Is Elon Musk hurting Tesla? (Mod Note Post #1)

While I agree that a device like Neurolink could have massive positives for people living with disabilities, I'm slightly unconvinced it'll be all that it promises considering who's in charge of the company

So far Elon's biggest accomplishment there seems to have been impregnating one of the executives, behaviour which would have gotten any other CEO sacked

Anyway, if Elon sticks one in his head and survives then maybe I'll consider it. Much like how you shouldn't trust a chef who doesn't eat his own food, don't trust a rocket man who doesn't sit in his own rockets 😉

Also, apparently this was enough to drag me out of hiding 😂

Ah jaysis, I thought this thread has died already 😂

I suppose now that we're a few months on since the start of the thread we can start to draw some conclusions

In general, Tesla sales haven't cratered and are still increasing. They don't seem to be going up at the rate the shareholders want, but that seems more down to market forces than Elon's antics

I do feel there's been something of a mental distancing between Tesla and Elon recently. Examples would be Tesla starting to do their own marketing instead of just getting Elon to post about it on Twitter

As for the owners getting abuse, well I think there's a certain anti EV crowd who will pick on Tesla owners no matter what. It might just be me but it seems like the attacks are less about attacking Elon now and just directed at Tesla owners

It was pretty funny a while back when Elon starting bringing up carbon taxes again and his new right wing fanboys reacted about as badly as you'd expect

I do think he's causing Tesla some issues in more obscure ways

There have been several cases recently where senior engineers from Tesla were redirected into doing work at Twitter or xAI. I've no issues with people having multiple jobs, and it makes sense to reuse resources across companies in a group

The problem is none of those companies are in partnership with Tesla (and in the case of xAI, is arguably a competitor) so none of these shared resources deliver extra value to Tesla, and likely costs them because they're losing some of their most valuable engineers

As CEO, it's Elon's job to deliver maximum return to the shareholders, and in this instance it looks like he isn't doing that. I'm pretty sure if he was anyone else he'd have gotten fired for diverting company resources elsewhere

One other example of Elon hurting Tesla is the Cybertruck. I'll say straight away, the CT was a divisive vehicle from it's announcement and I never thought it would sell as well as some speculators were saying

However, it looks like there was a lot more promised than delivered and some of that is arguably up to fulfilling some of Elon's more insane requests

The windscreen wiper saga, if true, would be a particular example. For anyone who hasn't heard it, apparently Elon insisted on keeping the single wiper blade despite the fact that it needs to swipe more than 50% of the windscreen.

This presents some difficulty so the designers wanted to switch to a different wiper design but the boss man said no and now the wiper has to move laterally while wiping as well, resulting in one of the most complex wiper mechanisms evet designed

Any other company would have just ditched the idea and saved money when they saw the idea wasn't worth the hassle. Now sometimes it's benefitted Tesla when Elon stuck to his guns in the face of adversity, but lately he seems to be coming out with a lot more bad ideas than gold ones

This is something of a sticking point between the EU, US and China at the moment

The latter two are becoming more and more protectionist to the expense of the EU which is still very much anchored in free trade

To some degree, I've no sympathy for most EU based manufacturers and policy makers (not just in the auto industry). They've been sitting on their hands for the last 15 years thinking they had a monopoly on brain cells and that China would stick to low cost manufacturing forever and never develop their own products and sell them into the EU market

However I do believe in the concept of a level playing field, and China and the US are effectively forcing out foreign manufacturers but throw a tantrum whenever they get called out on it or another country blocks import of their products