Musk lead teams at the only company who can land commercial rockets and the first company to profit from making electric cars. To say he is a wealthy idiot says more about you than it does about Musk.
So Musk hired the right people. I mean he made some brilliant decisions over the years. Does that mean that everything he does is a guaranteed success? There are plenty examples of ultra successful people in history who were blinded by their own success and became a little bit unhinged over time..
At this point Musk is behaving just like a twelve year old’s idea of a mega billionaire. Hyperloop, flamethrowers, self driving cars now Twitter... It’s great that he’s having fun I don’t think there is much to it than that.
"Lenders that also include Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group committed to provide $13 billion of debt financing for the deal. Their losses would amount to $500 million or more if the debt were to be sold now, according to Bloomberg calculations."
There is Elon's private wealth, mostly in tesla stock from what I understand. The cash and assets from the companies at which he is (majority) owner, CEO or a combination thereof are not his, they belong to his companies, which are separate legal entities.
Anything Trump did was an unpopular decision. If this starts to move forward under the current administration people would be more receptive to it purely based on the fact that it's the other side now.
I'm about as libby a lib as ever lib'd and Trump's action on China was maybe the single thing I agreed with him on. Neoliberal free-trade-over-all-other-concerns policies are actually pretty unpopular among voters in both parties, but are very popular with the donor and policy-wonk class, with the result that both parties typically favor it and have since the 80s, despite their voters mostly disliking it. One of the notable things about Trump's candidacy and presidency was his breaking from this (unpopular) long-standing norm, which fit with the rest of his messaging in that he mostly ignored whatever was ordinary or standard and instead picked the kinds of positions you'd hear talking to a Republican trucker in a diner ("They ought to just build a wall" is straight out of those kinds of conversations, for instance).
Oh, wait, one other thing I agreed with him on: leaving Afghanistan ASAP. The whiney push-back he got on that and the way the military managed to sand-bag the effort until well into Biden's term and still fuck it up, was straight-up embarrassing. Heads should have rolled.
Imagine being a top performer doing great work for a company whose managers insist on wasting your time putting you into needless meetings getting you to explain how you're doing everything all through badly communicated text with typos and misspellings.
I own a Tesla and have had no problems with customer service.
What I do have a problem with is negotiating a price for a vehicle from a slimy dealership agent who have a litany of techniques to increase their profit for no good reason. On the Tesla website the price you pay is the price that everyone pays.
Maybe I am wrong about this, but the price you pay at a dealership is the spot price for a car now and here. The price you pay on the Tesla website is for a car some time in the future, some times an indefinitely far off time in the future. I suspect the spot price for a Tesla now and here is also fluctuating, opaque, and subject to negotiation.
> The price you pay on the Tesla website is for a car some time in the future, some times an indefinitely far off time in the future.
FWIW, the delivery estimates displayed on the Tesla web site for cars currently in production are pretty accurate. Also, if you order a Performance/Plaid model, you get to the front of the queue. ;-)
> I suspect the spot price for a Tesla now and here is also fluctuating, opaque, and subject to negotiation.
In that case, you're buying a used one from a dealer, so that would be true.
The annoying thing with dealers though is that when it comes to Tesla, they often have no clue what they're actually selling, or they're trying to rip off naive customers. I've seen them try to sell base Model 3's for $55K. For just a couple thousand more, you could get a brand new Model 3 Performance delivered in 2-4 weeks.
Sort of, at least last summer if you wanted a car here and now there was a premium attached but you could order one for msrp and indefinitely far in the future is pretty accurate as to when it would arrive.
I agree their pricing model is good, but that has nothing to do with the value proposition of dealerships - just their approach to pricing. Ford could mandate flat pricing overnight to all their dealers too. It's just never been in corporate's interest, until now. For example a MacBook costs the same at BestBuy as it does at an Apple store as it does at apple.com
I'm hardly a Musk fanboy, in fact I have strong negative opinions about the, er, gentleman, but this push towards flat pricing and allowing sales directly to individuals is imo an unequivocal good. If the price everyone pays is the same online and at the dealerships then dealerships can prove their value to the customer - or not.
Ford could do this, but cars are expensive assets that are hard to move around and so subject to changes in local demand, macroeconomic circumstances, etc. Ford would not be able to successfully push flat pricing onto its dealers, because the dealers discover the price that clears their local market.
Why doesn't this happen in any other industry? You pay the same amount for an Apple laptop from every shop that sells it. Why doesn't BestBuy 'discover the price that clears their local market'?
Ford tried with the F150 Lightning and the top end Mustangs, but the dealers all decided they like money more, so you're not getting either of those for anywhere near MSRP. Not for lack of trying by Ford though:
I mean there's ways. They could just not sell to dealers who are found to be selling over MSRP. It won't be easy, but having an online direct channel makes it a lot easier. Depends how committed you really are, I guess.
Price functions to clear the market. If the MSRP is too low, then you are going to find waiting lists. It is not like dealers like selling at a price that forces them to carry more inventory than they need to operate.
Tesla (and fixed-price car sellers like CarMax) are profiting handsomely squarely off of your inability, unwillingness or fear of negotiating. They just bake the full profit right into the up-front price and wait for people like yourself, happy to pay full price. Your loss.
I would buy bathroom fixtures from an installer, and certainly negotiate the number of labor hours, and a discount off retail price of the fixtures themselves.
People negotiate the price of a $40 ride to the airport with taxi drivers every day. I negotiated the price of a pair of prescription glasses just yesterday, and they cost less than $300.
Funnily enough, my father does (at the local equivalent). Surprisingly, it almost always works.
Even in chain stores for hardware/DIY or white goods (fridges, washing machines, etc) there is almost always leeway for haggling to some degree on higher priced items.
He works in the automotive industry, where haggling is basically mandatory - if you don't haggle, you are going to get shafted. Its the same at builders merchants and lumber suppliers.
> They just bake the full profit right into the up-front price and wait for people like yourself, happy to pay full price. Your loss.
As opposed to the haggling model where they expect to sell a car for $55K but put a $60K tag on it knowing people will haggle it down to $55K and think they got a good deal.
It's an absolutely shitty model, and it's saddening that you're falling for it.
Dealerships do not set the sticker price. Only manufacturers do. At Tesla, your only option is to pay full sticker. At dealerships, you can certainly do the same, but you can also negotiate a better deal.
Manufacturers (other than Tesla) know people aren't going to pay MSRP.
"Negotiating a better deal" is just bullshit. Honda will throw a $24K MSRP on a Honda Civic knowing people will probably actually pay $22K or whatever.
The problem here is that you think that if Tesla participated in negotiations, then you could get a $63K Model 3 Performance for $58K by negotiating. That is false. What would actually happen is that they would up the sticker price to $68K so you could feel like you got a deal when you drive away after paying $63K.
>But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.
Yeah, all fine and good when you have informed consent. I took my life in my own hands by not getting vaccinated for covid after I looked at the mortality age graph, and knew I was fit and healthy and didn't need to worry.
Society at large, however, castigated me, threw me in the same box as a conspiracy theorist, denied me my rights. People acted goddamn stupidly about this subject. I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
> I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
Me neither. They attempted an unconstitutional mandate even after promising they wouldn't do it during the election.
I'll never forgive that or forget the social cruelty, scapegoating and illegal breach of limited governance.
I decided not to get the vaccine based on the data. Took me 2.5 years to finally get covid. It was 4 days of fever and feeling lame. I now have immunity based on the entire virus rather than a subunit of a protein that doesn't even exist anymore.
I also (rightly) assumed masks are not effective just observing the spread being very clearly seasonal. And that just being in open air would be far better than any mask could do. Completely disrupting normal life would cause far greater health consequences for general healthy people than covid itself. We ended up not saving the vulnerable and inflicting very real, unnecessary harm on the healthy - the worst of both worlds.
Are you still, three years after the initial outbreak, continuing this nonsense? None of your talking points make sense and have been repeatedly shattered into the brittle sophistry that they are.
The risk of myocarditis is an existential risk to my being, and one that only a fool would take.
Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.
When you have a several month wait list for your product, legions of devoted potential customers, if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
> if you're head and shoulders above any of your competitors, you're able to get away with things like this.
The hubris of Tesla is still believing this to be the case. I personally cancelled my cybertruck order from lack of interest. better competition exists in 2022 that wasn’t the case years ago.
Tesla's are outselling every other manufacturer (ICE or otherwise) in many countries for the last quarter and they are still severely supply constrained; your personal antidotal data point doesn't serve much purpose in the broader context.
But the best selling EV manufacturer in Norway is Volkswagen. Volkswagen has four EVs in Norway's top 10 sellers: VW ID.4, Skoda Enyaq, Audi Q4 e-tron, and the Audi e-tron.
The VW ID.4, Skoda Enyaq, and the Audi Q4 e-tron are different versions of the same car. Rather than selling just one model Volkswagen's approach gives you the choice of more options.
Add in ICE vehicles and it's not even close. Volkswagen sells 10 million per year globally across all of its brands (VW, SEAT, Cupra, Skoda, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, Ducati, Scania, MAN, etc.).
One of the weird things about Tesla is that, in general, supply side constraints are widely regarded as a flashing warning light that a firm can’t execute. Yet Tesla is just given an “I’m sure they’ll work it out.”
I've yet to be in a country were sales are not skewed toward local cars. Sweden lots more Volvos than anything else (and definitely Teslas), France, lots more Citroen and Peugeot than anywhere else, Australia: Holden and Ford, US: lots of cars that drive nowhere else (GM, Chevy...).
Regarding outselling most other car manufacturers: this seems to be the Tesla realitity distortion, it is likely true for electric cars but for all cars VW delivered ~5 M cars in 2021 vs Teslas 900k
Australia with its long drives if you leave a city and lack of infrastructure doesn't suit electric cars at the moment. Will change eventually, but likely lagging the rest of the world.
> Australia has no local car manufacturers and hasn't for some time. Toyota is by far the biggest car seller , followed by Mazda and Hyundai.
I know Toyota closed it's Melbourne plant in 2017 (Holden and Ford had stopped manufacturing even earlier IIRC). I would argue though that Ford and Holden (which I just read ceased operating in 2020) are still perceived as Australian car manufacturers by most. They definitely had some cars specifically for the OZ market.
"Car leases trough employers are only for German cars" - that is not true, as a German company you can lease whatever car you want for your employees. They are predominantly German cars for the obvious reasons. :)
While there is a preference for VW group in the corporate leasing market, theybare far from the only ones. Your first argument doesn't make any sense whatsoever so.
“In Q3, we began transitioning to a more even regional mix of vehicle builds each week, which led to an increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. These cars have been ordered and will be delivered to customers upon arrival at their destination” - [0]
In other words, they said all of the cars had been ordered, although many were in transition at the end of the quarter.
I mean isn’t that the same thing for traditional dealerships? They order the cars and they’re waiting to be sold. A good amount of Teslas end up rejected for whatever reason and show up on the existing inventory page. You can often find new cars in socal with delivery that week. I got my model s that way.
I'm pretty sure you can't stuff your supply chain like that.. Sunbeam got caught once doing that so I'm pretty sure it's a major no no. If it's ordered then it's ordered by someone. Not by a dealer etc? Plus Tesla have no dealers except themselves? so at most it'd be bunch of rejects?
The update that is only to v10.69, instead of v11 like Musk had suggested would roll out now? The same upgrade that's only rolling out to ~1k FSD-enabled customers (which is only 1% of FSD Beta customers)?
