Comment by estearum
2 days ago
I'm short on an allegedly successful automotive company that has a rapidly deteriorating automotive business (due entirely to management's own decision-making) pivoting into the most hyped business ideas in the world. I'm bearish on the type of creative accounting and self-dealing we see between the Musk companies.
Musk is similar to Zuck in that they get some credit for sheer courage to turn the wheel on their massive businesses, but they also have to be right. Aside from his anticompetitive behavior, Zuck continues to miss. Musk's pattern has been that the more Musk is personally involved, the worse the outcomes. Cybertruck was his baby. Optimus is his baby.
If Tesla is doing so well as an automotive business, then why doesn't he just continue making it a great automotive business?
I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Maybe a mid length answer is if you agree with his assessment on say humanoid robots in terms of market and you believe they might have a geometric growth factor in production (eg robots can make more robots) then you’d want that business build out done by a team that can scale rapidly.
For fabs spacex and Tesla are significant consumers of the output- vertical integration is preferred by lots of companies.
> I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Correct, and I think having a CEO who's totally unaccountable to a board and is temperamentally unable to focus on his core business is not good.
SpaceX and Tesla are nowhere near large enough consumers to justify vertically integrating a fab. The demand is predicated on Optimus producing millions of units per year.
This circularity will probably end up being seen in retrospect as so transparently absurd that it'll beggar belief that anyone accepted it.
I respect the perspective, of course, and cannot argue with the risk assessment.
That said I think these bets will pay off. Let’s check in in five years!
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It’s so interesting. On the one hand you have our culture’s deserved rancor at late stage capitalist CEOs juicing the profits and squeezing every last drop of profit out of their customers. Tired derivative products and enshittified service models are exhausting us. Our institutions seem to be creatively bankrupt, and every single product and utterance they make has been through 500 different committees to ensure maximum profitability and minimum soul. We all fucking hate what almost corporate America has come to stand for.
And yet… when it’s Elon Musk’s company, we are suddenly all numbers and figures, and we waggle our fingers disapprovingly that he doesn’t have board approval. Yes, with Musk you have a childish huckster asshole. And increasingly it does appear he’s gone off the deep end, buying into his own self mythology. But the one redeeming quality he still demonstrates is refusal to settle for doing the same thing over and over. He continually and unreasonably pushes the envelope.
Tesla has definitively become a successful company. They defied all the naysayers in reaching that success, and it has turned into a global behemoth. They have oodles of money. The fact that Musk tirelessly insists on trying new moonshots that seem ridiculous is a GOOD thing - it’s the thing we _lack_. Inventive, audacious risk-taking is exactly what our stupid extractive scam economy lacks. Compared to you and me, yes, Musk is a cringey edgelord with the energy of a weird kid at the sleepover who tells bragging lies. But compared to his cohort who run large businesses, he is a goal oriented doer who attracts great talent and then relentlessly pushes them to achieve the impossible. And they actually succeed some non-zero amount of the time. It doesn’t matter that not every idea is a winner. That’s not how moonshots work. The point is that _some_ moonshot ideas do work though and actually move us up the tech tree. And the probable reality is that the delusional unrealistic asshole _helps_ push you there, precisely because they cannot be reasoned with. No, you cannot build moonshot companies without grandiosity, because the people working on it need to have a mission that is bigger than dollars and cents or common sense. If the only thing pushing you is good financials, you will quit as soon as “projections” start to look bad. In the area of moonshots, projections are just the opinions of uninformed non-believers who will ALWAYS mount until the world convinces you to stop working on the “stupid” thing.
All that said, the flying car is the dumbest thing I’ve seen him push and I don’t find it remotely exciting. Self-driving and robots are way cooler.
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