In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.
Just casually asking for a roughly 80 Billion dollar pay raise. But at this point would Tesla be better off without him?
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I certainly have no interest in buying one as long as he’s still involved
Teslas are very well known to have absolute garbage tier quality anyway.
Did they always or is that more recent ones?
Hard to say. Cars put out before the Model 3 were typically not sold at large quantities. So the lower runs were sold to rich people or fanboys at first and it’s hard to get an honest long term review about them.
From what I’ve seen though, their earlier cars weren’t filled with tech like the newer ones which meant less points of failure so I’m betting the older ones were at least somewhat better.
I can’t really speak for the early models but all the ones in recent years, so mostly the Model 3 I think, were plagued with issues.
What brand do you suggest in the alternative?
Well considering telsa isn’t even the #1 ev any more? I guess anything else.
In the world, but not in most western nations.
Edit: why the downvotes? If I wanted to buy a car from the number one brand in my nation, I couldn’t right now. BYD isn’t selling cars in the US. Moreover, their presence in Europe is still small.
They downvote you because that’s a very western-centric vision.
Additionally, a car manufacturer in one of your western nations, Volkswagen, is also one of the top EV manufacturers.
And nearly every other manufacturer like Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes and Ford are now making EVs too. So it’s not like there’s a shortage of non-Tesla EVs in the western.
All I’m saying that #1 is relative with car brands.
In Europe and the Americas, the Model Y is still king. By you’re right, VW group is catching up.
Right now BYD is killing it because they’re affordable and a brand that centered in the world’s largest auto market. Outside of China, BYDs numbers are very very different.
What makes the Y “king”?
In Australia BYDs sell like hotcakes
If BYD was available in the US (and i’m certain BYD is looking into how to get here, probably the same trick Renault tried with Saturn and ultimately Mitsubishi) they would probably saturate the market, because at the very least, they’re affordable. Nobody in Detroit or Wolfsburg will make a cheap EV because Tesla spooked the market into being a luxury thing.
Volvo’s EVs seem pretty nice
Also check out Volvos preformace/electric devision polestar.
Just found out Volvo is owned by a Chinese investment group, not sure how I feel about supporting that either.
Is it even possible to ethically buy a car in this day and age?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
I felt the same way but ended up going with a volvo anyway because Chinese Investment or not, the company does at least try to make an effort to be more safe, ethical, and sustainable. Given the alternatives I made the decision that volvo was still the right car for me.
what’s the difference between a Chinese investment group and a US investment group? They are both terrible. There’s no ethical mega corp, I’m afraid.
While your statement is accurate and I won’t necessarily argue it, I think it’s a bit simplistic in a nuanced world.
I would buy from a company that knows how to build cars already so the difference is mostly a new power train, not an entirely new product. That’s not to say Tesla, Lucid, or Rivian can’t build a good product, but there are more unknowns with them. As with any car, be careful buying the first model year.
The ZEV T3-5D Mini Suv
Ford
The Ford Mach-E is excellent. I have also heard great things about Kia/Hyundai, VW and Volvo EVs as well.
In 2016 I drove a Tesla Model S P85D and I was surprised at how crappy the interior was considering it was a six figure car. And I don’t mean minimalist, I mean poor quality.
Back then, Tesla was you only real option. Today, there’s a lot of great competition in the market.
I have a Hyundai Kona Electric and it is fantastic. My next car will be the next version on the Kona EV in a few years
VW and Volvo both make some pretty bad EV’s IME, they have a ton of software issues and the entire infotainment system is insanely slow and buggy, which is a big problem when thats the main interface to the car. The interior is also very low quality. But these are probably general issues for them though and not strictly their EVs.
BYD, NIO, JAC, FAW, BAIC,
no interest in buying one
Did you mean a car, or a share?
Oh, wait… it doesn’t matter.
Exactly. At the moment we’re just watching the Tesla board grit their teeth and look worried. By the time they get around to Doing What Needs To Be Done, will it be too late?
Same for SpaceX. No one will ever give a shit about Twitter again already.
we’re just watching the Tesla board grit their teeth and look worried.
Bad strategy IMHO. Coupling their fate to one person’s ever declining mental health cannot bring anything else than their decline.
Tesla should move on from Musk
The world should.
I’d argue we’re at the point where that would be a good business move too. It wouldn’t fix my main issue of but allowing 3rd party repairs so I wouldn’t buy one, but I know several people who have bought other brands due to Elon.
Definitely. His ideology also seems to be taking a different route than what’s compatible with an EV company.
the only ideology compatible with any company is capitalism. Do you think companies that make EVs do it for the greater good of the planet? No, they do it for profit.
If Tesla gets rids of Musk it will be because he’s making the other shareholders loose money.
I’m not one of those people who will say Musk has done nothing for Tesla. The entire market wouldn’t have gone as quickly towards EVs without his leadership. No other company would have been (or has been) as aggressive on self-driving technologies, and he has pushed the entire market to try to keep up. They wouldn’t be where they are today without him.
But now he’s just a liability. He does just as much harm as he does good. Unless you see coal rollers out there buying Teslas to show fealty to new, alt-right Musk (and I don’t), I can’t see what he’s continuing to provide to Tesla.
He sold 10% to buy twitter. Maybe he shouldn’t have made himself legally obligated to buy it?
You are correct, and to this day if he hasn’t his family’s money, i guess he wouldn’t be as successful, I mean all.those bad decisions would made a small business going into the red really fast.
It’s going to be really fun if he gets ousted as CEO because of buying twitter
He brings ZERO value to tesla after all his FSD lies and others were exposed.
Sure people still fall for tesla crap, but he himself is useless now.
If they could get someone boring like Tim
AppleCook, that just runs the company very well and profitably… Tesla would be sitting pretty good with their dominant place in the Electric market. The only reason most people dont pick tesla for an EV is literally Elon.Unfortunately, idiot Elon gets his grubby fingers ALL OVER every last piece of tech in the Tesla. It’s ALL shoddily engineered because of him. Like simple, time tested engineering concepts like redundancy? Elon would fire you. He eliminated redundancy in their FSD, choosing to rely solely on computer vision and machine learning. He literally had a good design for the sensor modules and got rid of it. Tim Cook doesn’t sabotage Apple’s engineering team like that.
The lidar removal really pissed me off. At best, a Tesla can “see” as well as the human driver. It seems to me that half of the point of using a computer to drive a vehicle should be that it can easily access sensors that us meat bags don’t have access to.
Plus the stupid central instrument cluster in Model 3s and Model Ys is beyond idiotic.
The problem with Tesla is the problem Apple had for many years: Your CEO is the reason for the stock price. Apple had a plan for succession that saved them in the end, and they’ve never been better. Tesla has nothing. They are basically a carbon credit company run by a sycophant, and without Elon, they are nothing but a carbon credit company. If he departs, the stock price will crater/adjust.
Last time we had a CEO get fired because they were bad was the OpenAI fiasco and that proved that we no longer live in reality, because Sam was back in a week.
Sam was fired because the board stated he withheld information and misinformed them, not because he was a bad CEO
Apple had a plan, but Apple also had the iPhone and the MacBook. Literally the best smartphones and laptops you can buy.
Tesla does have the best EVs and, in the US, charging network. I think saying “tesla has nothing” is a bit disingenuous. Outside of China, no company is even close to Tesla.
Not the only reason… I’m happy with my model 3, but it’s not for everyone based on objective properties.
He has always been useless bang
Its just his money that is useful
Much like the PT cruiser, there’s a due hard group of people in love with cyber truck, he made that happen.
Personally I think it looks stupid as hell, but since people are very into it.
He created a massive failure with a cult following? Because that’s what the PT cruiser was. The difference with the cybertruck being that it won’t sell to rental companies on account of the price.
“It was a novelty car, and like all novelty items the enthusiasm faded,” says Keenan Mayo, associate editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, who wrote an obituary of sorts for the Cruiser. “The only people who were really buying it for much of the last decade were the rental car companies because it was cheap.”
https://www.marketplace.org/2013/03/04/goodbye-pt-cruiser-will-anyone-miss-it/
Cyber truck is 100% a novelty car designed to make an annoying CEO happy and presumably away from the serious projects.
Cybertruck is a mistake made in Solidworks allowed to go to production.
The PT Cruiser was more or less a Dodge Neon with a funny looking body shell on top, meaning engineering cost to bring it to market was pretty minimal.
The Cybertruck is… pretty much the opposite of that. Tesla has spent literally years trying to get the thing to market meaning it’s failure will be far more painful than PT Cruiser sales tapering off was for Chrysler.
He brought shareholders value by getting people pumped to buy the car.
I’m literally not buying a Tesla because he’s a douchbag.
When I see a Tesla on the road I assume they are a Musk fan boy. There’s no prestige in that brand. There are a lot of us that assume that.
I would be more likely to buy a Tesla if Musk was gone. He is poisonous to the brand.
I would be more likely to buy a Tesla if the cars weren’t engineered like garbage.
I think pretty much everyone would be
Tesla cars also have notoriously poor build quality, especially for the price; if you must buy an electric car, at this point, as far as I can tell, Hyundai cars are much better built. (Of course, we do need to remember that electric cars do not solve the problem of car dependency.)
I bought my Tesla 4 years ago before EM went full douche mode. I actually quite like the car but would not buy one these days on account of him.
Brought being the key word, he no longer does so
Guy is probably getting scared of his board members and is wanting to secure himself from being outed. There’s a reason why we are now hearing about his drug problem, and those stories are likely coming from his board members.
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I’m sure Tesla’s investors have a constant fear the stock market will figure out Tesla is a car company and start to value it as such (instead of valuing it more like Google or Apple). He’s basically saying, “If you don’t want to loose 2/3rds of what you have locked up in the company when the market corrects, you’ll give me 12% to continue the pivot.”
Sadly, I’m guessing it’ll work.
They value Tesla as a battery manufacturer. I’m not saying that’s right but they’re hoping other manufacturers will end up using their batteries just like every phone uses Samsung’s screens.
I think Tesla has a small lead but is going to be quickly out-developed.
The self driving stuff has always been fluff. The gigafactory not so much.
They value Tesla as a battery manufacturer.
Which is funny, because Tesla has no chemistry chops at all. Tesla buys Panasonic cells and CATL cells.
Yes, Tesla is technically a battery manufacturer because they take individual cells from CATL and then add electronics to them. (A package of cells is called a “battery” in the Electrical Engineering world). But its not the battery people “care” about when talking about this subject.
The “cell” (aka: the chemical package of size 18650 or 4680 or whatever) is Panasonic or CATL. Almost no Tesla involvement at all. This is what “common people” call the battery pack, not the giant computer system + wires that connect the cells together (which is what Electrical Engineers call the battery).
In effect, Tesla / Elon Musk is taking advantage of investor’s ignorance and its hilarious. Its been like 15 years and the investors still haven’t figured out that Tesla has no “cell manufacturing” and has basically been misleading their investors this whole time.
In Electrical Engineering terms: its a AA cell and a 9V battery (9V requires 6x AAAA cells, so wiring them up together makes a “Battery”, a collection of cells). Since AA is just one cell, its a cell. Similarly, its an 18650 cell or 4680 cell. And cells are made by Panasonic or CATL, not Tesla.
This means that as other EVs come up, Tesla barely has any moat. All Ford or GM has to do is build a battery (aka: buy Panasonic cells and wire them together) and bam, there goes Tesla’s 15 year advantage. That’s all Tesla ever has accomplished. Its a laughably sad moat and is why so many companies can pivot into EVs faster than Tesla ever did.
At this point Tesla is just a brand name. Mercedes is even doing better Level 3 than they are and they’re not even known for that shit.
Tesla’s battery business is also entirely dependent on licenses from Phillips. Tesla’s main value there is in scope of their production, the parts of which could be sold or spun out the way Ford eventually got divested from their gas production/stations. Though, for Ford, it was a long (30+ year) process - that’s a lot of extra buffer to carry Tesla through if history repeats itself.
Weird to do that ultra publicly, rather than in a board meeting…
For Elon “Funding Secured” Musk it is the opposite of weird.
Yep. It’s a very transparent extortion. “I will intentionally (illegally) manipulate the stock to tank it if you do not give into my demands”
Obviously, being forced to buy Twitter wasn’t enough punishment for him to stop him from blatantly manipulating stocks.
You forgot the sign at the top that reads “Heroes Work Here”. 🤘🏼🔥
As opposed to dunking on him, I am going to outline why he can’t do anything but cry about it:
- Once you IPO in Delaware like Tesla did, you can’t issue a second class stock
- At least not without liquidating your assets and re-incorporating, which means all shareholders have to agree and this certainly means shareholders will hold a smaller bag, this will go to court (probably in Delaware, a state Elon has little chance of winning given how Twitter/X turned out), and the process will be impeded. This is not an overnight process.
This is compounded by the fact that Tesla’s stock value pretty much comes from Elon’s manipulation and grandstanding, so anything that reveals this will cause the boat to rock, so anything he does will impact the stock price, which impacts his wealth.
Nobody will loan him money to buy more stock. If he could, he wouldn’t be crying about it. Or, more than likely, he could get it, but it means coming from MBS or similarly questionable sources and he’s on such good footing with them over how Twitter/X is going. This will increase the scrutiny he’s getting from the DOJ or the people at CIA who may drop a sword on his head.
He has at least two loyalists on his board: Kimbal Musk and JB Straubel. James Murdoch can no longer be considered one since its his other publication, the Wall Street Journal, that went to press about his drug issues.
Long and short, Elon has been reduced to begging. We could be watching the end of his tenure at Tesla, but this fucker is full of surprises.
You think he’d bother with legal and responsible methods of getting his way?
My first thought is he’d threaten to tank Tesla stock by using Twitter to screw it over and sink the price. It fucks him but why would he care when he still owns SpaceX and Twitter?
He’s been using Twitter to manipulate shares and crypto for years. He now owns Twitter and can manipulate even more so will use it to bully Tesla’s board for more equity.
I mean he “can do nothing but cry about it” in the same way anyone can do nothing about a request for a raise. He can say he will quit if they don’t give it to him.
And their reply? “Oh no! Anyway…”
Well, so much for the altruist Elon Musk who uses his genius intellect to make the world a better place out of the goodness of his heart and the shared benefit of humanity. if he actually gave a shit, he wouldn’t care if his compensation package was $1. He would supposedly be doing the work he is the most passionate about and cares the most about.
Nah. Richest man in the world says it’s more important that he gets paid first. He’s always been a fraud.
If you only read the headline (and maybe even this specific article) you miss the point.
He’s saying he doesn’t trust Tesla to develop AI/Robotics if he doesn’t have enough control (shares), as he’s afraid what they’ll do with AI otherwise, and without another compensation package that would give him that control, he’s going to hold Tesla back on the AI front and do it in a company he has control of (him saying this is probably breaking numerous laws as well, especially given he has an AI company)
It’s his same AI is going to doom the world if it’s not done right, and only I can protect us, though this isn’t really something new.
But as to your point, it isn’t actually about the money, it’s about more control of Tesla. He doesn’t actually care about the money and if there was a way to give him more voting control without giving him more shares, he’d be okay with that too, but that in itself isn’t a simple feat or necessarily possible.
But FUCK HIM, he gave up that control to piss it away on Twitter. If keeping control of Tesla was so important, you shouldn’t have fucked up, and fucked over all the shareholders in the process with Twitter.
Edit: Also - Even though he met every tranche of his existing compensation plan, it was a 10 year plan. It hasn’t been 10 years yet, so again, FUCK OFF, until those 10 years are up.
If I made a demand like this I’d be fired
Yeah but you’re not the CEO of the company.
If I made a threat like this as CEO when I also work two other jobs with a now clearly defined conflict of interest, I would ABSOLUTELY be fired by the board!
If the board wasn’t made up of asskissers.
As someone who still drives a Tesla vehicle I bought years ago, well before Musk totally went off the rails, can he please just leave?
You could always trade it in.
I hate to be that guy, but no one is forcing you to keep owning it and keep dumping money in Musk’s pockets every time you need it serviced.
You want him to go away but you keep handing him money. Curious.
In the 5 years I’ve owned my Model 3 it’s never needed any service. Only new tires. They are not even remotely as bad of a car as clickbait sites make them out to be. Yeah yeah Teslas aren’t perfect, but no car is. Be realistic.
It being associated with Musk and his crazy rants is annoying though. Almost annoying enough to trade it in, but I don’t particularly want to spend a bunch of money and getting rid of an almost like-new working car.
With all due respect my 2021 Model 3 is a gargantuan piece of shit. Every interior joint and connection squeaks, the range is and has always been far below stated range, both seats rattle, the wood trim has basically disintegrated, and my car only has 21k in it. I’d trade however my interest rate is 2.5%. I hate the car, the company, and Musk, but until interest rates drop I’m not trading. But hey it’s never needed service so yay for me. My 2012 Prius was a better built car than the Tesla Model 3, by miles.
Yeah if I could buy a similar car with the same features at the same price from a manufacturer like Toyota, the choice for better build quality is obvious. However up until basically this year that has not been the case. My only real complaint with my M3 is the terrible paint they use. But I can live with it.
Point to me to a similarly specced ev for a comparable price in the US taking into consideration federal tax rebate and dealership bullshit fees. There still ain’t anything this year. It will happen but we aren’t there yet.
Once the other care companies started making electrics, I wondered why anyone was still going with Tesla. Car companies have so many more decades of taking care of build issues.
At least in the US the charging network has been a huge differentiator. I’ve heard from a few people doing road-trips in non-Teslas and having trouble with the multitude of charging networks. Superchargers can get busy but I’ve never had a problem with them or gotten stranded. Hopefully NACS will improve this situation for all brands.
Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).
On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.
I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.
I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.
The recall of 2012-2023 models of the Model 3 tells me otherwise.
It’s actually an OTA update.
I’m curious what you think the recall process for a Tesla is. Do tell.
Servicing the vehicle. What do you think it is? Do tell.
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I’m being realistic. You’re embarrassed by it and association with Musk.
Musk is genuinely a bad person who is pushing bogus race science and other horrible unequivocal bullshit.
It’s great that it hasn’t needed service, but my point stands: once it needs service, you will be handing money to Elon Musk.
If you want him to go away that badly, there are things you could do. Like trading in your vehicle for another EV. There’s other brands, who are not run by a racist, misogynist, ableist, megalomaniacs.
You can complain on the internet all you want, but if you’re unwilling to find a way to not give him money, you’re just one more person with Elon’s foot stuck up your ass.
So send them the money to get a new car or stfu
Interest rates and depreciation make that a losing bargain, better to get the utility out of it now that the trade in is low and interest rates are high
As much as I hate Musk, I don’t have $10k+ to burn on making a statement.
Sure, if the car market was flush with used EVs, swapping one used car for another might not hurt as much. But right now it’s slim pickings if you want a used EV that isn’t a Telsa, that is similarly spec’ed to a Tesla.
Just run the thing into the ground and charge on non-Tesla infrastructure as much as reasonably possible.
Sounds like he wants out and this is his option.
Can’t really tell what he WANTS to do since he also wanted out of the X CEO role.
Maybe just ketamine.
If I were him I’d simply retire and enjoy my magnitudes of lifetimes worth of wealth. But I guess that’s not the billionaire mindset.
I mean, it seems he’s bad for Tesla’s image so…
He’s already out with 12.9% of stocks, we wants in for free claiming he’ll walk out with other parts of the company and people if they don’t oblige. If you are thinking that this behavior is not legal you’d be right and I can’t wait for trade commission to step on him.
If I was a shareholder or board member and heard “I don’t want to grow the company in ways you want with out a raise” I’d hear it as “he’s no longer doing the job we hired him for. Publicly going against our wishes.” Which is a short cut to getting fired in any other job on the planet.
I think Tesla would do better if he walked away. The whole fake Iron Man shtick was hardly believable a decade ago
He’s a billionaire…he cab buy the stocks back with his money like a normie would have to.
His money is literally the stocks he currently has lol
It’s not liquid and nobody will loan him money after his xitter stint
