "one of his products uses lithium", of course.

At some point, he needs to decide if he wants to be a CEO or a comedian. He can't be both.

The idea that CEOs tend to become inhuman is a bad thing, not a good thing. If we say they should be come inhuman machines then they will, and all the corporations will be led by inhuman machine-like humans. So yes, he definitely can be both, and more CEOs need to act like him, not less.

They don't need to become inhuman machines, they just need to understand that their words have effects beyond the obvious.

You might not want to joke about blowing up the plane while you're standing in line at the X-ray machine, and you might not want to joke about conspiracy theories (or stock prices, or buyout offers, or pedophilia, or Kanye's presidential campaign, or...) when you have reason to believe that people will take you seriously. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that large numbers of motivated morons are nothing to fuck around with.

I’m not suggesting he had anything to do with it (though I wouldn’t rule out the possibility). The question was just what he thinks of it, and I thought his response wasn’t funny in the slightest. The coup in Bolivia is horrible. Not even remotely funny. It’s tone deaf and insensitive at best.

I am not in favor of the US interfering, to whatever extent it may have, but it seems that for Morales to run in the first place was unconstitutional due to term limits. His party tried to overturn the term limits in a referendum, failed, and then presto, the Supreme Court ruled it was a violation of human rights.

So if he has a case for it being a coup, it seems like the opposition has a comparably good case that he was moving towards what people call an "autogolpe" or self-coup.

This is not to say the current government is preferable.

I have not been paying attention to Bolivia recently, like most Americans, so my information is from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_general_election

Glenn Greenwald has been covering the situation since the coup occurred:

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-i...

I tend to avoid The Intercept since the whole Reality Winner thing sensitized me to possible Russian connections. Without knowing what the true relationship is, I have written them off as providing a manipulative propaganda line. Of course, sometimes propaganda is written by the best; I was just reading about Eric Blair's wartime efforts for the BBC, and how he tried to avoid damaging his credibility as an anti-imperialist.

I understand the election irregularities in the Bolivia election are controversial, and I don't take a side on whether that was a pretext to get rid of Morales. My point was only that the act of running in the first place was questionable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

>Russian connections

You say it like it's something bad.

That's shorthand for Russian government intelligence; I didn't mean to cast aspersions at the Russian people.

I hesitate to declare it worse than being a CIA front.

But in any case, I think it's better to look for other sources of information and never, ever, trust them with your freedom or life, like Ms. Winner did.

That was an obvious joke. So many people get "woosh"ed by him so much. He obviously takes pride in doing it to people who believe in things that are obviously nonsense.

pretty sure that was a joke.

Really? What makes you say that? It’s not a funny joke coming from someone in a position to fund a coup for lithium... It’s a super insensitive thing to say if nothing else. The right wing government that took over Bolivia murdered innocent civilians.

Musk doesn't have a particularly compassionate sense of humor, nor much restraint on Twitter. It's cost him a lot of money in the past.

But my guess is that he knows very few details about that coup, which allows him to joke about it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he knew as much about it as most people in the US, including myself: nothing.

> It's cost him a lot of money in the past.

It actually made him a huge amount of money as the stocks he bought have increased in value by quite a lot.

It did cost him the position of chairman at Tesla however.

Your lack of a sense of humor isn't Elon's problem. Offense is taken, not given.

Oh fuck off.

(Are you going to take offense at that?)

I don't know about OP but I laugh at your words. They mean nothing.

Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources? What you call a lack of humor is IMO genuine compassion for people who have suffered a great loss.

> Should we have a sense of humor about Latin American countries being overthrown so powerful interests can exploit their natural resources?

I personally think we should have a sense of humour about everything.

The Russian reversal is one example of finding humour in darkness [1]. I found Elon’s joke to be in the category of the “be careful, or America will bring you some freedom” jokes that were popular during the Iraq war.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reversal

IMO it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event. Like a random American joking about invading a company for oil, vs Dick Cheney saying that the invasion of Iraq will be great for Halliburton. There's a point where it stops being a "joke" and is just a sad fact.

> it's a bit different when you're someone who financially benefits from the dark event

Fair enough. I prefer to have more room for humour. And I bet this joke did more to educate Americans of Bolivia’s history than serious discourse has. But a reasonable point on which to disagree.

Educate Americans of Bolivia’s history? By saying he supports a coup against the leader? The New York Times already did that, only to later retract their story That suggested the election was fraudulent. The tweet has no informational content which could serve to educate anyone about Bolivia.

It was a joke, and he followed it by stating that Tesla gets most of its lithium from Australia.

I did find it a tasteless joke though, and a foolish thing to publicly say. But then again Musk is known to TUI (Tweet Under the Influence) quite often. Rocket man gets hiiiiiiiiiiiiigh...

Even if they don’t use Bolivian lithium at Tesla, more lithium in the market reduces the cost of Australian lithium. Tesla directly benefits from this if the coup government isn’t ousted.

> do what humans have been doing for decades

This is incorrect. SpaceX has pioneered on several fronts of aerospace engineering. The most obvious of which is their reusable first stage.