In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.
Just casually asking for a roughly 80 Billion dollar pay raise. But at this point would Tesla be better off without him?
After seeing what he has done with Twitter, I’m not sure Tesla is interested in that deal.
You’re giving the likes of Kimball Musk and James Murdoch way too much fucking credit here.
His board is filled with fucking sycophants. They won’t go against him, especially his fucking brother.
It’s hardly a board that is looking to control you when you’ve filled it with Yes Men.
Why haven’t shareholders elected new board members? Or does his sycophants have the majority in combined total?
There’s good reason to believe that Tesla is an Enron-esque style fraud. No one in charge has shown any business acumen, and no one can explain how it is actually profitable. But that requires only stooges and yes-men on the board. There cannot be any accountability.
Hang on a sec, its publicly trade company. Its pretty easy to see how its profitable especially compared to other legacy automakers.
Tesla vs Ford numbers:
Disclaimer: the source is from March of 2023 and Tesla has cut prices (which means less profit) since then, but they had a lot of room to do so with so much profit per car.
So one could say that Tesla has been able to charge a premium for a cheaper car, or they’ve been able to reduce manufacturing cost for a moderately priced car. Both result in high margin returns for the company.
They have a direct sales model which is more expensive to operate and exaggerates profit margin. There’s also reason to believe they are wildly understating warranty costs plus ignoring R&D costs. People who look closely have consistently concluded that Tesla cannot really be making money, or have very narrow profit margins at best.
Huge price cuts will compound these problems dramatically.
How would adding a middleman that also has to make profit make the company earn less? Wouldn’t direct sales allow Tesla to sell for a higher price because they can sell at retail instead of a “wholesale” cost normally sold to a dealership?
I’d be interested in reading more on this assertion. Do you have a source you can point me to?
You have to build the entire system out yourself. That costs a lot of money. The dealership model also costs the manufacturer basically zero dollars, because it really profits on used car sales and maintenance works. You don’t make anymore money by having your own dealerships. The whole argument that there’s some secret behind Tesla’s business smacks of gaslighting, not something that actually holds up to reason.
It’s been a long standing issue with Tesla’s accounting. No one can really explain how profits are actually being generated going back years, especially considering everyone in the West is losing money on EVs. It’s also being ran entirely by sycophants and people with minimal qualifications, with zero accountability anywhere. So it just seems, via Occam’s razor, that they’re cooking the books.
The manufacturer also has to pay dealerships for warranty work on vehicles. Company owned services centers wouldn’t.
I’m interested in that source you talked about the “people who looked closely”.
Not OP but regarding sources, there’s a group referred to as “TSLAQ” (Q referring to a letter typically added to bankrupt stock symbols, but they’re not entirely free of conspiratorial thinking) that’s been critical of TSLA and others including David Einhorn who have criticized their accounting practices. I’ve not had time to look much into it myself but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Accounting
Here’s the section for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
= In 2017, a lawsuit alleged Tesla made materially false and misleading statements regarding its preparedness to produce Model 3 cars. The U. S. Department of Justice also began an investigation in 2018 into whether Tesla misled investors and misstated production figures about the Model 3. The lawsuit was dismissed in Tesla’s favor in March 2019.
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Every time I leave my house, I see dozens of Teslas driving around. If they’re not profitable, then they’re horrifically bad at making money. They’re ubiquitous. Pretty impressive market penetration for a business run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
Their single biggest revenue stream is selling carbon credits. They’re basically a regulatory arbitrage business with a side hustle in cars.
Just like Amazon who is a cloud computing company with a side hustle in e-tail or Google which is an ad company with a side hustle in tech.
In general most people don’t really understand this about big companies.
Yeah but in their cases the “hustle” got them the funds to move into their current space. Musk just had so much money that Tesla outlasted all the red it was in. Same thing going on with Twitter.
We all know it’ll never fully go under, he has too much money for it too. It’ll last long enough to sooner or later come back up.
No, it likely won’t, and part of that is also because of who’s invested in the company’s success. Just another example of “too big to fail”.
That depends on how bullshit the numbers really are. If it is just Jack Welch level of financial shenanigans, you can see a stump version of the company eventually surviving. If it is worse than that, then probably not.
Enron was a huge business that had millions of customers. It just happened to lose money while doing so. The crime was that they hid that last part.
Also they deliberately turned off people’s power for more money. Like, scum-of-the-earth.
Might be area dependant. Lots of them where I work at not many at all where I live at about an hour away.
I didn’t realize that. That’s disheartening.
Are you certain? I’m certain James is the one who broke the story about the drug use since its also his family that runs the WSJ
You are forgetting about Rule Number 1
Don’t Fuck With The Money.
The only interest they should have is in getting rid of him.
It’s hard for me to imagine 2024 not being the year they do.
Tesla’s lofty stock price is to some extent based on hype, and Musk being credited (far too much imo) for the company’s success. If he did leave the stock price would come down to something more sensible, which at least short-term would make shareholders unhappy. But yeah leaving him in charge after what he did to Twitter must also be causing sleepless nights.