Comment by estearum
2 days ago
> 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!
> Let’s check in in five years!
Do you have particular predictions we can evaluate in five years?
1) The fab will have been a highly profitable investment, possibly worth spinning out
2) more than 1mm optimus produced and sold in the US
Happy for any counters :)
3 replies →
It will be his robot typing the message for him at that point
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.
> our culture’s deserved rancor at late stage capitalist
Late stage capitalism was coined over a century ago. It still hasn't happened.
What does happen, however, is a company will grow until it strangles itself with committees and bureaucracy. And then gets replaced with a younger company. A good book on this is "The Innovator's Dilemma".
I don't really disagree with much here. I think Musk is a despicable piece of shit for reasons totally outside of his management track record.
However, the root of this conversation is not about Musk at all but about whether Tesla's core business (automotive) is in trouble. The answer to that, as Musk is demonstrably convinced as well as I am, is "yes."
Then we get into Musk's own personal idiosyncrasies and to what degree they're a liability or an asset to pull Tesla away from doom. For the reasons you mention, they're an asset. Not many leaders are willing to throw the wheel like he is (Zuck being another example). For other reasons, his idiosyncrasies are a liability. Like the fact that he personally was single-handedly responsible for destroying huge amounts of Tesla's brand power and that his personal project (the Cybertruck) inflicted such gargantuan direct and indirect cost on Tesla at such a critical moment.
Again, the question is whether Tesla's core business is in trouble. The answer is yes. Nobody remarks that it's such an incredible thing that a CEO of an unambiguously crushing-it company is willing to yolo the company into new directions.