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.