Agree 100%. The change in Musk’s public persona combined with his more recent business decisions are alarming. And you may say that his public persona shouldn’t matter, but when he willfully alienates a large portion of his traditional customer base, one wonders what he is even thinking.

This might ironically be the downside of being less money driven and more principle driven. I think he legitimately thinks “the woke mind virus” is a bigger short term threat to (western) civilization than failing to transition to sustainable energy (Tesla) or failing to become a multi planetary species (SpaceX). If he was primarily financially driven I think he would have kept quiet and just focused on the existing companies, like most people probably would even if they privately held similarly controversial opinions.

I’m not saying he is correct by the way, just that it seems like he thinks that and it basically explains his behavior.

The thing is, he’s never been paid to stay quiet and focus on the money.

Musk’s value add is as the celebrity CEO; the Jobsian ideal taken to its natural conclusion. He’s supposed to be this forward-looking visionary and having him at the helm of your company is supposed to make it forward-looking by proxy.

This is all well and good until the celebrity CEO fries his brain with Special K and builds a bubble of yes-men around him. Then it becomes a massive liability.

A lot of it’s explained by drugs, incredible impulsivity, some magical thinking, and remarkably thin skin, plus (I think the rest are in plain evidence—this gets speculative) maybe some discontent over his personal life and especially his kids.

Tell that to the share holders who keep rewarding him even on a huge earnings miss.

The only thing separating Tesla from a realistic multiple is Musk. For shareholders it's rational to want to keep him around. Otherwise they would have to face a much worse reversion to the mean.

TSLA down > 50% from the peak. The stock went up on earnings miss because things were not as bad as shareholders were expecting, but the shareholders are expecting things to be pretty bad.

But I think the point people have made (correctly!) is that TSLA's price is detached from any normal way we have for pricing a car company. Their market cap is 160% that of Toyota, despite selling 16% as many cars. How are they ever going to justify their current valuation? Kicking Elon out to get rational CEO behavior could result in a rational market assessment of Tesla's value, which would be bad from the shareholders' perspective!

Toyota issues bonds (ex. [1]) so their valuation should be less than the multiple on cars sold as tesla.

[1]: https://cbonds.com/bonds/1504323/

Hmmm... Usually the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes implies the people around him went along with the fiction because they feared personal retribution from the Emperor... But what if nobles did it to prevent a drop in the "stock" of the empire itself?

that felt like a pump to me. Those shareholders are in deep, easier to pump a bad earnings up instead of pulling their entire tesla portfolio imo

> The change in Musk’s public person

In other words, the change in media coverage.

To me, this just doesn't seem factual. I became an admirer of his in the 2010s. I don't believe he was spending so much time back then picking petty fights and saying unhinged or just extremely politically polarized things on social media in that time period, which the media was just covering differently than they are now. I think his public behavior has changed notably, not just the reporting on him.

On one hand, he has definitely become more unhinged as time has gone on. Some combination of stress, drug abuse and social-media-audience-capture.

At the same time tho: remember https://www.tesla.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

if the media reaction to that had been "tesla ceo pulls private driving detail in attempt to discredit journalist" it would have formed a much more obvious through-line with the Top Gear "tesla ceo pulls battery telemetry to sue comedy show" from years prior and "tesla employees can watch you have sex in your car" from years later.

See Also the ongoing excuse of "autopilot was not engaged when the crash happened" or Tesla's insurance charging more if you drive at night. https://electrek.co/2023/09/15/musk-wanted-to-use-tesla-came... Things add up to: Elon Musk does not believe in any sort of right to your privacy.

Like in general while his public persona has gotten less reasonable over the years there's a lot of things that could/should be reported as "patterns of behavior" that, in the early days got reported as if they happened in a vacuum which let it seem reasonable at the time.

I think two things are true, both that his behavior has really changed significantly, and that the media has been increasingly less friendly to his eccentric behavior. But I think it's the first of those true things that has impacted peoples' perceptions of him far more than the second.

It takes a tremendous amount of attention for a message to get into the public in 2024. For you to know Elon’s name in the first place is a result of careful marketing and PR.

So now that media is interested in Elon the question is what changed. Did Elon lapse on marketing? More likely is that he is giving off similar messaging but the media receiving it has decided to focus on other things.

Did the "media" force Musk to write his thoughts on his own platform?

No?

Then maybe you can't blame the media.

You wouldn’t hear about it if the media didn’t tell you.

I've honestly wondered whether or not he's going to end up as this generation's Howard Hughes. Makes fortune in other industry, parlays that into becoming a manufacturing/aerospace titan, slowly goes insane. He's 2 or 2.5 for 3 depending on how you count.

Started thinking that years ago ... and have always made the link, in my mind, between the Starship and the Spruce Goose ...

To be fair, Starship has gotten further than the Spruce Goose ever did.

I kind of agree - but relatively speaking they're at about the same place right now.

Maybe robotaxis will be the Spruce Goose.

Starlink (v2 sats in particular) alone justifies Starship. Include HLS and potential Mars stuff and the comparison does not make sense. Don't listen to people who hate on SpaceX because of Musk. If you want to hate on him pick any AI-related thing, much easier target.

Yeah, of the full possibility space of mystifying decisions, I think this one might be the global maximum... It's such a "selling shovels to the miners" business line where they are (were?) positioned really well in.

Maybe this isn't actually what's going on, but from an outsider's perspective, it really feels to me like watching a person's nervous breakdown play out, but at the scale of giant publicly traded companies.

What does the Supercharger team actually do?

To build and run a charger network you need people for at least these things:

• To design the stations (including the charging equipment (hardware and software), landscaping, buildings)

• To manufacture the charging equipment

• To decide at a high level were to put stations, and at a lower level to find specific sites, buy or lease those sites, and go through whatever legal process is needed to be allowed to build there.

• To deal with electric utilities to get power to the site.

• To do the actual building at the site, including preparing the land, maybe paving, installing the chargers, hooking up to the incoming power, putting up signage, etc

• To maintain it. It will need regular cleaning and trash pickup. Someone should be checking regularly for problems that won't be found by whatever remote monitoring and diagnostics they have. When a problem is found, manually or by there remote monitoring, someone has to go fix it.

• To provide customer support.

If you do all of them in house you need a large team. But a lot of them are reasonably done by hiring another company to do them in which case you might not need a large in house team.

I'd guess that they do the first (design), part of the second (assemble the charging equipment from components they have custom built by other companies), the high level location planning.

I'd guess that the lower level part of site placement is done by local firms familiar with the area that Tesla hires, that dealing with the electric company and the actual building is done by a local general contractor and whatever subcontractors that general contractor uses.

I'd guess that the cleaning and on site checking for problems is handled by a local maintenance company. Fixing problems would either be a local company or someone Tesla sends depending on what it is that needs fixing.

Customer support would likely be Tesla.

If Tesla considers that their existing Supercharger station designs are good enough to continue using for a long time for new stations, then they might really only need to keep in house the high level decision of were to put them, charger repairs, customer support, and hiring the local companies that do the field work.

500+ people to even do the HIGH level bits of running a SC network isn't a lot.

Everyone (even the most strident Tesla haters) agrees that SC is the one thing Tesla does the best, hands down. I own a model Y and tried to use only non-Tesla charging on a long distance trip a few months ago, it was a disaster.

Telsa's charging network is a win on EVERY front:

1. Locations 2. Quantity of locations 3. Quality (high charging rates) 4. User experience / design of hardware - software 5. Realtime reporting and navigation 6. Uptime of network

The SC network is why a lot people consider Tesla who otherwise it would be a big fat no.

Same, I'm a new used Model Y owner, and the supercharger infrastructure (existing, expected expansion, and maintenance) was part of the reason I bought it. It would be nice if Musk would provide some rationale of what's going on over there so we know what to expect...

Tesla's engineering culture around the Supercharger is what makes it viable. They mass produce a custom-designed unit in groups of four, and then ship them from factory directly to job site. None of the other competitors are doing that yet, which is why Tesla has been both more profitable and more reliable. Maybe that culture will survive the layoffs, but it's a fast growing business with a ton of complicated engineering work to do.

I wonder how many encryption certs are in the Supercharger environment and what will happen if they aren't maintained.

If I'm not mistaken, many companies do the product engineering in house and outsource the manufacturing/maintenance to contractors. Tesla's supercharger network is mature enough that it won't see much innovation moving forward, and that might've motivated them to remove the entire team.

Could a plausible explanation be that with the spread of NACS, the supercharger network matters more to the overall industry and so Tesla can get away without footing the costs of managing it?

Even if that makes some sense, it seems early to make that judgment call.

In that case, they should have spun it out. I think Supercharger would be good if boring business by itself. That would also get rid of the conflict of having car company own biggest charging network.

> Feels all like emotionally driven decisions...

Yep. This is why a CEO actually matters. Musk is a great example of what happens when a CEO is bad. He's turning into John Scully for those of you that remember. Unfortunately he's no Steve Jobs, but the board definitely needs to find a CEO, stat or that ship's going down.