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

Yeah that's why I wouldn't fully attribute it to Elon

He did sell a whole load of shares to buy Twitter, then said he wouldn't sell more and proceeded to sell more

That certainly earned the ire of some shareholders, but my view is that if you pay a CEO mostly in shares then you can expect this kind of behaviour

The bit which is really shocking IMO is how he diverts resources away from Tesla to other companies. There were reports that he had a bunch of senior Tesla engineers working in Twitter shortly after buying it

I dunno about others but my employment contract is pretty clear that working for another enterprise on company time is a firing offence

Also you'd assume that Tesla would want those engineers working on stuff that's Tesla related, or at least making a nice but if cash if they're getting hired out

There was also the case where Elon diverted a load of Nvidia chips from Tesla to Twitter because Tesla "wasn't ready" for them. Plenty of tech companies have had hardware delivered way before it was needed to avoid a shortage

And let's not forget his threat to the shareholders to divert investment to xAI instead of Tesla

On top of that there's just the general absenteeism and clowning around

Like I said, he doesn't seem to be delivering much value to the company at the moment. You'd think the board would be shopping around for a cheaper CEO in that case

One could argue he already did that with the price cuts over the past year. Lot of people who bought in 2022 have watched their resale value tank

Some would argue that it's only 34 vehicles, however they're the first so far to publicly blame Elon for the decision

There was a lot of fanfare years ago about Hertz buying hundreds of Tesla's (can't remember the exact number) and apparently paid full price, which is unusual. Normally they'd get a volume discount from manufacturers, so it was a pretty big win for Tesla to get a big order without giving a discount

The way rental companies work is they sell the cars after a year or two to avoid the worst of depreciation and avoid mechanical issues or extremely high mileage

Recently Hertz paused orders of new EVs and I believe they cancelled a chunk of the Tesla order precisely because they suffered higher than expected depreciation due to price cuts

Now to be clear, I'm in favour of the price cuts. EVs were way overpriced in 2022-23 and it needed to come down. In this instance Tesla definitely forced a market reaction by cutting prices

However, if I'd bought at a high price and just seen a load of value disappear, I'd definitely be reluctant to buy again

This thread is two years old! 😜

The guy can't even run a livestream in 2024, not sure he can be trusted with any kind of management position at this stage

Apparently the Trump Dump called him the greatest cutter in their little bromance session yesterday evening for all the jobs he's been cutting

Great to see the fruits of that exercise in the same bloody livestream 🤦🏻‍♂️

I suppose the brand is more popular among Trump fans now, I see the man himself got a Cybertruck as a bribe gift

Probably the most unhappy gift recipient I've ever seen 😂

I'd say one thing which is definitely not up for debate is that Elon certainly isn't helping the business.

Normally the CEO has basically one job, grow the company, Elon has failed to do that for a while now

He certainly doesn't seem to be earning his outrageous payment package, a more sensible board would be shopping around for a cheaper CEO

No, and as I've said not all of that can be attributed to Elon

My point is more that he seems to be incredibly poor value for money as a CEO.

If it's debatable whether Tesla is losing significant numbers of customers because of him, then it's equally questionable if anyone is buying a Tesla specifically because Elon is in charge

I'd argue that Elon could be fired and the company would save $46 billion without any significant negative consequences to sales