Lowly tech gossip, nobody will look back in a year and say "I'm so glad I read that article."
I wish there was no segment of HN that cared about this.
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I don't care for the gossip, but I do appreciate the discussions it often spurs in the HN comments. There are already a few good comments here, and without this post we wouldn't have those comments.
I'd enjoy the discussion more if it didn't always for some reason beeline to Tesla's stock price.
I think that is a function of Tesla being a publicly-traded company. I think that's why a lot of discussions devolve towards what a companies relationship to its shareholders actually is. A lot of people are clearly invested in the performance of Tesla's stock, but Musk seems less concerned with the share price of Tesla than some people find to be acceptable.
I think this is probably why people are constantly shorting Tesla. Why would you expect a company run by a person who hardly seems to care about share price to maintain its share price over the long run?
>> "but Musk seems less concerned with the share price of Tesla than some people find to be acceptable."
That's precisely my point. The stock price is a moving average of people's guesses and hopes about Tesla's performance. Very few of these people actually have a window into what's in Elon's mind. To that extent, the stock price is more a metric of the 'ignorance of the commons', rather than their wisdom.
Elon absolutely should not be focusing on micro-optimizing Tesla stock.
Because it's a dominance behavior.
I think the essence of this situation is, the stock market wants companies to pander to its every whim, BUT the stock market also has a dim awareness that this is trading off long-term success for short-term cash-in tactics. They know what they want but they also know it is bad for them, they just can't help themselves.
You could counter this by being fierce and stern and saying 'no, you must eat your spinach before dessert!' and probably have some success, if your business was based on hard-nosed determination. Amazon can do that, because they are tougher than Wall Street and will do what's best for Amazon, garnering respect.
Tesla's different. Musk's positioning is the foggy-eyed mystic, the guy with a vision WAY beyond what anybody else dares to have. Whether or not this is true this is how he has to behave. So, if Musk says things like 'ectually capital isn't even real, so the share price doesn't matter, it just slightly affects how fast we can roll out batteries and synergize with going to Mars', if it was a normal company the stock market would go WHACK and it would be goodbye Tesla.
Instead, since Musk is Musk and since the whole concept of Tesla/SpaceX is based on that impossibly grand vision, the stock market sort of gets wide eyes and goes quiet, and are careful not to cross Musk.
It's a type of dominance behavior. He doesn't have to yell at them: he acts like they're BENEATH him, and since the stock market likes to go for short-term thinking, technically they are. He can't go to Mars etc. while complying with stock market expectations because his business would implode. So he does it anyway and they interpret his arrogance as dominance, which it is.
Tesla, Amazon, and Uber each have their own type of dominance behaviors with the stock market. Tesla is the visionary seeing the burning bush and unaware of anything the stock market says, and they command awe. Amazon is the hard-bargainer who understands what the stock market wants, but won't trade away their own power, and they command respect. Uber just acts the way the stock market wants to act, and they command love (from the stock market, at least: maybe not from anything human!)
>the stock market wants companies to pander to its every whim
The market doesn't want anything, nor does it have any awareness.
>Tesla's different.
The Musks of the world are rare, but we've seen many captains of indsutry in history.
>and are careful not to cross Musk.
That's why it has massive short interest, right?
Tesla (the company) is great. TSLA (the financial instrument) is a hyped up momo stock, detached from anything underlying. That's it. There's no magic. Sorry.
[Got downvoted to hell, which almost never happens to me, but I believe it's worth saying] Well I might agree if the discussion was anything more than names of people and companies I'll never hear again. What I'm not hearing is anything about the big picture.
We as a species may die due to global warming, according to some models. Tesla is, by my measure, the tech company that comes closest to addressing this in any way. I couldn't care less about internal gossip and politics, I care about the greater vision. Politics are not business, they are an obstacle to business.
Do you think this may have an impact on Tesla's ability to ramp up their production? I think that's likely what interests many on HN.
I'm asking why would you read every successes and hiccups of every company (google, facebook, YC, uber, yahoo, tesla)? In the scope of things, each of these is trivial, it'd be like somebody writing a news article on your slipping and falling on your face, in the scheme of things it's entirely irrelevant to your larger success.
Why speculate? Wait and see.
One could argue the same thing about nearly any ongoing topic.
You mentioned elsewhere in this thread[0] that you're concerned about global warming and "Tesla is, by my measure, the tech company that comes closest to addressing this in any way." Tesla has not yet succeeded in having a significant impact on global warming, much less transformed the automobile industry or the large-scale use of batteries. Whether or not they succeed is something that many are interested in, just as it seems you are. Tesla has very ambitious goals in terms of Model 3 production and many people have expressed doubts whether they'll be able to meet those goals. Missing those goals could have a significant impact on the long-term success of the company. To meet these goals, Tesla acquired the automation company of which Grohmann was the CEO. If the departure of Grohmann results in management difficulties or departures of other Grohmann Automation staff, this could have a significant impact on whether Tesla meets these goals.
A wait-and-see attitude can make sense if you're just interested in the outcome and don't think you have any stake or ability to influence the company or the industry. If that's where you're coming from, there's nothing wrong with that.
At the same time, if you're concerned about the long-term survival of Tesla, own Tesla stock, are perhaps interested in purchasing a Tesla, or interested in getting into the electric automobile industry or battery industry, or any other of a number of reasons, or purely from an interest in better understanding how changes like this can affect a company, or an industry, this can indeed be something that is important.
Sure, there's some gossip-like discussion. We should all do our part to improve the level of discourse. Dismissing or trivializing others' interest, however, is not one of them. Share your point of view? Sure. It can be a worthwhile contribution to get someone's perspective, and in my experience on HN, one that's generally well-received when it's thoughtful and well-considered. Expressing your "wait and see" attitude with respect to Tesla I'm sure is something that people can appreciate on its own, while remembering that there are others that may not share it.
The same thing used to happen non-stop about bitcoin, every day new articles that it was going to takeover the world and articles saying it was doomed, for years. None of the speculation amounted to anything. It was just bored people who invested early or missed out getting excited or angry.