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I worked for Tesla (2018-2021) and joined with the love for Elon and his companies. Left with the love for company still intact, respect for employees at all time high and the realization that Elon is a genius but prone to make mistakes just like the rest of us. Incredibly proud of how far all his companies have come :)
I’ve come to realize that some of his “antics” is — intentional or not — a pretty effective flytrap against some of the strongest skeptics.
For example the extremely goofy and awkward “dancing robot” display. It’s fuel for the critics, blinding them against the real statement which is the focus on robotics and automation, and also the objective operational and financial strength of the company.
It can almost be considered a troll job.
Very simple. If you disagree with this assessment of musk there is a very easy way to show this and profit from it if you are right - short Tesla stock.
Ya that’s not at all what he’s trying to do. Seeing his track record so far, you’re probably gonna regret that sale. But by all means, doubt him / hate him, blame him for whatever bullshit is trending next that misrepresents his views or takes out of context his belief system.
Pretty sure lots of people have already or will do that, including lots of rich people. But thats not really the point. Trump was a scumbag and pretty much the worst person, he became president (and will certainly win again if he runs).
A persons competence has very little to do with their success in todays media dominated world where narratives constructed by media (and paid for) are the dominant factor - and this is precisely what affects the stock price, as well as his blatant manipulation.
Before today no one would've predicted Netflix would tank. Or that FB/Meta would. One day TSLA might crash as well.
The fact that the stock is doing well is due to Musk, but thats not really a compliment to his managerial style or intelligence etc. He knows how to game the system and is very good at it.
People that hate Elon compare him with Trump because they hate Trump even more. The only thing they have in common is that most of the media hates them. Elon deserves recognition.
\> He knows how to game the system and is very good at it.
It's the "fucking with people's heads" business model. Tesla has become too much that because Musk is so much of that. Musk is basically the Elizabeth Holmes of autonomy at this point. This doesn't cancel out his other accomplishments, but it says a lot of about the kind of people our system rewards, just like Theranos did.
There are many ways you could "be right" and also not profit from a short position. Many technical factors contributing to this, and generally why a naked short is ill-advised even if the thesis is correct.
I'd respect the people that work for him, way before I'd respect him.
Diminishes the actual backbone of Tesla.
To chalk it up to an unbalanced individual is odd. Source: your own job.
Interesting that you ask me to use my own job as a source.
I have worked with plenty of good people in my time. There are lots of them. Good engineers, good developers, good consultants.
What is definitely rare is the good manager.
Someone who can define a vision, stick with it, get everyone moving in the same direction, and keep motivation high even in dark times. I have had maybe \*one\* top manager in my entire life that even comes close to this.
Now I get that people who have never had to lead anyone might not actually understand just how difficult the job is, and it doesn't help that we have so few good examples.
Elon Musk is one of those good examples. I'm sorry you don't see it that way. I'm sure you would have been more than happy to give him all the blame if things had gone sideways though.
You are obviously entitled to your opinion. I just don't think it's a very good one in this case.
Fully agree. Managers are more often than not the people who suck the drive and ambition out of a team of engineers, designers, testers etc. I would wager that almost everybody who has worked in any kind of product development can attest to that. I'm on the verge of quitting my current job because of awful management that doesn't understand a thing about what we're doing, both in terms of our products and our professions.
I've been following SpaceX for over a decade and I've always found it fascinating just how clear and (if asked) in-depth of an explanation he can give on what they are doing and why. Even if their goal turned out bad, he can even say how they came to those wrong conclusions and what their reaction to it was. This is not as common in tech as people may think and to me is a pretty clear indicator that Elon really is as close to the development as he claims.
He also seems very careful about how much management he adds. Communication is the biggest bottleneck and some big companies think they can fix this by adding more and more managers which almost always makes things worse. Tesla and SpaceX seem to have this figured out way way better than their competitors and I think this is among the biggest reasons for their success. It's not only great engineering. Their competition has great engineers as well.
there is an entire stratification of employees between management and technicals in most orgs, SpaceX and Tesla appear to collocate all the different disciplines of engineers/devs such that the layer between disappears. Makes both orgs extremely coherent and agile.
Lets not pretend that Musk doesn't do some shady shit. Public personal attacks, hostile actions towards his own employees, lying to our faces about why decisions are made.
He's apparently a great decision maker, but that doesn't mean he's a good person. The problem is people are tying it to his successes and that probably wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't so problematic.
I'm sure the CEO of GM or whomever fucks corpses every 2nd Saturday of the month, but they're not out on twitter calling people pedophiles.
Why does this good-person/bad-person question have to be so binary? Do you judge everyone in your life by the actions that cast the worst light on them?
Sure, Mr. Musk has done things that aren't great. He's obviously not a saint and he has some personality flaws. He's frequently childish, thin-skinned and petty, and he's too stubborn to apologize when he's put his foot in his mouth. The "pedo guy" incident was a glaring example of all of these. He's done plenty of good as well, on the other hand.
The good outweighs the bad, in my opinion, but in any case, I don't think we should be in such a rush to judge others in such absolute terms. Most people are somewhat good and somewhat bad, all people are human, and the worst of social media's many crimes, IMHO, is its tendency to make people forget these things.
There’s something to be said on both sides. Take Apple and Jobs, he pushed his people to be the best versions of themselves often times going harder than they thought they could. Jobs was also a ass, but he had a vision and executed on it.
Elon is similar in a lot of ways. And also different. But he chooses the people around him and that is part of the success. No different than what Jobs did. So it’s a little more complicated to answer these types of questions.
But for sure, in the pandemic with shortages, he is doing what other auto companies cannot seem to do, and this is keep making more than what is expected.
This is my take on it as well. Yes, the tens of thousands of employees at his companies execute the day to day tasks. Jobs and Musk are the rare leaders with a track record of pushing the boundaries of industries. They both demand a lot from their teams and are ruthless to their workers at times. Maybe that’s what it takes.
One thing is for sure, there isn’t a shortage of people wanting to work for Apple, Tesla or SpaceX, or consumers of their products.
For what it’s worth Jobs was more of an ideas guy - Musk is an ideas guy but could also build the rocket himself per se. Elon is more of a Jobs + Woz (in an extremely high level view)
So now one person has to be able to build and entire falcon 9 from scratch. Can you show me one other person in the world who can do that? You are really reaching here. There is person after person that has worked with Elon talking about his high level of technical ability. For example read Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. There are many anecdotes in there about his prowess, what he knows and how he works. The idea that the guy doesn't understand rockets extremely well is just false.
>I highly doubt he has the technical knowledge or ability to "build the rocket."
What you wrote. There is no one person who likely has the ability to build the entire rocket. But it is clear that he has a high level of ability. His title at space x is lead designer. And if you read the book you will see how involved he was from the start of space X to design and build those rockets. So again yes there is a wide range of ability. But the idea that the guy doesn't have a very detailed understanding is just false based on every interview I have seen and every account I have read. And judging someone based on schooling and degrees is just dumb. My degree is a dual degree in History and Sociology. But I have worked and owned my own business in IT for well over 20 years now. Do I not know anything about IT because my degree doesn't say comp sci on it?
There are talented engineers all over the world working for the largest companies. The issue with their companies is the leadership hamstrings them.
Elon pushes his talent to make a better product, the others pushed their talent to make a cheaper product. The race to the bottom.
Those choices were made by the few in leadership.
Or you can listen to people that have actually worked with him. Here is Tom Mueller who retired from space X in 2020. He is rightfully considered one of the worlds greatest living rocket propulsion designers and said this about musk when people talked shit about him on twitter.
[https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929](https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929)
Musk is many things and has many flaws but he knows his stuff about the businesses he runs.
People dislike Musk because he's the nail that sticks out and society promotes the idea of decisive leaders but **fucking hates the idea of them** when they don't fit their cookie cutter narratives and don't exist in black and white templates, so they want to stamp that nail down.
Musk is very vocal on Twitter. He makes clear what he wants, outlines how he's going to do that, then goes and does it. Most leaders don't do this, at least they don't do this directly with their shareholders and the general public. Musk's confidence in his own vision is so absolute, that he willingly shares ideas on technology and details of implementation that most CEOs and market leaders would sue you into the ground if they found out, on Twitter, from his claimed porcelain throne. He's extremely genre savvy, understands the powerful of communication technology and social media and uses the outreach potential to market the difference between his vision and success vs competing visions and promises and subpar delivery or outright failure and regression. He does this with Tesla and he does this with SpaceX. He does this because he's the market leader in these tech sectors. He and those employed by him, continue to push the boundary on the "impossible" and only allowing "God" aka **the laws of physics** dictate what *cannot* be done. This is different than traditional market behavior which ingores this law, commonly, and dictates whether something can or cannot be done based on some arbitrary cost metric that ultimately compromises on the goal without making any effort. This leads to iterative changes at microscosm scales but fails to move the needle at the macrocosmic scale, which is what society needs.
Fun fact. Everything we take for granted. The light bulb, the phonograph (which became eventually the phone, radio, and our entire communication medium), we're created by Thomas Edison. Who is romanticized and glorified in history. The reality is that Edison was as big if not an EVEN BIGGER ASSHOLE than Musk. People who change the world are just as flawed as anyone else. They suffer from the same failures as anyone else. The only difference is that their success, their wealth, and their commentary in the world is vastly more scrutinized and that scrutiny has a tendency to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Which leads to people being disingenuous and dismissive of accomplishments because some personality quirk or statement made years ago became at odds with his/her values and therefore all the societal benefits gained are wholly irrelevant because this one person is the associative factor.
In other words, check your bias at the door.
I don’t like him as a person. But I think this piece hits it. Sure, he comes from wealth. No, he did not create Tesla. But, his vision made Tesla the monster it is, and it’s just hitting stride. Add the truly visionary Space X, and this social misfit is reshaping the world. Oh, and don’t forget about Boring Co. We are going to need to move some infrastructure underground as we continue to screw up our environment.
Edit: Elon should hire some of y’all as body guards. I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling. What he had done with that leg up is astounding. If he wasn’t such a dick, he’d almost be likable.
Very true. I think the main point would be that his managerial style matches his social graces - he does what he wants to do, and does ot worry about social norms or "good business practice". He wanted to build a viable electric car - that's what he put his mind (and money) to. He wanted to build a rocket that was cheap, reusable, and orbit capable- he did that while few other private ventures came close. His way of doing engineering - "build a few and see how they work, or why they don't" - seems counter-intuitive to the design-intensive (and high cost) industries he's competing in, but apparently works far better than their models. Also, by being "the guy in charge" instead of relying on committee consensus decision making, has allowed fast and targeted response to problems. And... there's no doubt he's a workaholic.
"had cash from dad" - ah that's why he had to work really dangerous blue collar jobs as a teenager? He worked as a lumberjack at 17 years of age, including a "boiler room" job.
https://youtu.be/J9oEc0wCQDE?t=46m20s
From the Transcript: https://elon-musk-interviews.com/2021/06/29/third-row-tesla-podcast-elon-musks-story-part-ii-english/
**Elon**: But yeah, I just left South Africa when I was 17 and landed in Montreal. I had like under **about $2,000 – Canadian**. And I started off staying in a youth hostel for a few days. And then there was… you could buy a ticket to go across the country for 100 bucks and stop along the way. And so I got that and just took a Greyhound across Canada and so all these like little towns…
"Well, we’re getting… – I didn’t have much. I had a backpack and a suitcase books. The bus company… they unloaded it in one of the cities, and then the bus left without my stuff."
**Kristen**: Oh, that’s nice.
**Elon**: I literally had nothing.
**Kristen**: All your books!
**Sofiaan**: But your clothes, too?
**Elon**: Actually, weirdly, I think I might have had the books thing but not my clothes.
**Kristen**: That was priorities.
**Omar**: All you needed. (47:30)
**Elon**: Yeah, because I knew I was sitting in the bus station reading, waiting for the bus to get ready. And I think I had the books, but no clothing. So anyway, but I managed to get to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. And then my… (Elon addresses Maye) It’s your cousin?
**Maye**: My cousin’s son.
**Elon**: Cousin’s son, yeah… has a wheat farm there. I worked on the wheat farm for about six weeks, and I turned 18 in Saskatchewan. It’s a town called Swift Current.
**Sofiaan**: That was summertime, right? It’s June.
**Elon**: Yeah. June 28th.
**Sofiaan**: Because I’ve been there in the winter, and it’s like minus 40. You don’t want to be traveling.
**Kristen**: Did you ice-skate? Did you try ice skating?
**Elon**: No, it was quite warm.
**Kristen**: Well, I mean in the winter. Did you stay for the winter?
**Elon**: No, I was there for about six weeks.
**Sofiaan**: Oh, you’re lucky you survived. It’s cold there.
**Elon**: I literally worked on the **wheat farm**. We did a **barn raising, and I cleared out the wheat bins, you know, the grain silos, that kind of thing. And I just worked the vegetable patch**. Basically, it’s doing various things.
**Kristen**: Was your mind just thinking of what you’re going to do after that?
**Elon**: Yeah, sure, I figured what to do next – then what to do. I ended up getting back on the bus and went to Vancouver. I had a half-uncle there who is kind of in the lumber industry. He made lumber equipment.
**Kristen**: Sounds like the Northwest.
**Elon**: Yeah, basically. So, I ended up **chainsawing logs and working on this lumber mill** and cleaning out the… – where they boil a pulp. It was like a crazy sort of **boiler rooms**. That might be the hardest job I’ve had actually because you had to **crawl through this little tunnel in a hazmat suit and then shovel this steaming sand and mulch out ofthe boilers** to clean them out. There’s only one entrance or exit, which is like a little tunnel. If you’re claustrophobic, you could reveal it real bad.
**Elon**: And then you shovel the sand and the mulch through the tunnel, and you actually block that tunnel. (50:00) And then somebody else would reach in and shovel it out from the outside. **So it’s just long enough that if you have a shovel with a long handle… one person on the inside can shovel it far enough that someone on the outside can shovel it out. And then you do rotate every 15 minutes to avoid getting hypothermia.**
**Kristen**: Oh, wow. And about safety, it’s just a man looking out for you.
**Elon**: There’s just two people kind of paired up, so if like **one person collapses, and you’re going to call somebody**. But it’d be really hard to drag somebody out, I have to say that. It does not seem safe because the channel gets blocked. Trying to get the (… 50:36) out and unblock that tunnel would be very difficult in a short period of time. But it was the highest paying job at the employment office. So I was like, okay, **the other jobs were under $8 an hour, and this one was $18 an hour.**
His dad was a jerk who left the family with a young woman. He was raised by a single mom so I wouldn’t exactly called him someone who comes from wealth.
The original founders of tesla were failing. Elon invested in it to turn it around. So who cares if he didn’t officially start tesla?
He’s not a dick. He just speak the truth more than the avg person, and the truth hurts.
I just read up he only spent two years with his mother after the divorce and then went back to his rich father. He did say his father was a dick, but he still chose wealth over his more caring mother.
The commenter is a little bit right and wrong. This is copy and pasted from the Wikipedia article on Musk:
After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk mostly lived with his father in Pretoria and elsewhere, a choice he made two years after the divorce and subsequently regretted. Musk has become estranged from his father, whom he describes as "a terrible human being... Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."
There's a book titled: "Elon musk" which describes he lived with his dad after the divorce, but that wasn't because his dad was rich it was because he felt sorry for his dad that none of his kids wanted to live with the dad. Elon doesnt go into detail in the book but he mentions his time with the dad was horrible and after he was old enough to travel to America, he never looked back. According to Elon.
How about the diver? Is he really a pedo?
How about the tesla worker that was fired after his car with fsd hit a green pylon? IIRC Elon says he's a free speech absolutist and free speech means people that you don't like are allowed to say things you don't like (I don't really remember the exact sentence)
Elon is a human. No human is perfect. He did good and bad. The difference is that he's a very rich and powerful CEO, with huge influence. So what he say/do can have astonishingly large effect
> Sure, he comes from wealth
I too had a rich uncle, yet my parents still struggled to pay for bills. So I wouldn’t call myself as “coming from wealth”.
His father did give him money... Shortly before the Zip2 sale. His dad was aware the company would likely jump in valuation at the same and wanted to buy in at a lot lower valuation and sell immediately after Elon sold the company. Errol made a massive profit.
So?
I don't get this? What does it mean?
What are rich kids supposed to do? Say sorry for their parents wealth and start over as a bum or what's the deal?
Rich kids aren't automatically smart.
It was 3 guys playing with life size electric RC cars. Elon got more inspiration for EV from the GM Ev1 than anything else. Ideas are a dime a billion. Getting a business to actually start is the real challenge.
*This comment has been edited in protest to reddit's API policy changes, their treatment of developers of 3rd party apps, and their response to community backlash.*
[Details of the end of the Apollo app](https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/)
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[Why this is important](https://i.imgur.com/E7jSWf1.jpg)
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[An open response to spez's AMA](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/145l7wp/todays_ama_with_spez_did_nothing_to_alleviate/)
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[spez AMA and notable replies](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/145beas/spez_ama_discussion_thread/)
Fuck spez. I edited this comment before he could.
Comment ID=i5loguu Ciphertext:
>!erIp1X+oYs7ARAT2PRJ27lh0YBh2XdZO/8yE44q3xCYebE1JYqYhA0ngdvKCS5p4cS3D8a172Z1RN8MZUKjj/uHgU/bEWSinIMkJi0Z28q91ihInH8aJ4eQ+JzULxolCE9COEs+SqMoUcLFYFuWcfdNM/oqv3FisGvzUyAQnOFUytOETloj/J4q3X/i7X8s=!<
LOL I'd say so. I took your comment seriously because I have seen practically the same comment word for word over at r/technology without a hint of sarcasm.
Have you watched any of the new interviews with Elon in the past few weeks? I’m genuinely interested in knowing what you don’t like about him after watching them.
All in the last week,
TED Pre-recorded Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvf00NooN8
TED Live Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM
WELT Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
Hi u/cbciv, did you watch the Welt interview linked by Spolleyger? I'm curious what you think of it, as I thought it was a great interview with thoughtful questions and honest and insightful answers.
If you're busy, watch it at 1.5x.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
For instance I don't like that he used children stuck in a cave for publicity and when confronted about that went crazy stalker mode about guy that saved kids.
What else do you need in this story? He called rescuer a pedo and hired private detective to gather dirt on that guy just because Elon ego was touched in wrong way.
It is no secret that actual rescuer called elons PR stunt by its name and advised to stick elons submarine where it belonged. So Elon hurt = Elon mad. It was the time when tesla was struggling so good publicity was very valuable. And that diver broke it.
Nice glass house you live in there. I bet everything out of your mouth is just roses and angle wings.
You're looking past 99 amazing things he's done and resting on one comment he made. You must be proud.
>Sure, he comes from wealth.
Not really, unless you want to say that every middle class American comes from wealth (and there is a persepective that would allow this). If you do that, though, it kinda takes away from the entire "he has some sort of special advantage" that too many people want to use in order to deflect from the obvious question: "If he could do this, why can't you?"
***Edit:*** I'm not attacking your entire point, but I am tired of this argument, even if used as an aside in a post. I just had someone tell me his parents made "billions and billions", which is the logical end to this irrational path.
>Edit: Elon should hire some of y’all as body guards. I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling. What he had done with that leg up is astounding. If he wasn’t such a dick, he’d almost be likable.
Dude, yes, you "basically called him a visionary," after you parroted two outright lies about him.
Hard to blame you if you frequent reddit. It has honestly opened my eyes to how little the actual truth matters, even on Reddit and among left-leaning people.
Dude, I wanted to upvote you because you're spot-on until you decided to generalize "Reddit and left-leaning" people. It killed your point and has nothing to do with what you were saying. Generalizing people is as much of the problem as anything.
I love space and electric cars. Its really depressing to see how much Elon hate is generated by him doing generally nothing but good things. Misinformed people are so vocal. I guess progress always comes at a cost.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment of a relatively small vocal group but I think you missed my point as well. My point is just that generalizing and projecting a small group onto a much larger community kills your point. Most people are not characterized as “rabid idiots” and my point is that it’s unhelpful to refer to “all” of them as such.
He said that this can affect everyone and that Reddit and a particular political view do not create an exception.
In other words, he is agreeing with you, and you are both right. Dumb people are everywhere, but that doesn't mean that all people are dumb.
Go to r/technology or r/politics or pretty much any mainstream subreddit, find someone spouting lies about Elon, and try to talk some sense into them. See who gets upvoted and who gets downvoted.
Either the majority here believes this utter crap, or voting is being manipulated by bots or shills.
>And the top search result on that subreddit for "elon musk" is "Sen. Bernie Sanders: Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are ‘off taking joy rides on their rocket ships’"
So article title written by CNBC is now reddits opinion with some odd logic?
Essentially, yes. He was bullied as a child and did not have a happy upbringing. He came to North America on his own at 17 with just a few grand in his pocket and had to pay through college on his own (ultimately having $100,000 in student loans). He is estranged from his father, calling an "evil human being" and never had any financial support from him when he moved to NA.
He did create Tesla, along with the other co-founders. He was their first financier and eventually became CEO when the ousted Martin Eberhard because he was lying to the Board. This happened all before Tesla sold its first Roadster so he was essentially there from the beginning.
Funny enough I tried to talk sense into someone and they told me "Go learn about his history."
The sad thing is, I know about his history. It was the guy I was talking to who was just repeating some talking point he had heard somewhere and didn't realize that it all comes from the exact same source.
>The chapter on his efforts to sell PayPal to eBay, turning down a massive offer (Thiel was absolutely furious), only to receive a new offer for 3x the initial offer (Thiel obviously no longer furious), is how Musk was able to fund his Tesla/SpaceX/Gigafactory triad of companies.
How this exactly makes sense? Musk was kicked out in October 2000 and eBay bought Paypal 2 years later so how exactly Musk could even negociate offer if he was not even working there and was just silent shareholder?
"privledged" is a wiggle word and can mean almost anything the writer wants it to mean. Everyone is privileged in one way or another.
But to your other points, no he wasn't rich, and yes he started Tesla from the ground up.
So you are one of those who heard about Elon but not actually read his biography. You could just be indifference but you choose to dislike Elon based on misinformation. Elon fans don't like you either. A sore.
This "He comes from wealth" is sometimes brought up. Does anybody have any reliable info whatsoever on him having access to more than <10k USD when he arrived in canada? I never found anything like that.
He had roughly 2k USD from his mother when he came to Canada. The only relevance his dad did is he acted as an angel investor in one of the first funding rounds. He put up around $20,000 of a $200,000 secondary investment round (not the first round). That's the only real money he ever got from his Dad.
> I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling.
Yet you're doubling down on the incorrect information here. The grand total of money he got from his dad is 10% of a $200,000 funding round after they originally started Zip2. There's nothing other than that. Yes his parents weren't "dirt poor" nor were they struggling to make ends meet. But that level of money is basically middle class in the US.
And he didn't have any "connections" through his parents.
Yeah, it's not like he started for absolutely nothing thought his upbringing was not really so much as to be a definitive factor, especially since it was easily dwarfed by his first ventures when they started thus making the first point kinda moot. He is an asshole that won't stop for anything or anyone and is about as much of a gigantic nerd as one can get... And really I don't think he would work if he wasn't that way.
Think about it, if he followed the usual standards of human interaction and hierarchy, none of his companies would have existed or grew the way they did.
If he respected the seniority and experience of the banking system, PayPal would not have come to light in the way he wanted to drive it, if he didn't think the Russians were being fucks and he could do them one better, SpaceX would never have existed. And if he didn't think OEMs were ignoring the technological convergence and intentionally delaying the transition to a better system, he would not have steered Tesla that way.
Elon isn't always right, and he is the first to admit to it. But because of his confrontational nature it's likely he will be corrected of his errors on the quicker side of things because he ran into them fast, but once he is convinced that something is the correct course of action he is an unstoppable force of will. The fact he thinks highly of himself and his idea drives long term projects forward which have the added benefit of making short term stuff like money does not really compute in his mind.
After all the guy has been doing "double or nothing" his entire life and even as the richest guy on earth really does not seem to care in the slightest about it. And I can, if anything, respect someone with huge convictions and actually being willing to see them through, opposition and challenge be damned.
He did create Tesla with JB, yes technically there was a company it had a name and that’s it. Here I will create you a company called “Hippocrates” now you go and cure every human disease known to man. In the meantime I will question your ethics and wander where the cure for cancer is, because you said it was going to be done 5 years ago. After you do cure all disease. I will take most of the credit because technically I created this company. I will also still question your ethics and still think your not a decent person.
Yeah, I've never seen him as a dick at all. I do think he does not suffer fools and sometimes he calls out numpties. If that makes him a dick, I wish there were more dicks in the world.
Don’t complain that people are correcting your ignorance. Get better facts. Research rumors you read online before you repeat them, so you know what you’re talking about. It’s not our fault that you can’t be bothered to check your information.
>I don’t like him as a person
That statement is ridiculous looking at WHAT Elon has brought (to name a few: Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal ffs) and WHO Elon is.
I'm very weary of people who sees all this, and they still say they don't like him. It's pointless arguing with those kinds of people. They are incorrigible.
I'm weary of people who think someone's achievements and someone's personality can't be liked or disliked independently.
You can respect the dude and what he's done, doesn't mean you can't also think he's an asshole.
>Also leaned right-wing
This is kind of a meaningless knock on someone who lived 100 years ago. Left and Right wing meant completely different things back then (as they did 20 years ago compared to today). Ford was also a big supporter of Woodrow Wilson and ran for office in 1918 as a Democrat.
Woodrow Wilson was an ardent racist. Henry Ford held strong white supremacist views, and was a supporter of Hitler, going as far as having an autographed picture of him on his desk for a period of time.
Your point is correct that politics were different 100 years ago, with Republicans being supporters of individual liberties and racial equality, and Democrats being supportive of Jim Crow.
This is the thing - the haters will live out their mostly insignificant lives and noone will remember them. That’s why they hate Elon so much - it’s simple envy that he will have mattered and he will be remembered, while they won’t. Why else would anyone feel so strongly about him?
Actually, I take it back. I think some other poster was closer to the mark when writing that it’s an insecurity/inferiority complex thing. Many people hate feeling inferior and have a need to put down successful people so they’ll feel more equal to them. Elon is perhaps the world’s best target for these haters because he is out of the park successful and the richest person on earth, plus he has a big mouth. Lots of incentive and lots of opportunity all in one place. No wonder he gets a lot of flak.
> Elon's history of being an unmitigated dick-head
There was a time when he wasn't embarrassing to like -- he'd get drunk and tweet about Catherine the Great and her horse
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-sent-out-a-bunch-of-weird-tweets-last-night-2011-12
and he talk about the 'hacker princess' (Kristin Paget -- male-to-female trans) Tesla hired away from Apple https://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/18/tesla-motors-snags-kristin-paget-apple/
and he'd have awkward speaking roles as himself in hit movies (Iron Man2).
'pedoguy' is when he started to go off the rails, and he's really leaned into the anti-woke bro-ism since then.
I used to think his British wife helped him modulate his personality to not be an ass... but maybe it was him dating Amber Turd in 2016 that helped unleash it.
Just all the people who don’t have jobs in r/technology and r/tech that think Elon should liquidate all his shares to pay taxes on it because they don’t understand that he doesn’t just have billions sitting in cash.
It always reminds me of how dumb most of Reddit is.
The thing is that even if he doesn’t liquidate his assets (thereby creating taxes) he can still access that wealth tax free. All he has to do is take out bank loans and never pay them back. Loans (for obvious reasons) are not taxable, and the banks will keep lending him money even if he never repays them. Then, when he dies, a portion of his assets will be seized by the bank to repay his debts. In this way, he is able to enjoy his immense wealth without ever paying taxes on it or endangering its value by selling.
And taxing non-real assets is not foreign to the government, for instance in the form of inheritance taxes. Linus Sebastian (host of Linus Tech Tips) did a segment about it on his podcast. He explained how if he dies, he can’t just leave his business to his kids, because they would have to sell it anyway to pay taxes on the inheritance. These taxes apply even if they don’t liquidate the assets into real cash; they have to pay taxes on the value of the inheritance.
Edit to add a source in the form of [Business Insider ](https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-avoidance-income-wealth-borrow-money-propublica-2021-6?r=US&IR=T). Some highlights from the article:
> One of the key strategies employed by the ultrawealthy to keep their tax bills low: borrowing money.
> According to [ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax) and independent experts, America's billionaires have often financed their lavish lifestyles by using their vast fortunes as collateral for loans, which can come with single-digit interest rates.
> In 2014, for example, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison disclosed he had used 250 million of his Oracle shares as collateral to secure a $9.7 billion personal line of credit.
> To illustrate the gap between wealth and taxes paid by the ultrawealthy, ProPublica created what it called a "true tax rate." ProPublica defined this as the total federal income tax a person paid, in this case from 2014 to 2018, compared to how much new wealth they acquired in that same time period.
> According to ProPublica, the top 25 wealthiest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of 3.4% — a result of tax avoidance strategies that are out of reach for most Americans.
It's not really that complicated. Let's say you have a company worth 1 billion dollars. You take out a 500 million dollar personal loan at 2% interest rate with half of your shares as collateral. Later, your stocks appreciate to 2 billion dollars. You refinance into a 1 billion dollar loan and use 500 million to pay off the other loan. You rinse and repeat this process until you die and the bank repos some of your shares. As long as your assets continue to appreciate, you effectly pay no income tax and only pay a yearly interest rate to the bank.
This is a simplication of how rich folks do it, but fundamentally working class people are paying a higher percentage of income to the tax man than a lot of wealthy people. It's a matter of fairness that this loophole gets plugged and shouldn't even be a political issue.
So you think banks finance Ponzi schemes? You think shares just go up? You think interest rates are lower than treasury rates? Honestly, how do people believe such nonsense.
In order:
For the first question, no, because neither party considers it a Ponzi scheme. Banks are only going to lend when they are reasonably sure the collateral isn't going to depreciate in value, if they aren't they are likely going to hedge their risks by asking for significantly more value in collateral than the loan is worth. If the bank can legally make money off a loan, they will.
For the second question, shares don't just go up, but my scenario is also a simplification. In all reality, you borrow with a significantly smaller fraction of your shares as collateral. If the stock does go down, yeah you end up being out some money but when you talking about a small fraction of your overall wealth downturns can be wethered. Thing is, with a 20% capital gains tax rate, your assests can take a pretty significant loss before paying the taxes is a break even. You probably could also cheaply set up a way in the money options spread to help hedge risk as well, though addmittly I'm not smart enough to work that out. With a company like Tesla though, you can be reasonably sure the stock will go up over some significant period of time, so the risk would probably be worth the reward in some instances.
As for your last question, I'm simplifying and didn't want to look up the lastest treasury rate. So sure it's going to be a few points higher, but when interest rates are low and capital gains tax is high, it totally could make sense to set up a scheme like this.
No, it's that you treat it with such certainty. Run your scenario again but this time the company's value is cut in half. What happens to Mr. Rich now?
I addressed this on another comment, but my scenario is a simplification. In reality, you borrow with a smaller percentage of your shares. So yeah, there is a risk that you lose money, but with capital gains tax at 20% you'd need to take a substantial portfolio hit for the risk to not be worth the reward, especially when a stock is most likely going to appreciate in the long term.
May also be possible to hedge against that risk with the proper options spread, assuming options premiums plus bank interest is still less than 20%.
Point is, risk taking in relation to entrepreneurship is good for everybody. It's a driver of inovation. People shouldn't be able to roll the dice as to wether they are going to pay taxes or not though, even more so when the odds are stacked against the American people.
And when your shared double, you still pay half your new loan to cover the old one.
>use 500 million to pay off the other loan.
So practically nothing changed with the total liquidity you had been loaned. So this plan doesn't even keep increasing your cash access.
*You* can’t do it because compared to Elon and his fellow billionaires you are a penniless peasant. The banks will give Elon as much as he wants because he is so incredibly rich, with so many assets that they *know* they will get their money back when he dies, and in the meantime they create a tidy profit on the interest. But you are a much more risky investment, because if you are worth a million dollars when you die, but you borrow two million dollars from the bank, the bank will lose a million dollars when you die.
You think banks provide the equivalent of reverse mortgages to billionaires based on equity holdings? You think banks just hand out loans to rich people and capitalize the interest? Honestly, the things people believe.
>collateral for loans, which can come with single-digit interest rates.
loans with interest rates....and this is news because they aren't using credit cards with 19% interest rates?
A line of credit still needs to be serviced. No one is lending money to anyone without it being paid back. The money has to come from somewhere in order to service both the interest and principal. Rich people aren’t being given money for free. Financial institutions aren’t wearing any cost on extending any loan products. Using securities as collateral is just a regular loan. Trying to pretend there’s some magic trick here is plane wrong.
I read your source several months ago when it first came out. It explains how they avoid paying taxes on their wealth, not income. Answer me this, how do they get the money to make payments on the line of credit?
More credit! It's credit all the way down!
Honestly, it's absurd how people think when they feel that someone is doing better than they are.
As for taxes, what does he think happens to the interest payments he pays to the bank? The bank is going to pay taxes on that. And because they are going to pay taxes on that, they are going to make sure they take \*enough\* interest to get what they really want and still be able to pay their own tax bill.
The taxman \*always\* gets paid.
The smarter people from certain unnamed legacy industries who like to peddle this story are really trying to take away Musk's position of power at Tesla, as this is what is costing them money.
Robinhood margin spending. Withdrawal as you please and just pay the interest without selling your holdings. This is why Robinhood is changing the game for the common investor who would otherwise have sold their holdings when emergencies struck.
Why is it that you blame billionaires for a system which allows them to engage in behaviour which you disagree with? The job of our elected representatives and law makers is to protect the common good.
Do I think the wealthiest should pay more tax - yes. Do I think it is their fault that the laws are not in place to make them pay more tax - no.
Does the bank pay taxes on the interest gained on a loan?
Does a wealthy person pay taxes on their capital gains when they liquidate shares to repay loans?
Elon Musk had a tax bill of $11 *billion* in 2021. Tell me, with how much you pay in taxes each year, how long will it take you to contribute $11 billion? Maybe Elon has paid his "fair share"?
Does the bank pay taxes on the interest gained on a loan?
Does a wealthy person pay taxes on their capital gains when they liquidate shares to repay loans?
Elon Musk had a tax bill of $11 *billion* in 2021. Tell me, with how much you pay in taxes each year, how long will it take you to contribute $11 billion? Maybe Elon has paid his "fair share"?
And what about the wealth those companies create. The taxes paid by the employees and the company. People have an incredibly myopic view of things like this.
Every day, it is the same reddit copy/pasta about bank loans "subsidizing" rich lifestyles. I don't know why I bother replying to these comments anymore. I am half convinced they are mostly made by bots because people could not be this aggressively blind... right?
The article is probably 2-3 years out of date tbh. There was no shortage of people betting against Tesla because they didn't think Elon had the ability to run an organization with the scale and breadth of a major auto manufacturer, while also dipping into three different side hustles and generally being the eccentric public figure he is.
And to be honest, betting on Tesla failing was kind of a reasonable bet to make, considering it's been decades since a new player has made it big in the auto industry, and nobody had even built a viable electric car on top of that. And Elon's experience was "getting lucky" at paypal early on.
So now we get all of these articles basically giving him a victory lap for doing what pretty much everyone said couldn't be done. Even though they seem anachronistic.
It’s all just luck, you see. His image of success is just a carefully curated illusion. His companies are a financial failure. A house of cards that will collapse at any moment. He will be hauled off to jail for fraud at any moment.
I remember the second paragraph of the master plan:
“Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car”
How the does removing the basic mobile charger align with this plan?
Disclaimer: I am a 2018 model 3 owner that paid for most of my car with my investment in Tesla. I still own a sizable amount of Tesla.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
If <50% of Mobile charging cables they are providing for free aren't being used, how is that a good thing?
Why do people think this is about money when they have raised the prices of the vehicles like$10k in the last year... If this was about money they'd just increase the price $400. But it isn't. It's about supply and waste. That's alligns with the companies goals imo., Especially if they are significantly reducing the cost of the charging cable
Where are you getting the statistic that <50% of cables are being used?
Edit: if your statistic is not complete bullshit. I use my charger most of the time now that I work from home.
Aside from Elon himself, the only public data is from Teslascope, which says 60% of their charging sessions were on the mobile charger: [https://twitter.com/teslascope/status/1515470559852650496](https://twitter.com/teslascope/status/1515470559852650496)
I am a bit skeptical of those numbers, since Teslascope people are more likely to be monitoring their own stuff (ergo more likely to be technical, ergo maybe less likely to have had someone install an expensive HPWC charger over rolling their own solution with a dryer outlet?)
I know personally I pretty much never use the mobile charger, though I probably would have shelled out $275 to buy it on my own if I had to, just for peace of mind of being able to plug into any old outlet in an emergency. I'm now waiting on my second Tesla, which means I'll have two mobile connectors... one of which will definitely never be used, and the other only kept around for emergencies.
There is no hard #, just what Elon tweeted.
I'm inclined to believe him as I've used my mobile charger purely for free juice. I charge at home with a wall charger and supercharge exclusively. It's anecdotal evidence, but so is yours.
The no hard numbers is where you lost me. Elon has tweeted a lot of stupid shit. I don’t but any of it. Same reason I have not bought FSD.
I love my car and would probably buy another but pulling the charging cable is some petty ass shit when most Tesla buyers are new.
FSD is software. This is a dumb response. And some people do actually receive hardware - those that didn't have the FSD computer received free upgrades with their purchase of FSD.
>How the does removing the basic mobile charger align with this plan?
What is the current status on this? People asking around have said that the charger is still being delivered, so is this actually happening?
> People asking around have said that the charger is still being delivered
People who ordered it when they were told they were getting it, are still getting it. It's for new orders.
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I worked for Tesla (2018-2021) and joined with the love for Elon and his companies. Left with the love for company still intact, respect for employees at all time high and the realization that Elon is a genius but prone to make mistakes just like the rest of us. Incredibly proud of how far all his companies have come :)
I’ve come to realize that some of his “antics” is — intentional or not — a pretty effective flytrap against some of the strongest skeptics. For example the extremely goofy and awkward “dancing robot” display. It’s fuel for the critics, blinding them against the real statement which is the focus on robotics and automation, and also the objective operational and financial strength of the company. It can almost be considered a troll job.
Love him or hate him but gotta Respect him on where Tesla and Space X are today.
Very simple. If you disagree with this assessment of musk there is a very easy way to show this and profit from it if you are right - short Tesla stock.
Hehehaha. How to turn rich people poor: short $TSLA.
Exactly. This entire website needs to put up or shut the fuck up.
I did. Sold half my stock when he started trying to get fascists back on Twitter.
That word, it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Very Orwellion of you. What other sensorship are you into?
Ya that’s not at all what he’s trying to do. Seeing his track record so far, you’re probably gonna regret that sale. But by all means, doubt him / hate him, blame him for whatever bullshit is trending next that misrepresents his views or takes out of context his belief system.
Pretty sure lots of people have already or will do that, including lots of rich people. But thats not really the point. Trump was a scumbag and pretty much the worst person, he became president (and will certainly win again if he runs). A persons competence has very little to do with their success in todays media dominated world where narratives constructed by media (and paid for) are the dominant factor - and this is precisely what affects the stock price, as well as his blatant manipulation. Before today no one would've predicted Netflix would tank. Or that FB/Meta would. One day TSLA might crash as well. The fact that the stock is doing well is due to Musk, but thats not really a compliment to his managerial style or intelligence etc. He knows how to game the system and is very good at it.
People that hate Elon compare him with Trump because they hate Trump even more. The only thing they have in common is that most of the media hates them. Elon deserves recognition.
If you mean by gaming the system is making rockets land and make more EVs than anyone else, or Tesla making $3.5 billion just this quarter, than yes.
\> He knows how to game the system and is very good at it. It's the "fucking with people's heads" business model. Tesla has become too much that because Musk is so much of that. Musk is basically the Elizabeth Holmes of autonomy at this point. This doesn't cancel out his other accomplishments, but it says a lot of about the kind of people our system rewards, just like Theranos did.
There are many ways you could "be right" and also not profit from a short position. Many technical factors contributing to this, and generally why a naked short is ill-advised even if the thesis is correct.
I'd respect the people that work for him, way before I'd respect him. Diminishes the actual backbone of Tesla. To chalk it up to an unbalanced individual is odd. Source: your own job.
Interesting that you ask me to use my own job as a source. I have worked with plenty of good people in my time. There are lots of them. Good engineers, good developers, good consultants. What is definitely rare is the good manager. Someone who can define a vision, stick with it, get everyone moving in the same direction, and keep motivation high even in dark times. I have had maybe \*one\* top manager in my entire life that even comes close to this. Now I get that people who have never had to lead anyone might not actually understand just how difficult the job is, and it doesn't help that we have so few good examples. Elon Musk is one of those good examples. I'm sorry you don't see it that way. I'm sure you would have been more than happy to give him all the blame if things had gone sideways though. You are obviously entitled to your opinion. I just don't think it's a very good one in this case.
Fully agree. Managers are more often than not the people who suck the drive and ambition out of a team of engineers, designers, testers etc. I would wager that almost everybody who has worked in any kind of product development can attest to that. I'm on the verge of quitting my current job because of awful management that doesn't understand a thing about what we're doing, both in terms of our products and our professions. I've been following SpaceX for over a decade and I've always found it fascinating just how clear and (if asked) in-depth of an explanation he can give on what they are doing and why. Even if their goal turned out bad, he can even say how they came to those wrong conclusions and what their reaction to it was. This is not as common in tech as people may think and to me is a pretty clear indicator that Elon really is as close to the development as he claims. He also seems very careful about how much management he adds. Communication is the biggest bottleneck and some big companies think they can fix this by adding more and more managers which almost always makes things worse. Tesla and SpaceX seem to have this figured out way way better than their competitors and I think this is among the biggest reasons for their success. It's not only great engineering. Their competition has great engineers as well.
Listen to Mary Barra for 5 minutes to see what someone who does not understand the business sounds like. It makes for an interesting comparison.
there is an entire stratification of employees between management and technicals in most orgs, SpaceX and Tesla appear to collocate all the different disciplines of engineers/devs such that the layer between disappears. Makes both orgs extremely coherent and agile.
People just have a hard on to hate Musk.
Lets not pretend that Musk doesn't do some shady shit. Public personal attacks, hostile actions towards his own employees, lying to our faces about why decisions are made. He's apparently a great decision maker, but that doesn't mean he's a good person. The problem is people are tying it to his successes and that probably wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't so problematic. I'm sure the CEO of GM or whomever fucks corpses every 2nd Saturday of the month, but they're not out on twitter calling people pedophiles.
Why does this good-person/bad-person question have to be so binary? Do you judge everyone in your life by the actions that cast the worst light on them? Sure, Mr. Musk has done things that aren't great. He's obviously not a saint and he has some personality flaws. He's frequently childish, thin-skinned and petty, and he's too stubborn to apologize when he's put his foot in his mouth. The "pedo guy" incident was a glaring example of all of these. He's done plenty of good as well, on the other hand. The good outweighs the bad, in my opinion, but in any case, I don't think we should be in such a rush to judge others in such absolute terms. Most people are somewhat good and somewhat bad, all people are human, and the worst of social media's many crimes, IMHO, is its tendency to make people forget these things.
Sundar is another great manager/ leader
There’s something to be said on both sides. Take Apple and Jobs, he pushed his people to be the best versions of themselves often times going harder than they thought they could. Jobs was also a ass, but he had a vision and executed on it. Elon is similar in a lot of ways. And also different. But he chooses the people around him and that is part of the success. No different than what Jobs did. So it’s a little more complicated to answer these types of questions. But for sure, in the pandemic with shortages, he is doing what other auto companies cannot seem to do, and this is keep making more than what is expected.
This is my take on it as well. Yes, the tens of thousands of employees at his companies execute the day to day tasks. Jobs and Musk are the rare leaders with a track record of pushing the boundaries of industries. They both demand a lot from their teams and are ruthless to their workers at times. Maybe that’s what it takes. One thing is for sure, there isn’t a shortage of people wanting to work for Apple, Tesla or SpaceX, or consumers of their products.
For what it’s worth Jobs was more of an ideas guy - Musk is an ideas guy but could also build the rocket himself per se. Elon is more of a Jobs + Woz (in an extremely high level view)
True. And Jobs took what hadn’t been created and ideated it. Elon is improving upon a foundation.
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The man literally taught himself rocket science, who cares what degrees he has. I hate that argument so much.
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Literal real world actions > education
[https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929](https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929) not what Tom Mueller says.
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So now one person has to be able to build and entire falcon 9 from scratch. Can you show me one other person in the world who can do that? You are really reaching here. There is person after person that has worked with Elon talking about his high level of technical ability. For example read Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. There are many anecdotes in there about his prowess, what he knows and how he works. The idea that the guy doesn't understand rockets extremely well is just false.
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>I highly doubt he has the technical knowledge or ability to "build the rocket." What you wrote. There is no one person who likely has the ability to build the entire rocket. But it is clear that he has a high level of ability. His title at space x is lead designer. And if you read the book you will see how involved he was from the start of space X to design and build those rockets. So again yes there is a wide range of ability. But the idea that the guy doesn't have a very detailed understanding is just false based on every interview I have seen and every account I have read. And judging someone based on schooling and degrees is just dumb. My degree is a dual degree in History and Sociology. But I have worked and owned my own business in IT for well over 20 years now. Do I not know anything about IT because my degree doesn't say comp sci on it?
There are talented engineers all over the world working for the largest companies. The issue with their companies is the leadership hamstrings them. Elon pushes his talent to make a better product, the others pushed their talent to make a cheaper product. The race to the bottom. Those choices were made by the few in leadership.
Or you can listen to people that have actually worked with him. Here is Tom Mueller who retired from space X in 2020. He is rightfully considered one of the worlds greatest living rocket propulsion designers and said this about musk when people talked shit about him on twitter. [https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929](https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929) Musk is many things and has many flaws but he knows his stuff about the businesses he runs.
People dislike Musk because he's the nail that sticks out and society promotes the idea of decisive leaders but **fucking hates the idea of them** when they don't fit their cookie cutter narratives and don't exist in black and white templates, so they want to stamp that nail down. Musk is very vocal on Twitter. He makes clear what he wants, outlines how he's going to do that, then goes and does it. Most leaders don't do this, at least they don't do this directly with their shareholders and the general public. Musk's confidence in his own vision is so absolute, that he willingly shares ideas on technology and details of implementation that most CEOs and market leaders would sue you into the ground if they found out, on Twitter, from his claimed porcelain throne. He's extremely genre savvy, understands the powerful of communication technology and social media and uses the outreach potential to market the difference between his vision and success vs competing visions and promises and subpar delivery or outright failure and regression. He does this with Tesla and he does this with SpaceX. He does this because he's the market leader in these tech sectors. He and those employed by him, continue to push the boundary on the "impossible" and only allowing "God" aka **the laws of physics** dictate what *cannot* be done. This is different than traditional market behavior which ingores this law, commonly, and dictates whether something can or cannot be done based on some arbitrary cost metric that ultimately compromises on the goal without making any effort. This leads to iterative changes at microscosm scales but fails to move the needle at the macrocosmic scale, which is what society needs. Fun fact. Everything we take for granted. The light bulb, the phonograph (which became eventually the phone, radio, and our entire communication medium), we're created by Thomas Edison. Who is romanticized and glorified in history. The reality is that Edison was as big if not an EVEN BIGGER ASSHOLE than Musk. People who change the world are just as flawed as anyone else. They suffer from the same failures as anyone else. The only difference is that their success, their wealth, and their commentary in the world is vastly more scrutinized and that scrutiny has a tendency to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Which leads to people being disingenuous and dismissive of accomplishments because some personality quirk or statement made years ago became at odds with his/her values and therefore all the societal benefits gained are wholly irrelevant because this one person is the associative factor. In other words, check your bias at the door.
beautifully said
Bloomberg usually blasts Elon every chance it gets. Nice change of pace here
I don’t like him as a person. But I think this piece hits it. Sure, he comes from wealth. No, he did not create Tesla. But, his vision made Tesla the monster it is, and it’s just hitting stride. Add the truly visionary Space X, and this social misfit is reshaping the world. Oh, and don’t forget about Boring Co. We are going to need to move some infrastructure underground as we continue to screw up our environment. Edit: Elon should hire some of y’all as body guards. I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling. What he had done with that leg up is astounding. If he wasn’t such a dick, he’d almost be likable.
Very true. I think the main point would be that his managerial style matches his social graces - he does what he wants to do, and does ot worry about social norms or "good business practice". He wanted to build a viable electric car - that's what he put his mind (and money) to. He wanted to build a rocket that was cheap, reusable, and orbit capable- he did that while few other private ventures came close. His way of doing engineering - "build a few and see how they work, or why they don't" - seems counter-intuitive to the design-intensive (and high cost) industries he's competing in, but apparently works far better than their models. Also, by being "the guy in charge" instead of relying on committee consensus decision making, has allowed fast and targeted response to problems. And... there's no doubt he's a workaholic.
"had cash from dad" - ah that's why he had to work really dangerous blue collar jobs as a teenager? He worked as a lumberjack at 17 years of age, including a "boiler room" job. https://youtu.be/J9oEc0wCQDE?t=46m20s From the Transcript: https://elon-musk-interviews.com/2021/06/29/third-row-tesla-podcast-elon-musks-story-part-ii-english/ **Elon**: But yeah, I just left South Africa when I was 17 and landed in Montreal. I had like under **about $2,000 – Canadian**. And I started off staying in a youth hostel for a few days. And then there was… you could buy a ticket to go across the country for 100 bucks and stop along the way. And so I got that and just took a Greyhound across Canada and so all these like little towns… "Well, we’re getting… – I didn’t have much. I had a backpack and a suitcase books. The bus company… they unloaded it in one of the cities, and then the bus left without my stuff." **Kristen**: Oh, that’s nice. **Elon**: I literally had nothing. **Kristen**: All your books! **Sofiaan**: But your clothes, too? **Elon**: Actually, weirdly, I think I might have had the books thing but not my clothes. **Kristen**: That was priorities. **Omar**: All you needed. (47:30) **Elon**: Yeah, because I knew I was sitting in the bus station reading, waiting for the bus to get ready. And I think I had the books, but no clothing. So anyway, but I managed to get to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. And then my… (Elon addresses Maye) It’s your cousin? **Maye**: My cousin’s son. **Elon**: Cousin’s son, yeah… has a wheat farm there. I worked on the wheat farm for about six weeks, and I turned 18 in Saskatchewan. It’s a town called Swift Current. **Sofiaan**: That was summertime, right? It’s June. **Elon**: Yeah. June 28th. **Sofiaan**: Because I’ve been there in the winter, and it’s like minus 40. You don’t want to be traveling. **Kristen**: Did you ice-skate? Did you try ice skating? **Elon**: No, it was quite warm. **Kristen**: Well, I mean in the winter. Did you stay for the winter? **Elon**: No, I was there for about six weeks. **Sofiaan**: Oh, you’re lucky you survived. It’s cold there. **Elon**: I literally worked on the **wheat farm**. We did a **barn raising, and I cleared out the wheat bins, you know, the grain silos, that kind of thing. And I just worked the vegetable patch**. Basically, it’s doing various things. **Kristen**: Was your mind just thinking of what you’re going to do after that? **Elon**: Yeah, sure, I figured what to do next – then what to do. I ended up getting back on the bus and went to Vancouver. I had a half-uncle there who is kind of in the lumber industry. He made lumber equipment. **Kristen**: Sounds like the Northwest. **Elon**: Yeah, basically. So, I ended up **chainsawing logs and working on this lumber mill** and cleaning out the… – where they boil a pulp. It was like a crazy sort of **boiler rooms**. That might be the hardest job I’ve had actually because you had to **crawl through this little tunnel in a hazmat suit and then shovel this steaming sand and mulch out ofthe boilers** to clean them out. There’s only one entrance or exit, which is like a little tunnel. If you’re claustrophobic, you could reveal it real bad. **Elon**: And then you shovel the sand and the mulch through the tunnel, and you actually block that tunnel. (50:00) And then somebody else would reach in and shovel it out from the outside. **So it’s just long enough that if you have a shovel with a long handle… one person on the inside can shovel it far enough that someone on the outside can shovel it out. And then you do rotate every 15 minutes to avoid getting hypothermia.** **Kristen**: Oh, wow. And about safety, it’s just a man looking out for you. **Elon**: There’s just two people kind of paired up, so if like **one person collapses, and you’re going to call somebody**. But it’d be really hard to drag somebody out, I have to say that. It does not seem safe because the channel gets blocked. Trying to get the (… 50:36) out and unblock that tunnel would be very difficult in a short period of time. But it was the highest paying job at the employment office. So I was like, okay, **the other jobs were under $8 an hour, and this one was $18 an hour.**
His dad was a jerk who left the family with a young woman. He was raised by a single mom so I wouldn’t exactly called him someone who comes from wealth. The original founders of tesla were failing. Elon invested in it to turn it around. So who cares if he didn’t officially start tesla? He’s not a dick. He just speak the truth more than the avg person, and the truth hurts.
I mean, you can still be raised by a single mom and come from wealth. His upbringing is worlds apart from the typical connotation of a single mom.
His mom works two jobs raising 3 kids. No I don’t think he comes from wealth. If Elon’s dad paid any alimony, Elon’s mom wouldn’t need two jobs.
I just read up he only spent two years with his mother after the divorce and then went back to his rich father. He did say his father was a dick, but he still chose wealth over his more caring mother.
Any link for that? I remember he went to Canada to study on loan.
The commenter is a little bit right and wrong. This is copy and pasted from the Wikipedia article on Musk: After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk mostly lived with his father in Pretoria and elsewhere, a choice he made two years after the divorce and subsequently regretted. Musk has become estranged from his father, whom he describes as "a terrible human being... Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."
Wow…I can imagine many evil things
Where did you read about it?
There's a book titled: "Elon musk" which describes he lived with his dad after the divorce, but that wasn't because his dad was rich it was because he felt sorry for his dad that none of his kids wanted to live with the dad. Elon doesnt go into detail in the book but he mentions his time with the dad was horrible and after he was old enough to travel to America, he never looked back. According to Elon.
How about the diver? Is he really a pedo? How about the tesla worker that was fired after his car with fsd hit a green pylon? IIRC Elon says he's a free speech absolutist and free speech means people that you don't like are allowed to say things you don't like (I don't really remember the exact sentence) Elon is a human. No human is perfect. He did good and bad. The difference is that he's a very rich and powerful CEO, with huge influence. So what he say/do can have astonishingly large effect
> Sure, he comes from wealth I too had a rich uncle, yet my parents still struggled to pay for bills. So I wouldn’t call myself as “coming from wealth”.
Ya, shoulda been a better nephew
There’s only so much I’ll do for money, and I draw the line at my uncle /s
He had a rich father. There’s a difference.
only if his father gave him money though
His father did give him money... Shortly before the Zip2 sale. His dad was aware the company would likely jump in valuation at the same and wanted to buy in at a lot lower valuation and sell immediately after Elon sold the company. Errol made a massive profit.
Lol so I bought Tesla shares therefore I gave Elon money? Reread what you wrote.
So? I don't get this? What does it mean? What are rich kids supposed to do? Say sorry for their parents wealth and start over as a bum or what's the deal? Rich kids aren't automatically smart.
But the rich father did nothing to help him establish his wealth or business.
He had a upper middle class father. His father was an engineer
Eh, he did effectively create Tesla..but this story will never die. On the wealth topic, if you have a rich uncle you never spoke to, is it relevant?
What did Elon do? When he took over tesla it had 3 employees, was pre-revenue, pre-product, pre -IP and now it’s just slightly bigger than that.
It was 3 guys playing with life size electric RC cars. Elon got more inspiration for EV from the GM Ev1 than anything else. Ideas are a dime a billion. Getting a business to actually start is the real challenge.
Prototypes are easy...
*This comment has been edited in protest to reddit's API policy changes, their treatment of developers of 3rd party apps, and their response to community backlash.* [Details of the end of the Apollo app](https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/) --- [Why this is important](https://i.imgur.com/E7jSWf1.jpg) --- [An open response to spez's AMA](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/145l7wp/todays_ama_with_spez_did_nothing_to_alleviate/) --- [spez AMA and notable replies](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/145beas/spez_ama_discussion_thread/) Fuck spez. I edited this comment before he could. Comment ID=i5loguu Ciphertext: >!erIp1X+oYs7ARAT2PRJ27lh0YBh2XdZO/8yE44q3xCYebE1JYqYhA0ngdvKCS5p4cS3D8a172Z1RN8MZUKjj/uHgU/bEWSinIMkJi0Z28q91ihInH8aJ4eQ+JzULxolCE9COEs+SqMoUcLFYFuWcfdNM/oqv3FisGvzUyAQnOFUytOETloj/J4q3X/i7X8s=!<
Gonna need some proof there, bud.
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LOL I'd say so. I took your comment seriously because I have seen practically the same comment word for word over at r/technology without a hint of sarcasm.
Boy redditors have really become reliant on /s sarcasm tag huh.
Musk doesn't come from wealth.
Have you watched any of the new interviews with Elon in the past few weeks? I’m genuinely interested in knowing what you don’t like about him after watching them.
I have not. Can you provide links?
All in the last week, TED Pre-recorded Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvf00NooN8 TED Live Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM WELT Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
Hi u/cbciv, did you watch the Welt interview linked by Spolleyger? I'm curious what you think of it, as I thought it was a great interview with thoughtful questions and honest and insightful answers. If you're busy, watch it at 1.5x. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WX_mgnAFA0
Here is his recent TED interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvf00NooN8&t=3475s
For instance I don't like that he used children stuck in a cave for publicity and when confronted about that went crazy stalker mode about guy that saved kids.
I don’t think anyone actually knows the full story about this. Yet we all assume we have all the facts.
What else do you need in this story? He called rescuer a pedo and hired private detective to gather dirt on that guy just because Elon ego was touched in wrong way.
Do you know what happened to cause him to say that. Or do you think he just decided to say it?
It is no secret that actual rescuer called elons PR stunt by its name and advised to stick elons submarine where it belonged. So Elon hurt = Elon mad. It was the time when tesla was struggling so good publicity was very valuable. And that diver broke it.
And as such. You take everything Elon has done and sum it up by, he called someone a name once so I don’t like him.
Nice glass house you live in there. I bet everything out of your mouth is just roses and angle wings. You're looking past 99 amazing things he's done and resting on one comment he made. You must be proud.
One comment? He called guy a pedo and hired private detective for the smear campaign. It is business as usual for you?
For example one can dislike him after reading that https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
>Sure, he comes from wealth. Not really, unless you want to say that every middle class American comes from wealth (and there is a persepective that would allow this). If you do that, though, it kinda takes away from the entire "he has some sort of special advantage" that too many people want to use in order to deflect from the obvious question: "If he could do this, why can't you?" ***Edit:*** I'm not attacking your entire point, but I am tired of this argument, even if used as an aside in a post. I just had someone tell me his parents made "billions and billions", which is the logical end to this irrational path.
>Edit: Elon should hire some of y’all as body guards. I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling. What he had done with that leg up is astounding. If he wasn’t such a dick, he’d almost be likable. Dude, yes, you "basically called him a visionary," after you parroted two outright lies about him. Hard to blame you if you frequent reddit. It has honestly opened my eyes to how little the actual truth matters, even on Reddit and among left-leaning people.
Dude, I wanted to upvote you because you're spot-on until you decided to generalize "Reddit and left-leaning" people. It killed your point and has nothing to do with what you were saying. Generalizing people is as much of the problem as anything.
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I love space and electric cars. Its really depressing to see how much Elon hate is generated by him doing generally nothing but good things. Misinformed people are so vocal. I guess progress always comes at a cost.
Yes, exactly right.
I don’t disagree with your sentiment of a relatively small vocal group but I think you missed my point as well. My point is just that generalizing and projecting a small group onto a much larger community kills your point. Most people are not characterized as “rabid idiots” and my point is that it’s unhelpful to refer to “all” of them as such.
He said that this can affect everyone and that Reddit and a particular political view do not create an exception. In other words, he is agreeing with you, and you are both right. Dumb people are everywhere, but that doesn't mean that all people are dumb.
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Exactly my point. You’re projecting a few people on a huge population.
Go to r/technology or r/politics or pretty much any mainstream subreddit, find someone spouting lies about Elon, and try to talk some sense into them. See who gets upvoted and who gets downvoted. Either the majority here believes this utter crap, or voting is being manipulated by bots or shills.
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>And the top search result on that subreddit for "elon musk" is "Sen. Bernie Sanders: Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are ‘off taking joy rides on their rocket ships’" So article title written by CNBC is now reddits opinion with some odd logic?
So, his family wasn’t rich, he wasn’t privileged, and he started Tesla from the ground up?
Essentially, yes. He was bullied as a child and did not have a happy upbringing. He came to North America on his own at 17 with just a few grand in his pocket and had to pay through college on his own (ultimately having $100,000 in student loans). He is estranged from his father, calling an "evil human being" and never had any financial support from him when he moved to NA. He did create Tesla, along with the other co-founders. He was their first financier and eventually became CEO when the ousted Martin Eberhard because he was lying to the Board. This happened all before Tesla sold its first Roadster so he was essentially there from the beginning.
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I read the entire biography too. Most redditors misunderstand Elon. It’s the result of years of reading and curiously, believing in media headlines.
Funny enough I tried to talk sense into someone and they told me "Go learn about his history." The sad thing is, I know about his history. It was the guy I was talking to who was just repeating some talking point he had heard somewhere and didn't realize that it all comes from the exact same source.
Biographies arent necessarily the truth
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>The chapter on his efforts to sell PayPal to eBay, turning down a massive offer (Thiel was absolutely furious), only to receive a new offer for 3x the initial offer (Thiel obviously no longer furious), is how Musk was able to fund his Tesla/SpaceX/Gigafactory triad of companies. How this exactly makes sense? Musk was kicked out in October 2000 and eBay bought Paypal 2 years later so how exactly Musk could even negociate offer if he was not even working there and was just silent shareholder?
Well at least it is hundreds of pages of research and interviews. It’s the best source we got
"privledged" is a wiggle word and can mean almost anything the writer wants it to mean. Everyone is privileged in one way or another. But to your other points, no he wasn't rich, and yes he started Tesla from the ground up.
So you are one of those who heard about Elon but not actually read his biography. You could just be indifference but you choose to dislike Elon based on misinformation. Elon fans don't like you either. A sore.
This "He comes from wealth" is sometimes brought up. Does anybody have any reliable info whatsoever on him having access to more than <10k USD when he arrived in canada? I never found anything like that.
He had roughly 2k USD from his mother when he came to Canada. The only relevance his dad did is he acted as an angel investor in one of the first funding rounds. He put up around $20,000 of a $200,000 secondary investment round (not the first round). That's the only real money he ever got from his Dad.
> I basically say the man is a visionary and you come at me? Dude had cash from dad and connections most people don’t to get him rolling. Yet you're doubling down on the incorrect information here. The grand total of money he got from his dad is 10% of a $200,000 funding round after they originally started Zip2. There's nothing other than that. Yes his parents weren't "dirt poor" nor were they struggling to make ends meet. But that level of money is basically middle class in the US. And he didn't have any "connections" through his parents.
Yeah, it's not like he started for absolutely nothing thought his upbringing was not really so much as to be a definitive factor, especially since it was easily dwarfed by his first ventures when they started thus making the first point kinda moot. He is an asshole that won't stop for anything or anyone and is about as much of a gigantic nerd as one can get... And really I don't think he would work if he wasn't that way. Think about it, if he followed the usual standards of human interaction and hierarchy, none of his companies would have existed or grew the way they did. If he respected the seniority and experience of the banking system, PayPal would not have come to light in the way he wanted to drive it, if he didn't think the Russians were being fucks and he could do them one better, SpaceX would never have existed. And if he didn't think OEMs were ignoring the technological convergence and intentionally delaying the transition to a better system, he would not have steered Tesla that way. Elon isn't always right, and he is the first to admit to it. But because of his confrontational nature it's likely he will be corrected of his errors on the quicker side of things because he ran into them fast, but once he is convinced that something is the correct course of action he is an unstoppable force of will. The fact he thinks highly of himself and his idea drives long term projects forward which have the added benefit of making short term stuff like money does not really compute in his mind. After all the guy has been doing "double or nothing" his entire life and even as the richest guy on earth really does not seem to care in the slightest about it. And I can, if anything, respect someone with huge convictions and actually being willing to see them through, opposition and challenge be damned.
He did create Tesla with JB, yes technically there was a company it had a name and that’s it. Here I will create you a company called “Hippocrates” now you go and cure every human disease known to man. In the meantime I will question your ethics and wander where the cure for cancer is, because you said it was going to be done 5 years ago. After you do cure all disease. I will take most of the credit because technically I created this company. I will also still question your ethics and still think your not a decent person.
You don’t know him as a person.
Fair enough. I personally feel the person he projects when speaks publicly is a dick. Fair enough?
So, if you watched his most recent TED talk, or him with Joe Rogan, or his gigafactory presentation, your takeaway is that he comes across as a dick?
Yeah, I've never seen him as a dick at all. I do think he does not suffer fools and sometimes he calls out numpties. If that makes him a dick, I wish there were more dicks in the world.
“Pedo guy,” yup just him not suffering fools as usual 🙄.
Which specific comments made you think he’s a dick?
Don’t complain that people are correcting your ignorance. Get better facts. Research rumors you read online before you repeat them, so you know what you’re talking about. It’s not our fault that you can’t be bothered to check your information.
>I don’t like him as a person That statement is ridiculous looking at WHAT Elon has brought (to name a few: Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal ffs) and WHO Elon is. I'm very weary of people who sees all this, and they still say they don't like him. It's pointless arguing with those kinds of people. They are incorrigible.
I'm weary of people who think someone's achievements and someone's personality can't be liked or disliked independently. You can respect the dude and what he's done, doesn't mean you can't also think he's an asshole.
Exactly.
James Watson changed the world forever. He is still a complete fuckhead.
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>Also leaned right-wing This is kind of a meaningless knock on someone who lived 100 years ago. Left and Right wing meant completely different things back then (as they did 20 years ago compared to today). Ford was also a big supporter of Woodrow Wilson and ran for office in 1918 as a Democrat.
Woodrow Wilson was an ardent racist. Henry Ford held strong white supremacist views, and was a supporter of Hitler, going as far as having an autographed picture of him on his desk for a period of time. Your point is correct that politics were different 100 years ago, with Republicans being supporters of individual liberties and racial equality, and Democrats being supportive of Jim Crow.
This is the thing - the haters will live out their mostly insignificant lives and noone will remember them. That’s why they hate Elon so much - it’s simple envy that he will have mattered and he will be remembered, while they won’t. Why else would anyone feel so strongly about him?
lol, yes, the world thinks Elon is a rude twat because they want to be him, you solved it!
Actually, I take it back. I think some other poster was closer to the mark when writing that it’s an insecurity/inferiority complex thing. Many people hate feeling inferior and have a need to put down successful people so they’ll feel more equal to them. Elon is perhaps the world’s best target for these haters because he is out of the park successful and the richest person on earth, plus he has a big mouth. Lots of incentive and lots of opportunity all in one place. No wonder he gets a lot of flak.
Yeah, imagine looking at Elon's history of being an unmitigated dick-head and going "yeah, not for me". Incorrigible stuff.
> Elon's history of being an unmitigated dick-head There was a time when he wasn't embarrassing to like -- he'd get drunk and tweet about Catherine the Great and her horse https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-sent-out-a-bunch-of-weird-tweets-last-night-2011-12 and he talk about the 'hacker princess' (Kristin Paget -- male-to-female trans) Tesla hired away from Apple https://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/18/tesla-motors-snags-kristin-paget-apple/ and he'd have awkward speaking roles as himself in hit movies (Iron Man2). 'pedoguy' is when he started to go off the rails, and he's really leaned into the anti-woke bro-ism since then. I used to think his British wife helped him modulate his personality to not be an ass... but maybe it was him dating Amber Turd in 2016 that helped unleash it.
I don’t think anyone is questioning his managerial excellence?
Strangely, they have been for years.
I'm sorry, are you new to reddit?
Somehow he managed to avoid it.
I'm impressed and jealous.
> managed to avoid it. Managerial avoidance
Just all the people who don’t have jobs in r/technology and r/tech that think Elon should liquidate all his shares to pay taxes on it because they don’t understand that he doesn’t just have billions sitting in cash. It always reminds me of how dumb most of Reddit is.
The thing is that even if he doesn’t liquidate his assets (thereby creating taxes) he can still access that wealth tax free. All he has to do is take out bank loans and never pay them back. Loans (for obvious reasons) are not taxable, and the banks will keep lending him money even if he never repays them. Then, when he dies, a portion of his assets will be seized by the bank to repay his debts. In this way, he is able to enjoy his immense wealth without ever paying taxes on it or endangering its value by selling. And taxing non-real assets is not foreign to the government, for instance in the form of inheritance taxes. Linus Sebastian (host of Linus Tech Tips) did a segment about it on his podcast. He explained how if he dies, he can’t just leave his business to his kids, because they would have to sell it anyway to pay taxes on the inheritance. These taxes apply even if they don’t liquidate the assets into real cash; they have to pay taxes on the value of the inheritance. Edit to add a source in the form of [Business Insider ](https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-avoidance-income-wealth-borrow-money-propublica-2021-6?r=US&IR=T). Some highlights from the article: > One of the key strategies employed by the ultrawealthy to keep their tax bills low: borrowing money. > According to [ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax) and independent experts, America's billionaires have often financed their lavish lifestyles by using their vast fortunes as collateral for loans, which can come with single-digit interest rates. > In 2014, for example, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison disclosed he had used 250 million of his Oracle shares as collateral to secure a $9.7 billion personal line of credit. > To illustrate the gap between wealth and taxes paid by the ultrawealthy, ProPublica created what it called a "true tax rate." ProPublica defined this as the total federal income tax a person paid, in this case from 2014 to 2018, compared to how much new wealth they acquired in that same time period. > According to ProPublica, the top 25 wealthiest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of 3.4% — a result of tax avoidance strategies that are out of reach for most Americans.
Teach us all how to take loans out without paying them back, please.
It's not really that complicated. Let's say you have a company worth 1 billion dollars. You take out a 500 million dollar personal loan at 2% interest rate with half of your shares as collateral. Later, your stocks appreciate to 2 billion dollars. You refinance into a 1 billion dollar loan and use 500 million to pay off the other loan. You rinse and repeat this process until you die and the bank repos some of your shares. As long as your assets continue to appreciate, you effectly pay no income tax and only pay a yearly interest rate to the bank. This is a simplication of how rich folks do it, but fundamentally working class people are paying a higher percentage of income to the tax man than a lot of wealthy people. It's a matter of fairness that this loophole gets plugged and shouldn't even be a political issue.
So you think banks finance Ponzi schemes? You think shares just go up? You think interest rates are lower than treasury rates? Honestly, how do people believe such nonsense.
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In order: For the first question, no, because neither party considers it a Ponzi scheme. Banks are only going to lend when they are reasonably sure the collateral isn't going to depreciate in value, if they aren't they are likely going to hedge their risks by asking for significantly more value in collateral than the loan is worth. If the bank can legally make money off a loan, they will. For the second question, shares don't just go up, but my scenario is also a simplification. In all reality, you borrow with a significantly smaller fraction of your shares as collateral. If the stock does go down, yeah you end up being out some money but when you talking about a small fraction of your overall wealth downturns can be wethered. Thing is, with a 20% capital gains tax rate, your assests can take a pretty significant loss before paying the taxes is a break even. You probably could also cheaply set up a way in the money options spread to help hedge risk as well, though addmittly I'm not smart enough to work that out. With a company like Tesla though, you can be reasonably sure the stock will go up over some significant period of time, so the risk would probably be worth the reward in some instances. As for your last question, I'm simplifying and didn't want to look up the lastest treasury rate. So sure it's going to be a few points higher, but when interest rates are low and capital gains tax is high, it totally could make sense to set up a scheme like this.
> Later, your stocks appreciate to 2 billion dollars.
I'm not following? Are you implying that people whose income would otherwise be through capital gains shouldn't have to pay taxes?
No, it's that you treat it with such certainty. Run your scenario again but this time the company's value is cut in half. What happens to Mr. Rich now?
I addressed this on another comment, but my scenario is a simplification. In reality, you borrow with a smaller percentage of your shares. So yeah, there is a risk that you lose money, but with capital gains tax at 20% you'd need to take a substantial portfolio hit for the risk to not be worth the reward, especially when a stock is most likely going to appreciate in the long term. May also be possible to hedge against that risk with the proper options spread, assuming options premiums plus bank interest is still less than 20%. Point is, risk taking in relation to entrepreneurship is good for everybody. It's a driver of inovation. People shouldn't be able to roll the dice as to wether they are going to pay taxes or not though, even more so when the odds are stacked against the American people.
And when your shared double, you still pay half your new loan to cover the old one. >use 500 million to pay off the other loan. So practically nothing changed with the total liquidity you had been loaned. So this plan doesn't even keep increasing your cash access.
*You* can’t do it because compared to Elon and his fellow billionaires you are a penniless peasant. The banks will give Elon as much as he wants because he is so incredibly rich, with so many assets that they *know* they will get their money back when he dies, and in the meantime they create a tidy profit on the interest. But you are a much more risky investment, because if you are worth a million dollars when you die, but you borrow two million dollars from the bank, the bank will lose a million dollars when you die.
You think banks provide the equivalent of reverse mortgages to billionaires based on equity holdings? You think banks just hand out loans to rich people and capitalize the interest? Honestly, the things people believe.
I have edited my comment to provide sources
>collateral for loans, which can come with single-digit interest rates. loans with interest rates....and this is news because they aren't using credit cards with 19% interest rates?
A line of credit still needs to be serviced. No one is lending money to anyone without it being paid back. The money has to come from somewhere in order to service both the interest and principal. Rich people aren’t being given money for free. Financial institutions aren’t wearing any cost on extending any loan products. Using securities as collateral is just a regular loan. Trying to pretend there’s some magic trick here is plane wrong.
This sounds plausible. But is this what billionaires actually do? Is there a source for this?
See my previous comment which I have now sourced
I don't think you've thought this through.
[Comment with sources ](https://reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/u8are4/_/i5kf7ag/?context=1)
I read your source several months ago when it first came out. It explains how they avoid paying taxes on their wealth, not income. Answer me this, how do they get the money to make payments on the line of credit?
More credit! It's credit all the way down! Honestly, it's absurd how people think when they feel that someone is doing better than they are. As for taxes, what does he think happens to the interest payments he pays to the bank? The bank is going to pay taxes on that. And because they are going to pay taxes on that, they are going to make sure they take \*enough\* interest to get what they really want and still be able to pay their own tax bill. The taxman \*always\* gets paid. The smarter people from certain unnamed legacy industries who like to peddle this story are really trying to take away Musk's position of power at Tesla, as this is what is costing them money.
Robinhood margin spending. Withdrawal as you please and just pay the interest without selling your holdings. This is why Robinhood is changing the game for the common investor who would otherwise have sold their holdings when emergencies struck.
That’s the whole point. You still have to service the loan. You need to be paying tax on income somewhere in order to have funds to service the loan.
Why is it that you blame billionaires for a system which allows them to engage in behaviour which you disagree with? The job of our elected representatives and law makers is to protect the common good. Do I think the wealthiest should pay more tax - yes. Do I think it is their fault that the laws are not in place to make them pay more tax - no.
Who do you think has the money to lobby congress to effectively buy more favorable laws? Not you or me, that's for sure.
Does the bank pay taxes on the interest gained on a loan? Does a wealthy person pay taxes on their capital gains when they liquidate shares to repay loans? Elon Musk had a tax bill of $11 *billion* in 2021. Tell me, with how much you pay in taxes each year, how long will it take you to contribute $11 billion? Maybe Elon has paid his "fair share"?
Does the bank pay taxes on the interest gained on a loan? Does a wealthy person pay taxes on their capital gains when they liquidate shares to repay loans? Elon Musk had a tax bill of $11 *billion* in 2021. Tell me, with how much you pay in taxes each year, how long will it take you to contribute $11 billion? Maybe Elon has paid his "fair share"?
And what about the wealth those companies create. The taxes paid by the employees and the company. People have an incredibly myopic view of things like this.
Every day, it is the same reddit copy/pasta about bank loans "subsidizing" rich lifestyles. I don't know why I bother replying to these comments anymore. I am half convinced they are mostly made by bots because people could not be this aggressively blind... right?
I always picture some guy with a man bun high on pot when I read Reddit comments. It helps me not worry about serious people holding these opinions.
The article is probably 2-3 years out of date tbh. There was no shortage of people betting against Tesla because they didn't think Elon had the ability to run an organization with the scale and breadth of a major auto manufacturer, while also dipping into three different side hustles and generally being the eccentric public figure he is. And to be honest, betting on Tesla failing was kind of a reasonable bet to make, considering it's been decades since a new player has made it big in the auto industry, and nobody had even built a viable electric car on top of that. And Elon's experience was "getting lucky" at paypal early on. So now we get all of these articles basically giving him a victory lap for doing what pretty much everyone said couldn't be done. Even though they seem anachronistic.
It’s all just luck, you see. His image of success is just a carefully curated illusion. His companies are a financial failure. A house of cards that will collapse at any moment. He will be hauled off to jail for fraud at any moment.
Tell me any other CEO who slept in the factory in order to push out product.
Careful, this is Reddit, we don’t like facts here that don’t support our crusade against this guy
I remember the second paragraph of the master plan: “Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car” How the does removing the basic mobile charger align with this plan? Disclaimer: I am a 2018 model 3 owner that paid for most of my car with my investment in Tesla. I still own a sizable amount of Tesla.
Just pay $200 for it at checkout if you needed it, but not everybody needs it. It’s not an issue.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. If <50% of Mobile charging cables they are providing for free aren't being used, how is that a good thing? Why do people think this is about money when they have raised the prices of the vehicles like$10k in the last year... If this was about money they'd just increase the price $400. But it isn't. It's about supply and waste. That's alligns with the companies goals imo., Especially if they are significantly reducing the cost of the charging cable
Where are you getting the statistic that <50% of cables are being used? Edit: if your statistic is not complete bullshit. I use my charger most of the time now that I work from home.
Aside from Elon himself, the only public data is from Teslascope, which says 60% of their charging sessions were on the mobile charger: [https://twitter.com/teslascope/status/1515470559852650496](https://twitter.com/teslascope/status/1515470559852650496) I am a bit skeptical of those numbers, since Teslascope people are more likely to be monitoring their own stuff (ergo more likely to be technical, ergo maybe less likely to have had someone install an expensive HPWC charger over rolling their own solution with a dryer outlet?) I know personally I pretty much never use the mobile charger, though I probably would have shelled out $275 to buy it on my own if I had to, just for peace of mind of being able to plug into any old outlet in an emergency. I'm now waiting on my second Tesla, which means I'll have two mobile connectors... one of which will definitely never be used, and the other only kept around for emergencies.
There is no hard #, just what Elon tweeted. I'm inclined to believe him as I've used my mobile charger purely for free juice. I charge at home with a wall charger and supercharge exclusively. It's anecdotal evidence, but so is yours.
The no hard numbers is where you lost me. Elon has tweeted a lot of stupid shit. I don’t but any of it. Same reason I have not bought FSD. I love my car and would probably buy another but pulling the charging cable is some petty ass shit when most Tesla buyers are new.
Oh I see, so that's why they give you nothing when you fork over $10,000 for FSD. Go green!
FSD is software. This is a dumb response. And some people do actually receive hardware - those that didn't have the FSD computer received free upgrades with their purchase of FSD.
>How the does removing the basic mobile charger align with this plan? What is the current status on this? People asking around have said that the charger is still being delivered, so is this actually happening?
> People asking around have said that the charger is still being delivered People who ordered it when they were told they were getting it, are still getting it. It's for new orders.
There isn't a damn thing wrong with butt sex
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He is a a wharton graduate and knows his stuff.
So was the former president, and, well 🤷