I'm not a direct shareholder, but if the Deleware court gives me an option not to pay $55 Billion that I thought was committed, I'd strongly consider.
What are the implications of not approving? On the plus side, the company keeps the compensation. On the minus side, Musk will be upset; and there's a trust issue for future compensation. On the neutral side, those receiving future compensation will endeavour to follow an approval process that is likely to stand up in court.
There’s got to be some measurable number of people who are turned off from buying a Tesla because of his association, especially now that alternatives are available.
Put another way, which company is more likely to exist in 10 years: Microsoft or Tesla?
And nobody has a larger interest in Tesla's valuation them Musk himself, the largest shareholder.
He can't walk and any threats to that effect are theatrics. Shareholders would be idiots to re-approve the $55bn.
That's over $30,000 for every single car Tesla sold in 2023.
It's a weird situation. It sounds like an unconscionable amount now only because of Musk's success in raising the stock value. Like he's being paid too much because he was too successful.
Also that amount was from a contract made in 2018.
Sometimes I feel like the person watching the parade and wondering why nobody else is confused by the emperor's choice of attire.
So that’s why it was worth paying Elon that much. The current sales position is tremendous.
Worldwide BEV sales 2023:
VW Group - 742k
Tesla - 1,808k
That's 2.5x, how did you get 8-16x?
Despite being the 11th biggest by revenue.
It's true that high-end carmakers seem to get a lot of goodwill valuation simply for being high-end carmakers. But normally not that much.
investors buy stocks.
customers buy cars.
silicon valley's product is stock.
Case in point is AWS. I've been reading they are a PIP factory for the last couple of years. Doesn't seem like they have a major issue hiring (partly due to lack of a competitor who is doing better).
The takeaway for me is that as a fundraiser and hype man, before he ruined his reputation, he was pretty successful, but in all other ways he's a massive self-promoting hack.
The hagification of Musk in the press was on another level, like Steve Jobs, DaVinci and Obama rolled together. That this carefully crafted illusion is falling apart due to his online ramblings and bizarre business decisions is something worthy of study. He and Kanye West share a very similar trajectory in this regard.
I don't think you've ever seen anyone with ketamine habit (keywords: UK k-hole).
Pretty stupid thing to say about someone who has medical prescription for ketamine to treat depression while they work 100hrs per week.
Musk is arguing that paying him $55B to pump the stock price is better than paying those employees for 40 years.
If you're a shareholder that only cares about the stock price and not the underlying value of the company - that's a decent argument.
I wouldn't buy it. But maybe the shareholders will.
I think SpaceX is one disaster away from suffering the same fate, to be honest. Like, if the next Starship doesn't make it as far as the previous attempt (for example, if it blows up on the way up), Elon is going to come in like a wrecking ball.
The pressure on the SpaceX team must be immense.
Meaning that, like for Elon's other companies, they might be in an incredibly vulnerable position, financially speaking. A disaster could sink the company. But simply failing to have some of these risky bets pay off could be just as damaging. For example, even if everything in the plan works on a technical level, if there isn't enough demand for Starlink's service to support the whole Starlink 2 project then that might turn the entire Starlink 2 project, including the Starship rocket they need to launch these larger satellites, into a big money loser.
Not entirely unlike how we're seeing signs that Tesla may not be a sustainable business, not necessarily because of anything fundamentally wrong with their core business, but because they made some over-aggressive assumptions about how many golden eggs their goose would lay.
I'm wouldn't worry too much. Uncle Sam probably wants those capabilities anyway for the SDA to ramp up the NDSA now that the Russian nuclear threat is renewed.
immaterial: "the worst" here is elon destroying the engineering culture & with it their ability to keep improving on what they've done so far. not going bankrupt (by way of a bailout or otherwise) is a necessary condition for avoiding the worst (boeing syndrome), but it's not sufficient
fedgov can pour money into the military industrial complex, but it can't do a whole lot more, and that only goes so far
Knowing that I'm guaranteed enough income to stay minimally solvent does not mean I have no reason to care about losing additional income streams that enable me to have things like vacations and dinners at nice restaurants and digital watches.
Similarly, the relative security of the ~1/3 of Boeing's revenue that comes from government contracts is probably small consolation to its shareholders. They do that business more-or-less at cost; essentially 100% of their profits come from other sources.
Aren't all govt contracts cost plus?
Buying COTS products; probably not.
If you're buying AWS compute through GSA I bet the rate is more than AWS's costs + 10/15%.
Or if you purchase say post-it notes from Staples; I bet they're going to be way more than the cost of paper+glue*1.15.
[1]: https://www.acquisition.gov/far/15.404-4#FAR_15_404_4__d941e...
Isn’t it? I use X every day and it seems to be fine now and getting better on a good cadence.
Last I heard he's hemorrhaging paying customers (advertisers) who while publicly say it has to do with <insert popular issue>; privately say it has to do with worsening ROI (targeting).
I’m saying the platform seems to be good and getting better, not worse.
Like the local earthquake tracker on Twitter used to be great, it became unusable after musk mayhem as Twitter intentionally only showed many years old posts to those not signed in.
Nowadays that’s super rare. And I used to remember seeing links to a lot of articles published as like 13 tweets, I can’t even remember the last time I saw one of those. I think some used to be linked form HN.
Twitter is basically a zombie now. It’s way worse for the former user base at large.
It’s true that one groups probably think it’s better, those who were banned and are allowed back for example and those who liked the banned accounts.
We don't really need Tesla or Twitter/X. But we really do need SpaceX. He's already moved it to Texas to shield himself from lawsuits, so I wouldn't count on it surviving intact.
why?
Don’t think so, it’s just that he’s focused on another reality - losing the crown of the richest person in the world. And, he’s doing everything to keep that crown, everything else be dammed.
The alleged money he asks for does not exist, it is just shares in Tesla, which are currently owned by the company. It's bizarre how misinformed these Journalists are, the real story is far more interesting then just Musk being greedy.
Musk is detached from reality. He seems to think firing most of X is a resounding success and Tesla, a car manufacturing company, needs to do the same. Also that cost cutting and performance reviews only apply to others, just like in Twitter and elsewhere free speech means his speech not critics.
I really hope he doesn’t wreck spaceX too.