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.
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”?
Volvo’s EVs seem pretty nice
Also check out Volvos preformace/electric devision polestar.
IMHO, Polestars have a MUCH nicer cabin than Telsa. Also, Android Automotive with CarPlay.
The console is obnoxiously large though. I rented one and it felt like being back in a HMMWV.
Yeah, they should’ve taken a page out of the S60. That center console has some weird decisions.
I’ll still gladly take the Volvo / Polestar interior over Telsa’s cheap minimalist interior.
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.
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 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.
Ford
The ZEV T3-5D Mini Suv
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.
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.
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.
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.
After seeing what he has done with Twitter, I’m not sure Tesla is interested in that deal.
You’re giving the likes of Kimball Musk and James Murdoch way too much fucking credit here.
His board is filled with fucking sycophants. They won’t go against him, especially his fucking brother.
It’s hardly a board that is looking to control you when you’ve filled it with Yes Men.
Why haven’t shareholders elected new board members? Or does his sycophants have the majority in combined total?
There’s good reason to believe that Tesla is an Enron-esque style fraud. No one in charge has shown any business acumen, and no one can explain how it is actually profitable. But that requires only stooges and yes-men on the board. There cannot be any accountability.
and no one can explain how it is actually profitable.
Hang on a sec, its publicly trade company. Its pretty easy to see how its profitable especially compared to other legacy automakers.
Tesla vs Ford numbers:
On the other hand, “let’s look at Tesla and the Model 3. Tesla is aiming for 25% gross margin on the Model 3 and mid-teens profit margin (let’s say 14%). The average price of the Model 3 is projected at around $42,000… [so] the average gross margin on a Model 3 would be $10,500 and profit margin would be $5,880. Compared to Ford’s average vehicle profit margin of $1,100, the Model 3 would be 5x as profitable.” source
Disclaimer: the source is from March of 2023 and Tesla has cut prices (which means less profit) since then, but they had a lot of room to do so with so much profit per car.
So one could say that Tesla has been able to charge a premium for a cheaper car, or they’ve been able to reduce manufacturing cost for a moderately priced car. Both result in high margin returns for the company.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin. There’s also reason to believe they are wildly understating warranty costs plus ignoring R&D costs. People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
Huge price cuts will compound these problems dramatically.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin.
How would adding a middleman that also has to make profit make the company earn less? Wouldn’t direct sales allow Tesla to sell for a higher price because they can sell at retail instead of a “wholesale” cost normally sold to a dealership?
People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
I’d be interested in reading more on this assertion. Do you have a source you can point me to?
You have to build the entire system out yourself. That costs a lot of money. The dealership model also costs the manufacturer basically zero dollars, because it really profits on used car sales and maintenance works. You don’t make anymore money by having your own dealerships. The whole argument that there’s some secret behind Tesla’s business smacks of gaslighting, not something that actually holds up to reason.
It’s been a long standing issue with Tesla’s accounting. No one can really explain how profits are actually being generated going back years, especially considering everyone in the West is losing money on EVs. It’s also being ran entirely by sycophants and people with minimal qualifications, with zero accountability anywhere. So it just seems, via Occam’s razor, that they’re cooking the books.
Not OP but regarding sources, there’s a group referred to as “TSLAQ” (Q referring to a letter typically added to bankrupt stock symbols, but they’re not entirely free of conspiratorial thinking) that’s been critical of TSLA and others including David Einhorn who have criticized their accounting practices. I’ve not had time to look much into it myself but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Accounting
Every time I leave my house, I see dozens of Teslas driving around. If they’re not profitable, then they’re horrifically bad at making money. They’re ubiquitous. Pretty impressive market penetration for a business run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Their single biggest revenue stream is selling carbon credits. They’re basically a regulatory arbitrage business with a side hustle in cars.
Just like Amazon who is a cloud computing company with a side hustle in e-tail or Google which is an ad company with a side hustle in tech.
In general most people don’t really understand this about big companies.
Yeah but in their cases the “hustle” got them the funds to move into their current space. Musk just had so much money that Tesla outlasted all the red it was in. Same thing going on with Twitter.
We all know it’ll never fully go under, he has too much money for it too. It’ll last long enough to sooner or later come back up.
Enron was a huge business that had millions of customers. It just happened to lose money while doing so. The crime was that they hid that last part.
Also they deliberately turned off people’s power for more money. Like, scum-of-the-earth.
Might be area dependant. Lots of them where I work at not many at all where I live at about an hour away.
I didn’t realize that. That’s disheartening.
You are forgetting about Rule Number 1
Don’t Fuck With The Money.
Are you certain? I’m certain James is the one who broke the story about the drug use since its also his family that runs the WSJ
The only interest they should have is in getting rid of him.
It’s hard for me to imagine 2024 not being the year they do.
Tesla’s lofty stock price is to some extent based on hype, and Musk being credited (far too much imo) for the company’s success. If he did leave the stock price would come down to something more sensible, which at least short-term would make shareholders unhappy. But yeah leaving him in charge after what he did to Twitter must also be causing sleepless nights.
He sold 10% to buy twitter. Maybe he shouldn’t have made himself legally obligated to buy it?
Ding ding ding. We have a winner.
He sold the shares, why should Tesla reimburse him for his folly? If he wants to have those shares back, he can rebuy them on the open market, just like anybody else would do.
Price of Tesla 420.69 /s
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.
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.
Which is going to bite them in the ass in 3-5 years when Toyota, VW and a few others roll out the solid state batteries
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”. 🤘🏼🔥
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.
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.
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.
He brought shareholders value by getting people pumped to buy the car.
Brought being the key word, he no longer does so
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.
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?
There’s a model X near me with a bumper sticker that says “we bought this before we knew Elon was crazy”
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.
The recall of 2012-2023 models of the Model 3 tells me otherwise.
It’s actually an OTA update.
Which, and try to follow me here, would count as being serviced.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
They realize he’s tainted the Tesla brand and are trying to get rid of him.
He’s a billionaire…he cab buy the stocks back with his money like a normie would have to.
It’s not liquid and nobody will loan him money after his xitter stint
Eat the rich fascists
Here have the standard HR answer: sorry we don’t have the budget due to outside factors, also we’re doing layoffs in your department.
But if you’re doing layoffs in my department that frees up budget. So…there is budget?
Shrodingers budget
HR: No, we need to have the layoffs as we are over budget.
He doesn’t need to own 25% of tesla’s shares to be given 25% of voting power. It’s very common for different classes of shares for a company to exist that have entirely different voting rights.
I believe in order for that to work, the shares have to be set up for that during IPO. I’m not sure of any company that’s done it mid-flight (but I could be wrong).
They also can’t re-issue dual shares in Delaware, where Tesla is incorporated.
They have, but it’s done before diluting shares. Generally people with voting power don’t vote that power away from themselves.
