Musk has a reputation as being too demanding, which is one thing if you are doing something revolutionary, but nowadays the market has mostly caught up to his cars. It seems all that over-working his employees has done is produced poor QA.
He’s also politically alienating to liberals, who would otherwise be inclined to buy his cars.
Also, would love to hear your definition of who is and who isn't "liberal".
Remember kids, the left/right & liberal/conservative is a completely false dichotomy.
Of course it's alienating to ordinary people.
This is why you got movements like social liberalism, to try to temper the madness and turn into something less socially useless, but everything moves back towards its origin, so here in Europe even once reasonably decent social liberal parties have now decayed into liberal parties, into the inherently alienating position that is liberalism's core.
I suppose now neither of them is a free party anymore at least, and I suppose both are landowner's parties.
Not sure I'd classify either of those as "image".
did Altman do it?
Musk on the other hand has built things. People can disparage him all they want, but I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal. who cares if he opens his mouth on social media.
I mean, he went to russia to launch a rocket, figured out they were a mess, came back and... several years later the world is launching rockets all the time. (It's june 11, and just starlink launched 4 rockets since the beginning of the month)
The rocket stuff is like the rise of pc hardware, where things start happening faster and all of a sudden, commercial flights are putting people in space.
I kind of think openai got off mission, and won't be as good for everyone, except maybe in the sense that other folks like meta have opened up models like llama.
None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
Tesla might not be your favorite car, but it has created robust competition in EVs, and made the incumbent car manufacturers have to compete.
Someday if you need internet in your cabin or RV, starlink made it easier even if you don't use them.
How does starlink existing make it more likely for other companies to build expensive infrastructure while having to price compete with it?
If you've ever looked at satellite internet, hughes was not affordable, and very slow. Now starlink has shaken things up, and it is even fast enough to do real work.
If anything, Musk getting a $45B package after a year of failures and layoffs at Tesla is something that tarnishes Musk and Tesla's image. The fact that this cash package is almost exactly what he owes creditors for the loans he took out buying Twitter, it almost looks like he's begging Tesla for an undo button for his own terrible decisions.
As for Apple making a deal with OpenAI, the fact that every product integrating ChatGPT is just being ruthless enshittified as a result, this is terrible optics for Apple when their biggest competitor, Microsoft, is currently playing target practice with its feet shipping poorly advised AI integrations (see: Recall).
As for OpenAI's image, the only thing they have going for them is the technical impressiveness of ChatGPT - organizationally everyone I know in the tech space assumes that OpenAI is a dumpster fire of a company.
I hate to defend executive comp, but Tesla’s market cap has gone up by $487 billion (almost 10x) since he was awarded that comp package in 2018. Half of all EVs sold in the US are Teslas. In 2023, the Model Y was the world’s bestselling car, outselling the Toyota Corolla. That’s completely insane. What more do you want?
I believe in honouring deals, even if it’s unsavoury ex post facto. Until recently, that meant approving the pay package.
But Musk unilaterally amended the deal when he “threatened on X…to develop AI elsewhere if he doesn’t get a 25% stake in Tesla” [1]. Then he developed AI elsewhere [2]. If you promise to give me a dollar, you dither, I say I’ll burn your house down if you don’t, and then I burn your house down, I don’t believe you owe me the dollar anymore.
Musk should offer to return xAI’s funding and merge it into Tesla in exchange for the vote.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/tesla-elon-musk-pay-package-share...
Another way to think about this is that investors are in a position where they got that wildly ambitious growth, and are currently not obligated to pay for it, so why would they? This is to the guy that has no problems breaking contracts of his own, and gives the finger to people he owes money to.
I guess we'll see when this comes to a vote, but it would be shrewd business not to.
This situation, though, has a different set of forward-looking concerns. Musk already has several other jobs. And the primary concern is that he wants this large pay package so that he can have more personal resources to put toward those other jobs (at the expense of Tesla).
As it stands now, Musk’s personal financial position depends on leverage against his Tesla position. This binds him to Tesla’s future performance. Giving him a huge personal pay package essentially weakens that binding, giving him greater license to deprioritize his Tesla leadership in favor of SpaceX, Xai, Neuralink, etc.
There is an argument to be made that Tesla’s board should be essentially antagonistic toward Musk’s other companies, given that his time and attention are finite resources, and Tesla is a public company. The board has responsibilities to investors to maximize their return, which should take precedence over whatever feelings of gratitude or connection they feel toward Musk personally.
If anyone took away a software engineers options here after a company became successful because the company later decided it's too much there'd be hell to pay. Everyone rightfully complained about Zynga doing this.
But here it's fine? Bullshit. I voted to pay the man his due. I voted to move the corp out of Delaware to Texas. He made me money under reasonable terms. Back then everyone said he'd just fail.
b) Stop devaluing the Tesla brand with his controversial, inflammatory comments.
c) Compensation package that is more reasonable compared with other companies.
The speculation on Tesla's stock raised the "market cap". Any stock that Tesla doesn't own brings Tesla exactly 0 dollars, no matter how hight the illusionary market cap there is.
How much of the stock does Tesla actually own? How much of the stock that Tesla owns can the company safely sell to offset the $45 billion of actual money that they had to cough up for Elon?
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-announces-new-long-...
Altman just did a big deal with Apple.
Musk's board is still likely to cram through a $45B+ comp package for him.