Posted on 08/17/2018 9:27:52 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Elon Musk was at home in Los Angeles, struggling to maintain his composure. “This past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career,” he said. “It was excruciating.”
The year has only gotten more intense for Musk, chairman and chief executive of the electric-car maker Tesla, since he abruptly declared on Twitter last week that he hoped to convert the publicly traded company into a private one. The episode kicked off a furor in the markets and within Tesla itself, and he acknowledged Thursday that he was fraying.
At multiple points in an hourlong interview with The New York Times, he choked up, noting that he nearly missed his brother’s wedding this summer and spent his birthday holed up in Tesla’s offices as the company raced to meet elusive production targets on a crucial new model.
(Excerpt) Read more at wral.com ...
Has Elon Musk ever succeeded at anything that did not involve government subsidies?
I know he has had a rough year and we are all supposed to feel sorry for him and all ... but he is worth over $20B.
I believe that Elon has agreed to be used.
By putting “space” into his hands, it removes public access to information from inquiries through the FOIA. NASA has appeared to step aside, but in reality, NASA is one of the money funnels for channeling wealth/resources into the hands of the elite.
All of his rockets are a distracting side show at the circus.
The Tesla board is concerned about Musk’s “recreational drug use. This is the beginning of the end of Tesla. The company burns cash, has squandered huge amounts of capital in “state of the art” giga factories and assembly plants that ,uh, just don’t function well. have produced products of dubious quality and suspect demand. What is more Tesla is spending more on attorney fees defending lawsuits and SEC investigations than it pays engineers. Without the wily Musk’s ability to find new investors, hatch schemes and keep creditors at bay. the whole thing collapses.
He has two modes: insufferably smug or boo-hoo.
Musk is acting like a guy who had a sponsor up high, and then suddenly lost that sponsor. Abruptly.
Out of friends in high places, and out of unlimited government cash, he now is trying to make it work and knows he can’t, since both Spacex and Tesla were set up to never really could.
Spacex has felt like an off-the-books US space launch capability funded by deep state dollars for whatever they were going to use it for.
It explains why NASA got sidelined. NASA was science and on-books stuff mixed with military spacelift missions.
Spacex was private, and quiet.
Tesla? A sort of Solyndra. A funnel and laundromat for various monies.
Tesla doesn’t have any battery IP, or energy management IP. It’s why the entire auto industry is flying past and around them right now.
Musk is acting like a man out in the cold, and knows there are no doors back in. I’d say by November, the ooze from Tesla will spill in earnest and the stock won’t be worth a dollar.
Where have all the Muskovites gone? There usually here by now singing his praises.
Of course the most positive part of the article (which uses many unnamed sources) is placed at the very bottom:
In response to questions for this article, Tesla provided a statement that it attributed to its board, excluding Musk. “There have been many false and irresponsible rumors in the press about the discussions of the Tesla board,” the statement said. “We would like to make clear that Elon’s commitment and dedication to Tesla is obvious. Over the past 15 years, Elon’s leadership of the Tesla team has caused Tesla to grow from a small startup to having hundreds of thousands of cars on the road that customers love, employing tens of thousands of people around the world, and creating significant shareholder value in the process.”
Oh, c’mon, all the cool yuppies are. I’m seeing them quite regularly up here in the NE Dallas area (from the window of my cheap Chevy)
What is more Tesla is spending more on attorney fees defending lawsuits and SEC investigations than it pays engineers.
...
What’s your source for that?
Has Elon Musk ever succeeded at anything that did not involve government subsidies?
...
ZIP2 and Paypal, plus he paid for his education by running a nightclub on the weekends in the house he rented.
How many corporations the size of Tesla and SpaceX have received no subsidies?
My bad. Meant to write “probably spending more on attorney fees than paying their engineers”
“he choked up, noting that he nearly missed his brother’s wedding this summer”
you just gotta feel sorry for a billionaire who ALMOST missed his brother’s wedding ...
The Board of Directors seems to be more venture capitalist based rather than political.
http://ir.tesla.com/corporate-governance/board-of-directors
If they see Musk as putting themselves in a position of losing money, I bet they will simply break up the company and sell it off bit by bit...:^)
ok, i easily found information about the musk drug use assertion, but can’t find anything about lawyers vs engineer fees. on the surface, it makes some sense given what’s going on, but do you have a link about that issue?
https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+must+drug+use
For the record NASA has never built its own rockets. They have always subcontracted the work to companies. The Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon was built by the following companies:
Boeing
Douglas Aircraft
Rocketdyne
IBM (guidance computers)
And many others
Even today NASA will buy a launch on a ULA Delta or Atlas rocket.
The only difference is that SpaceX is providing the completed rocket instead of subcontracting rocket parts. But NASA has always used tax-payer dollars with private companies.
Maybe their paychecks didn’t clear this month.
I understand that, but it’s all been very public. Even the military stuff was subject to award and open bidding.
Spacex was meant to be different.
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