As a workaholic, tech enthusiast and a deeply worried person about the state of our planet, I thought to have found a kindred spirit with Elon Musk as I agree with most of his vision.
At first, I could have imagined myself applying for a job at Tesla and naturally researched more, i.e. read everything I could find about the company (including posts from both sides of the fan-hater-divide and his biography).
It is well known that Elon Musk’s goals are overly ambitious and high impact seeking. Google’s co-founder and friend Larry Page once even admitted that he would rather give away his fortune to Elon Musk rather than to charity.
But still, an unpleasant side effect is that Tesla is structured as a giant Ponzi scheme and is highly dependent on outside capital obviously making the company highly fragile to external events. That in itself is nothing new, but what I find puzzling are his more and more frequent misleading claims, like the following one
I really wish Tesla to be successful, but after seeing some of the leaked tent footage, I couldn’t stop thinking about that great Wolf of Wall Street scene… So much so that I just had to slightly modify it.
h/t to @skabooshka for providing the photo an photo and @IspyTSLA for the video.
You just can’t make this stuff up… or as put in a recent Bloomberg article
A week later, Musk posted a picture of the new facility on Twitter. There were no fancy robotic systems, nor fixed walls, even—just a large tent outside the factory built from scrap from the other lines. The automotive world winced. “Insanity,” said Max Warburton, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., in an email to Bloomberg News. “I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this outside of the military trying to service vehicles in a war zone.”
and a little further down in the article
Mass-producing a car isn’t rocket science; in some ways, it’s harder. Rockets can essentially be built and checked by hand; a perfect car must come off the production line every minute or so if you have any prayer of keeping pace with the world’s leading manufacturers. Cars are composed of tens of thousands of individual parts and have to withstand snow, potholes, and highway speeds, performing flawlessly for years. They are the largest purchase most people make besides a home, and they’re also heavily regulated lethal weapons that contribute to more than a million deaths each year.
At a typical plant run by Toyota Motor Corp., widely seen as the most capable carmaker, a new car requires about 30 hours of labor. Even with all the robots, Tesla spends more than three times that number of hours on each car, says Michelle Hill, a manufacturing expert at management consulting firm Oliver Wyman. And Toyota would never, as Musk has, try a new manufacturing system and all-new workforce on a never-before-built car. Successful carmaking is “the orchestration of so many things that have to play together in unison,” she says.
Then yesterday this hit on Engaget
In an investor call last week, Musk said that “hundreds” of homes already had solar roofs, but the company later clarified to Reuters that Musk’s estimate included systems that had been partly installed or scheduled for installation. According to state records, there are just 12 Tesla roof systems in operation in California.
Tesla received massive state support for the project, including $350 million to build the factor, $275 million for equipment and $125 million for additional costs. In return, the company is require to employ 1,460 people in Buffalo and spend $5 billion in the state over a decade. Some lawmakers are concerned that the delays jeopardize Tesla‘s ability to hold up its end of the deal, however Tesla would face penalties of $41.2 million a year if that were to happen. In a statement, Tesla said its facility now employs 600 people, and is “on track to meet all of its commitments.”
So things seem not to be moving smoothly at the moment and I fear that especially after his recent tweet
that appears to be untrue (at least the funding part), Tesla might not only fail soon, but Elon might even land in jail for market manipulation. C.f.:
- Market Stunned After Musk Discloses Intention To LBO Tesla, Lawsuits Threatened
- SEC Is Probing Musk’s “Going Private” Tweet To Determine If He Lied
or his pre-market stock pumping?
Whatever happens, it is impossible to deny Elon Musk’s positive influence in the renewable space and I believe that he deserves a lot of credit for that. But I would also hope that he would stop unnecessarily compromising himself and his company. I personally think he should take a step back, admit everything that is going wrong, raise a few billion in equity, take the hit to the stock, maybe even go private at say $200 and just focus on what he does best. We’ll see how it plays out! Definitely interesting times we live in.
Gordon Schücker 