SpaceX has been quite successful, though it also came really close to failing.
Solar city actually failed as an independent company.
Boring company is floundering.
Twitter is having massive issues.
I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.
> I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit.
Didn't every single product launch happen after the takeover? We probably would have never heard of the company otherwise, why would we assume a similar trajectory with different leadership? It's like saying Jobs did more harm than good after returning to Apple.
Tesla was founded in 2003, Musk invested in 2004, Roadster unveiled in 2006 and entered production in 2008. October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the 5 year old company which then went public in 2010. The model S entered production in 2012 and they discontinued the roadster.
So Tesla went public selling a product developed under the original CEO, and he took 5 years to get the next model our even after having a working EV. That said the Model S was a hit, but it was also the original founders goal to work down to more mainstream products.
> has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
i wouldn't call the cybertruck a true failure, since it's effectively free marketing, and they don't have a real obligation to make a sale.
Tesla's massive competitive moat is their battery making capacity. I do not believe the incumbent car manufacturers are able to catch up any time soon.
It would be the chinese manufacturers of electric cars that pose the biggest threat to tesla, not the US/western incumbents.
Tesla is down to 54% of US EV sales (it’s much worse globally) and it’s been falling very quickly. So, their battery moat is basically gone, and the need for the recent price drop amid such rapidly expanding EV sales is a really bad sign.
A significant part of that is they lack of a truck option considering how popular the Ford Lightning, Rivian, etc are. Alongside that is the general perception of stagnation among car buyers, the yoke was seen as a gimmick not the refresh the model S is in serious need of.
They just keep fumbling. Consider the amount of bad press they got around the undersized breaks on the Plaid or their 1 foot rollout numbers. What could have been a real halo product did almost as much harm as it helped.
This is such a silly criticism, of course Tesla's share of the "EV Car" market is going to shrink as more companies sell EV cars. DUH! But that is a silly way to view things, Toyota was never compared on their share of the "Hybrid Car Market", because that is not a real thing, just as the "EV Car" market isn't really a thing, people buy cars and to the extent they cross shop they generally do so across drive trains.
Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The Model S is a tiny and irrelevant portion of Tesla's sales.
The Halo effect / most premium products do drive sales. This is graphics card manufacturers care about the speed crown for a product launch even if their most expensive products are a trivial number of sales.
The perception of the plaid being unsafe unconditionally extends to people viewing all their cars as unsafe irrespective of actual crash statistics etc. The same thing happened with self diving car fatalities it’s a trivial number of accidents but still impacted people’s perception of the brand.
> Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.
The company’s stock price is based on the assumption they can ride the wave of exponentially increasing EV sales and take a large share of the global car market. Having largely squandered that opportunity the company’s prospects are far less favorable.
I mean we’ve known how to use rockets for decades, but SpaceX was a good idea.
TBMs are just slightly too expensive right now. At 1/2 the price per mile a huge number of projects suddenly become very attractive. Which then opens the door for more economies of scale, further efficiencies, and in theory a very valuable company.
Lower cost, but not cheaper because you can’t use them for the same things. Aka a toy car costs less than a real one but isn’t a cheaper transportation option.
But you can’t use the Boring Company’s TBM to drill ‘real’ tunnels - it’s build for tiny Tesla car sized tunnels (which aren’t actually that much larger than the local sewer being bored)
Trains i.e. proper mass transit, require wide bore tunnels and cost increases with the diameter of the bore
A lot of the costs with tunnels isn’t the tunnel but things like the portals that need to dissipate pressure waves as trains enter and leave at high speed
The boring company produced a smallish bore TBM and then ‘oh look it’s cheaper than a large one’, there is no innovation there
Solar city actually failed as an independent company.
Boring company is floundering.
Twitter is having massive issues.
I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.
All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.