Tesla decimates staff amid ongoing performance woe Tesla is starting the week on a low note by laying off "more than" 10 percent of its employees just days after Cybertruck production was reportedly halted to address an issue with the accelerator pedal. News of the layoffs came via an allegedly leaked internal email from CEO Elon Musk, who said the company planned to cut "more …
Musk has for many years announced a new product - usually vapourware - to cover up failing with an existing one. The semi truck masked appalling build problems with the Model S, the Cybertruck masked the non-appearance of the semi and, of course, "self-driving" is announced as regularly as Tony Blair announced votes on fox hunting, and for much the same reason. Keeps the supporters on side.
Look at how many people bought stock in Truth Social. Saw an article the other day about some guy who invested basically his entire retirement fund into it, and despite the fact that the price has been in freefall after an initial surge, he was still looking to buy more. People don't look at the stock market as a kind of gambling anymore, they seem to think it involves guaranteed returns. You have people who buy into the cult of personality for a particular CEO and can't seem to understand it when they wind up penniless.
is that it is a penny stock masquerading as a $20 stock.
This is not investment advice and I don't own any shares that are traded in NYC
But honestly,.... If you hold stock in DJT then SELL NOW. The company has filed the documents that would allow Trumpo to dump all his shares in 6 weeks and not 5 months.
As soon as he sells even one share, the price will plummet like a stone. He will walk away with 1-3 billion leaving everyone else with nothing.
He will walk away with 1-3 billion leaving everyone else with nothing.
Which was, of course, the plan all along.
As George Dubbayew once mumbled:
"[...] fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”... but that's not true anymore, now, is it? There's a new brand of fool out there that will willingly and actively be taken for ride after ride. (Hint: they tend to wear red baseball caps....)
I'm pretty well convinced that a big part of taking Truth Social public was so that the Chinese and other foreign officials could just bribe Trump directly by buying stock in this company. Just like all the foreign dignitaries and other assholes stayed at the Trump hotel in DC before he sold it. Only you can hide your purchasing of stock, you can't really hide going in/out of a building.
Of course a lot of people also don't really understand how stock works. A lot of the cult members faithful think that if they buy a share of Truth Social that money goes directly into Trump's pocket. It doesn't. He owns some millions of shares in the company, which are completely worthless until he sells them. Unless you're buying one of the shares Trump owned, you're not giving him any money. And as has been reported, he can't sell his shares for about 5.5 more months. Even then, unless you work out some kind of private deal directly with Trump, you're never going to know if you're buying one of his shares or some other random cult member true believer, or even just a random speculator. You could be giving money to the Chinese Communist Party if the share you buy is one they bought to try to bribe influence Trump.
And I always liked the SNL spoof on that Dubbya quote: "Shoe me once, shame on me. Shoe me twice... and I'm keeping that shoe!"
> Of course a lot of people also don't really understand how stock works. A lot of the cult members faithful think that if they buy a share of Truth Social that money goes directly into Trump's pocket.
You're only saying that because you and your fellow liberal deep state conspiracists want to stop us supporting Trump, nice try, but I'm going to invest my remaining $10,000 of savings just to prove you wrong.
(Disclaimer: A BIG FLASHING SIGN IN THE CENTRE OF SCREEN READING "SATIRE". But I've no doubt that this is how some of the cult members would respond to that comment).
Nah, that's more for a certain type of "I'm aware that this is a naff joke" or crap comment, or whatever.
The general "ha ha this is a joke" icon is "Joke Alert", but that couldn't be more over-direct if it tried and with the obnoxiously in-your-face "funniness" of the typeface (*), it's the visual equivalent of Colin Hunt.
Still, I felt it necessary to point out the SATIRE regardless of how obvious I might have thought it was, because Poe's Law proves otherwise, and I'd rather flag it than seriously have someone think I was a Trump supporter investing their last $10,000 in an obvious grift. :-/
(*) Jokerman, pretty much the nadir of oh-so-90s forced whimsy, the typographical counterpart to the post-modern peephole frame in Friends.
He will walk way with nothing. In 6 weeks, the stock is dead. It took another -18% today as the urge is now to flog even more worthless paper into small investors' hands before the boat sinks like a stone.
"As soon as he sells even one share, the price will plummet like a stone."
I'm not sure about that. It's already gone from $65 to $25.
That would be the institutional speculators, betting on the cultists, getting out.
They will need to be out before Trump floods the market.
But, Trump selling even 1 share - what would that signal, and to whom ? I don't see the cultists looking away from their "truther" podcasts to notice the chief culter slipping out the back.
"I'm not sure about that. It's already gone from $65 to $25."
It would be WAY over valued at even 25 cents. The entire value of the stock is based on the financial performance of Truth Social. Or lack of performance, as the case may be. I won't go into details here (you are quite welcome!), but you can look it up for yourself if you care by searching on the rather obvious "truth social financial status".
"It would be WAY over valued at even 25 cents. "
There's still a lot of time for that to happen. Yesterday's close : $22.80
"The entire value of the stock is based on the financial performance of Truth Social"
More specifically, anyone investing for *financial* reason will need to see profits. We don't disagree, there are none.
But that's not what I am questioning, what I am curious about is : "Trump selling even 1 share - what would that signal, and to whom ?"
I have to agree. Obviously the price of the stock (let's leave "value" alone, since that requires some reference class and it's really unclear which one to use) isn't based on the fundamentals; Truth Social is an expensive dog whistle, nothing more.
So the stock price appears to reflect three factors, all of which have been mentioned upthread:
1. Speculators assuming Trumpists would push the price up and they could cash out quickly, or make money shorting the stock, or make money off derivatives, etc.
2. As a vehicle for would-be influencers to curry favor with Trump — the same reason why, when he was President, foreign dignitaries generally stayed in his hotel in DC.
3. Idiot Trump fans buying it either to demonstrate loyalty or because they believe it'll be the next Meta and they just need to hold on long enough.
Group 1 are already selling or planning to sell; they anticipate Trump dumping and intend to be out first. Group 2 don't care, because they accomplish their goal simply by buying the stock, and aren't counting on being able to recoup any of that investment directly. Group 3 are delusional and have ample cognitive dissonance to excuse any move Trump makes.
> You have people who buy into the cult of personality for a particular CEO and can't seem to understand it when they wind up penniless.
In Trump's case, it's because he *is* a cult that his followers can't- and won't- "understand it". Cult members generally respond to the failure of their central belief by- perversely- doubling down on it, and rationalising it as being the fault of everything else except that.
In this case, that means people investing more after seeing seen their initial investment plummet in value in just a few weeks and blaming *that* on a deep state/liberal/whatever conspiracy against Trump
I mean, look at this; the mentality is practically that of a holy war with cult-like behaviour towards those who show any signs of doubt (i.e. an ounce of common sense). There's a comment in the article:-
> “I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”
This would only need "Trump" to be replaced with "God" to be an utterly standard representation of blind, uncritical religious faith.
So, they won't blame Trump, and they won't "understand" that he- and their gullible belief in him- is the cause of the problem when their cult's entire belief system depends upon their not understanding that.
And, in turn, the grift to fleece those rubes depends upon those at the top being fully aware of that.
Cult members generally respond to the failure of their central belief by- perversely- doubling down on it, and rationalising it as being the fault of everything else except that.
To be fair, this is one of the most pervasive cognitive traps humans fall for. Schulz discusses it at some length in Being Wrong, and it's essentially a compound of various well-documented more-specific cognitive traps, such as confabulation, confirmation bias, and post-hoc rationalization (McRaney discusses these and others in You Are Not So Smart).
To a first approximation, people will dig in their heels rather than admit they were wrong, when presented with opposing evidence.
How many of those employees could keep their jobs if one of the highest paid CEOs, who's only a part-time employee (and that's being generous) were among those to be cut from the workforce? My empathy goes out to those affected by this decision, but really the blame lies squarely with top management and investors who have inflated the stock price of Tesla well beyond anything rational.
They aren't such a bad concept if you (perhaps rightly) see the future as a barren Blade-Runner-Mad-Maxesque landscape where robots and homeless outlaws battle it out against corporate AI over the last scraps of energy and food.
Cybertruck's semi-bulletproof, stainless structure, can ride high over dead bodies and other detritus. You can collect assets and ammo in the back, take any necessary kit with you. Plus mount self-targeting armaments of your choice to keep you safe from flying objects with hostile intentions, at least until you can't find a charging station.
Clearly ideal for use on Mars, too! Why wouldn't we all want one?
It all seemed a great use case, for someone obsessed with 1980s computer games and Sci-fi. Unsurprisingly there wasn't a soul at Tesla that could stop it.
Elon might be brilliant at doing what humans have collectively failed at doing for decades, but he needs to understand the root cause of the blunders he has made to transcend. His plan to reach the next interstellar level is doomed to fail otherwise. It seems he may end up celebrating his 3000th birthday heading into an unnamed sun in another universe, just off some yet to be finished, interstellar highway whilst a Vogon Captain laughs at his MayDay messages in real-time via his employer's X-verse-Premium account.
They kind of suck off-road, though, according to the videos I've seen. Certainly they're less capable off-road than my 1992 Toyota truck, which also offers such highly-preferable features as not having a fucking touchscreen anywhere in it, and a gasoline engine which can easily and quickly be refueled, even in the wilderness (using a gas can).
Musk pitched it as a great off-roader ("go anywhere") but it's actually fairly terrible for anything more ambitious than mall-crawling. Even if you don't hate every other thing about it.
A linguistics grad student was walking across campus with his girlfriend when they came upon three descriptivists beating up a prescriptivist. The girlfriend turned to him and said, “Well, aren’t you going to do anything!?!”
The grad student replied, “Nah, I think three’s enough.”
"to kill a large number of something, or to reduce something severely:"
That's because English dictionaries (unlike the French) are descriptive, not prescriptive. So they reflect ignorant misuse of words once the misuse has become sufficiently prevalent. Unfortunately, the general tendency of such misuse is that numerous useful words with precise meanings lose that precision -- witness the common use of "impact" for any influence of anything on anything else. I got so fed up with that a while back that a spent about half an hour looking up alternatives, and found over 60 with nuanced meanings, that could replace "impact" and actually convey more information about how something actually affected something else.
Yeah, and many of us don't accept that recording of usage. Dictionaries record common, incorrect use of words, as well as definitions of course, so all the dictionary is telling us is a lot of people ignore the fact the word has a number in it. I don't think we should allow common use to define the value of a number, they should be absolute, shouldn't they?
I believe there's a disconnection between Elon's reality and that of his customers. He believes that the vocal minority that cheers him on to bring out the outlandish-looking Cybertruck represents a large part of America's middle-class. He's now finding out that this is not the case and that the Cybertruck is turning into a wrecking ball tied to his neck.
I'm not saying the Cybertruck will doom the company but it could play a substantial role in it.
If he'd just made a normal pickup truck that happened to be electric I think he would found a really good market for it, at least in the US where pickups are among the most popular vehicles. Ditch the expensive asshattery like an all stainless steel body, being "bulletproof", etc. and concentrated on what pickup truck buyers actually want (cargo space) he would have found a lot more willing buyers.
Don't need to worry about off road capabilities because most pickup truck owners NEVER take theirs off road, unless they're a big city dweller who considers gravel roads "off road" (anywhere I can drive my Audi coupe with 4.5" of ground clearance without worry is by definition not "off road") Leave that market to those who know how to do it, like Jeep, and leave the "work truck for people who work for a living" market to the big 3 - most of those people would never consider being an early adopter of a electric truck. They'll wait until they see a friend or two buy one and how it pans out after they've owned it a couple years before they'd be willing to give them a look.
The only ones buying Musk's monstrosity are people who "want to be seen". There are always a few buyers for weird looking vehicles most people laugh at, but when your whole shtick is having only a few models wasting it on a niche product like that is stupid.
Is there some rule/regulation/law that helps make pickup trucks more desirable/affordable?
Bit like in 1960s Britain where a van version of a car had reduced tax? And all that meant was they hadn't put the back windows in ( or was it lacking a passenger seat in the front....)
Wasn't there a rumor that Tesla had a more conventional design in its back-pocket in case the Cybertruck turned out to be a dud? I've seen renderings of it, but never heard anything since it became clear that Musk was intent on actually building and selling this monstrosity.
> He believes that the vocal minority that cheers him on to bring out the outlandish-looking Cybertruck represents a large part of America's middle-class.
Remember the huge amount of online hype, memes and discussion surrounding Snakes on a Plane before its release? It was pretty much taken for granted that this would translate into the film itself being a huge success at the box office and... it wasn't. (*)
That was apparently eighteen years ago(!), so you'd think people should have learned by now that cult-like online buzz doesn't necessarily translate to real-world, mass-market success.
(*) Also, checking the figures for that brought a more recent example back to my attention- "Morbius", which flopped initially and then became the subject of numerous tongue-in-cheek/piss-take memes. The makers thought that might translate to more success if they reissued it, which they did... whereupon it flopped even harder.
I guess they can't tell the difference between online hype due to people making fun of something and online hype about something people really want to see. Witness Barbie, and the "Barbenheimer" hype. People were eagerly awaiting Barbie, but the Oppenheimer thing was late and from left field. That probably helped Oppenheimer's box office take as it isn't necessarily the sort of movie that would be really popular in the mass market, but when a bunch of regular people saw it due to "Barbenheimer" and liked it they told their friends.
You think 18 years is a long time? How about ten times that?
Try to find a copy of the 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay ... Here it is at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
It's tulips and the mid-1630's all over again. Learn history, or be doomed to repeat it.
> You think 18 years is a long time?
My point was that I was surprised that it was that long ago- it doesn't seem like almost 18 years since everyone was banging on about that film, and I suspect that many people who remember it would be similarly surprised.
My point was also that almost two decades down the line, others should have learned their lesson long ago- that buzz on the Internet doesn't automatically translate to market success.
It's being reported that two senior executives at Tesla have resigned.
Senior Vice President Drew Baglino is one of four named executives at the company, and lead the power division for 17 years.
The VP of public policy has also resigned.
In other news, Tesla continues to cut prices on it's products, halving the price of FSD... which is being reported as causing a high number of curb hits that Tesla is refusing to repair.
I would say the wheels are falling off, but...
Can you imagine how absurd it would seem if Toyota, or Honda, or BMW were subject to the whims of one guy at the top of the pyramid who said "today, I'm announcing a stupid looking truck!", or "today, I'm spending half our share capital on Twitter!", or "today - we're going in big on Robotaxis!"
Tesla's aren't bad - there are issues, but they're fairly decent cars in many ways. But I genuinely have no idea what the company will look like in 5 or 10 years, and 100% of that doubt is because of Musk. I seriously considered a Tesla about 5 years ago, but the sense I dodged a bullet in buying a different EV just gets stronger every day.
《One is a muppet that helps teach children valuable life lessons. The other is a drug abusing narcissist.》
I suspect the average 5 year old could easily learn a few life lessons from the failings of the second - a facility of which quite clearly numerous adults are lacking.
A drug abusing, narcissistic muppet, with his own little submarine, hopefully isn't likely to appear on Sesame Street.
Its a shame Spitting Image (UK) or Rubbery Figures (AU) aren't still running as the contemporary world would provide them with an embarrassment of riches (embarras des richesses. :)
How about, "Today I'm going to poach a bunch of employees for one of my private ventures!"? He's been hiring a lot of the FSD employees from Tesla for xAI, which is a very significant potential conflict of interest. Never mind how he's already been embezzling Tesla resources by having Tesla engineers working on Xitter. Unless he secretly sold Xitter to Tesla, like his brother's failed solar panel company, it's a great big no-no from a corporate governance perspective to be tasking employees from one to be working on things for the other.
At the risk of sounding smug in an "I told you so" sort of way... many years ago, when Xitler was still a media darling, I remember reading the odd story here or there about how someone talked to the press about an issue with their Tesla. The guy would go to all the trouble of tracking down the logs for that specific person's car, and then probably pulling some of the software engineers off of whatever else they were working on to go through the logs looking for anything they could use to discredit the person. It always struck me as odd in 1) that they would have that kind of telemetry to begin with, and 2) he would go to this kind of trouble. The CEO of a company should have far more important things to be spending their time on than worrying about what maybe a half-dozen customers may have said to the press. I also just hate the look of every single Tesla model. It's like a station wagon fucked a hatchback. Then when I realized the fondleslab in the center dash was basically the CiC for about 90% of the car's functions, I noped that so fast. Not only is it a huge safety issue for multiple reasons, but it's also a giant single point of failure. If the eMMC that stores the settings on it fails, it takes almost the entire car with it. Touch screen overlay dies? Hope you didn't want to change radio stations or anything else. It's just a huge engineering, safety, and UX fail. I've had the occasional thought about going to a rental car place and renting one for a day just to experience it, but usually it passes within a couple minutes. My guess, is that within 10-years, Tesla will be just another brand in the stable of a company like Ford or GM. If they fired Xitler within the next year or two, they might be able to carve out a small, but profitable, niche for themselves in the luxury EV sedan space, but there's no way they'll be able to compete with the major auto makers on price or volume once they start churning out EVs in bulk.
I'm just really hoping Toyota's solid state battery tech lives up to the hype. Even if it's half as good as they claim, it'd be about on par with EVs right now. There's also this fascinating tech where they suspend basically thousands of little batteries inside of some kind of fluid, and then you "recharge" your car by just replacing this fluid with some that has charged particles. Then "gas stations" could use solar panels or something to charge old fluid in storage tanks. The fluid is supposed to be completely non-flammable too, so if you spill it, it's less dangerous than gasoline.
I imagine there are some lawyers already working with Tesla shareholders for lawsuits against him for stuff like that. You can't make the company's CEO spend all his working time working for your company - you've had ample warning he has other interests besides Tesla for years now. But you can expect that some of the (presumably) best employees paid for by your company are not taking off to work for the CEO's pet social media project!
You can also expect that your CEO isn't actively poaching some of the best employees with AI knowledge/experience are being poached by the CEO to work for another company he owns, because he's pissed he can't steal tens of billions from shareholders because he thinks he deserves a bigger paycheck than any CEO in history has ever received when he's already one of the richest men in the world.
If Tesla sales keep falling as many analysts are predicting, and the stock keeps falling, look for one or more such lawsuits or a big class action suit against him. Tesla has always been seen as being pretty immune to falling to something approximating its true value because there are so many true believers who own the stock and claim they will "never sell". If they stop believing Musk is a magic man who can do anything and the HODLers start selling, look below!
Xitler is above petty things like following the law.
Racism, sexism, even sexual assault, is rampant within Tesla factories. Has been for years. The fact that Xitler has taken exactly zero steps to stamp it out tells you everything you need to know. You'll never completely get rid of it, but to hear former employees tell it, particularly those who have worked at other car manufacturers, it's a night and day difference at Tesla... not in a good way. Xitler's name often gets bandied about as a justification for their actions. Whether they're just making shit up is besides the point because Xitler doesn't do anything to stop it, meaning he's giving tacit approval to it.
Tesla, near as I can tell, is run as a tech startup. LEAN. Move fast and break things. All that. It's an interesting experiment. Dramatically increasing and decreasing staff numbers based on quarterly results, pivoting, announcing vapourware... these are all tech startup things.
Cars, however, are not software. Cars are heavy and move fast, they have momentum when they hit things. They are physical objects that can't be updated virtually (see cybertruck pedal).
I'm very happy I live somewhere where Teslas don't drive themselves, because I cycle near cars a lot. The kerb strike comment struck a nerve, because I could be the kerb, but also because somehow Tesla tries to pretend it is the 'driver's' fault, even when the car is in FSD. Classic tech startup mentality.
Its an interesting experiment, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Hopefully the world will learn that killing people isn't just a bug to be fixed in a later release.
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