and it will still be...."late and over budget, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than planned....."
Elon Musk .... talking Tesla: 5 key takeaways https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-live-twitter-spaces-5-takewasy/ .
Elon Musk’s Twitter obsession isn’t the core reason for Tesla stock’s plunge https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/23/investing/elon-musk-tesla-twitter .
It’s one reason. He’s effectively alienated the core market for Tesla cars: affluent, college-educated, east and west coast liberals/moderates. Aka the EV early adopters. Lots of NY Times letters from current Tesla owners who say they are done with it due to Musk. Twitter now seems politicized. I think Musk shot himself in the foot. Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat.com mobile app
I agree. If his core buyers feel better about Climate Change by driving EVs......they most likely aren't happy about Elon politically levelling Twitter. Unfortunately......Tesla was due for an stock price adjustment and still is way above everyone else for a car maker. While I believe Tesla will continue to be successful.......Elon has a tight wire rope to walk. The breakthroughs he has made in manufacturing, batteries and space are unparalleled in history.
No, it WAS politicized -- it's far more neutral now than it was. The Lefties are just going nuts and throwing a tantrum
Tesla needs those affluent coastal buyers. The MAGA crowd may be excited about Twitter, but they aren’t going to flock to EVs.
So you don’t know about the Cyber truck? Lots of newer Elon fans in red states supported by Space X and this Twitter revamp that may be all over buying one. I hear F series fords do well in America. Maybe he needs a different audience going forward. Who knows, maybe Starlink, Tsla power/solar and cars, Twitter as the everything app containing operating software for a Satellite smart phone that would work anywhere perfectly? Add in some Neuralink humans supercharged with AI always connected to the internet and we have super humans traveling to mars 20yrs from now. Lets see.
It was a financially catastrophic move and totally unneeded distraction for Elon to buy Twitter. He bought it at a huge premium, over the already inflated price at the absolute peak of the overall market, and then he declined the opportunity to do any due diligence, making it impossible to wriggle his way out of the deal. He eventually figured out it was a stupid deal and tried to get out of it by saying there was an undisclosed "bot" issue, which fell flat logically because of the main reasons he bought it was to fix the "bot" issue, but fell flat legally because he declined due diligence and left himself literally no "outs" for the deal. It was an acquisition he couldn't afford, despite being the richest man in the world, because the vast majority of his wealth was tied up in Tesla stock, which he had to take margin loans against to make the purchase. Margin loans aren't good, and they especially aren't good when the stock you are margined against is declining hugely -- compounded by the fact that the asset he was acquiring at a high premium has never made a meaningful profit. I think he sold enough Tesla shares to cover himself - I haven't really tracked it has of late -- but this has been a disaster from every perspective financially and business-wise. I was a fan of Elon for everything he's accomplished with Tesla, Space-X, etc -- but this was a massive self-own and massive unneeded distraction.
As you can see I agreed with your post.........but it will be instructive if he can turn it all around downstream and make us look clueless........
Neuralink humans and Mars travel? I grew up in the Midwest, and your Ford F150 observation is the only part of your post that would get broad agreement. The Tesla sales data look grim between the coasts.
I'm entirely with you. I would have liked to have seen that also because I have been an Elon fan, but in addition to it being financial/business suicide (not just for him, for shareholders of Tesla, other entities that inexplicably provided financing for the deal, etc), his "mission" is impossibly stupid and naive. His "mission" for Twitter is the equivalent of removing all forum rules and all moderation from Fchat. I can't think of anything more idiotic, because if we did that, there would be a group of jerks who dominate all conversations and it would ruin all constructive discussion. You would quickly alienate all of the valid data sources on the site -- they would stop posting and you would end up with signal-to-noise ratio on Fchat of 0.0. There is no way somebody like Marcel, or many, many others would hang around in the cesspool it would quickly become, and Fchat would be all noise in short order. Only with Twitter, instead of being a few jerks on a (relatively) unimportant topic of one car brand, it is the entire world, on every single topic, with the participants heavily made up of foreign enemies whose entire goal is to sow division and misinformation, specifically to create infighting that splits the country apart (which was already happening at massive levels prior to Elon's "help"). This is not a political stance, no matter what your political view is, eliminating rules and moderation from Fchat, or from Twitter, is incomprehensibly stupid.
the tail wagging the dog ..... ANYBODY could see this coming. (well almost anybody ) You have to have rules/mods/'bumpers' to avoid a cesspool of chaos which causes advertisers ($$$) to flee. .
Eh you guys got to have a little more imagination…. If you don’t think you’ll see a AI blended neuralinked human connected to Starlink internet within 15- 20yrs and maybe much sooner than you need to study what he and others are actually doing. Mars travel, 50yrs from now with a giant space real estate industry. Built by guess who? Space X Starship and whatever else comes next from them. Moon base built by Space X/NASA, mining Helium 3 to power Fusion power plants with the marginal cost of energy falling 50% or more might be 25-30yrs maybe earlier. The cars are just toys and a means to a bigger power generation ambitions….. Tesla will look very different over time. Apple will move into cars, Musk will move into communications hardware that Apple and frankly all earth based companies like Verizon and ATT will not be able to match. T-Mobil is very smart to work with Space X and Starlink. I wonder what brand the phone device will come under? I’m pretty sure we ain’t seen nothing yet regardless of what you think of the genesis to all this. Advertisers may need twitter or whatever it becomes more than Twitter 2.0 will need domestic advertisers. Who knows?
@rmolke85 - "...15-20 years..." "...25-30 years..." That's a bit of a long time to wait for all those Tesla and twitter investors in the real world..........
Maybe some futuristic tech is upon us and it will compound like Moores Law….. This thread was started 15yrs ago, a year after the first iPhone came out. Lots changed since. 15yrs from now there will be new incredible American Technology, not just social media and advertising. Regardless of what you think of Musk and his tactics, we are watching something very historic. I wasn’t and I am not always a fan. Put $250k into appl 15 yrs ago and that would be almost $6m today. 2008 doesn’t feel too long ago.
Aside from sensors, I think the Telsa autopilot uses GPS to figure out where the car is. As it just drove into a tunnel, could it have lost contact with the GPS and mistaken the fast lane for a breakdown lane that was safe to stop in until GPS signal was restored? In any case, I think Elon Musk being erratic in public is going to do more harm to Tesla than these teething difficulties with their technology. All the best, Andrew.
I'm also a glass's half full guy. I do believe Musk will do a phone and starlink is the future. but sometimes also zippy slips on the banana peel of life. hard to say. But its pretty clear that teslas functional dominance of electric car marketplace is drawing to an end. Their sales model only works for millenials and they're going to need new product to remain fresh and grow. None of this can happen while musk is tied down elsewhere. Musks bigger dreams are funded by his Musk brand, and that is now reliant on Tesla growing and working, not tanking.
