Sure, but that doesn’t make him wrong in this instance.
I read it. He’s applying his usual circa 1946 thinking, but blaming Trump instead of {insert any politician not in favor of Truman era economic policy]. I moved on.
OK, what would you be doing differently to prevent issues of near-monopoly and -monopsony? From banks to Internet access to online shopping, we’ve got lots of economic sectors with huge players that keep getting bigger. If not anti-trust, what’s the solution? I tend to side with the “1946 thinking” because it seems like the best solution, if we’d only apply it.
Not interesting in debating it. No offense. Disagree with Reich completely. That is all. This thread is for capers, carousels and shenanigans, anyhow. You might get more traction if you started an “Antitrust in the Age of Trump” thread or somesuch.
The plot thickens with Tesla. The CBS article has all the salient info. The WSJ article goes VERY deep (but is paywalled for many people).
Folks need to start considering that Elon Musk may just be a con man
He may be a con man, but he’s not just a con man. I mean, they’ve delivered more than 300,000 cars. That’s not nothing.
Unlike the buyout thing, this does not seem like a big deal to me. This kind of nonsense is routine in the valley ( less so in the public ally quoted companies, of course) That’s not to say he didn’t technically say something that he wasn’t supposed to, but I can’t imagine it moved the markets the way the buyout claim did. Maybe I’m wrong.
I think it primarily a case of Elon not understanding that regular humans without genius level IQs and the willingness to work 100/hour, may not be as productive as Elon. Both my friend, a long time Tesla engineer, and the Elon biography describe many meeting as Elon saying I could do this task in 2 days (and probably could) so the team of you should be able to do it in one day. Plenty of folks told him that goals were impossible, he just didn’t believe them.
Steve Jobs, Gates and plenty of others in Silicon Valley set impossible goals for their teams. The difference is that Jobs was super secretive, and we live in the age of twitter where unfiltered thoughts get shared with tens of millions of people.
Impossible goals are one thing. Making knowingly fraudulent statements to get more cash from investors is another. From the WSJ article:
“Looks like we can reach 20,000 Model 3 cars per month in Dec,” he tweeted on July 2, 2017, days before the first Model 3 rolled off the production line.
In the early weeks of production, the company’s body shop, where the skeleton of the cars would take shape, wasn’t fully functional, according to an October 2017 article in The Wall Street Journal. Tesla was still hand-building parts of the Model 3s, and the body shop wasn’t fully installed until September, according to people quoted in the article that were familiar with the situation.
Tesla ended up producing 2,700 Model 3s for all of 2017, and 793 in the last week of that year.
Now the FBI is comparing the company’s statements with its production capability during 2017. Authorities are homing in on whether the company made projections about its Model 3 production knowing it would be impossible to meet the goals, people close to the situation say.
Model 3s began assembly in July 2017 and Tesla finally reached the long-promised goal of making 5,000 of the vehicles in a single week during the last seven days of June 2018.
If the Feds find internal communications that show He or Tesla knowingly made false claims that would be very, very bad for him and the company.
I agree, and I’m sure they can find plenty of folks in Tesla protesting that the schedule was unrealistic. I’m ok with them fining the guy, but criminal charges are bit over the top. He said it would take 6 months to hit 5,000/week and it took a year. If we are going jail the executive every company that takes twice as long to do something as they predict, the jails will be full. Tesla was in the somewhat unusual situation of needing capital. (The sold $1.2 billion worth of bonds in Aug 2017) so yes bond holders could have been harmed by his statements.
On the other hand anybody who bought Tesla stocks or bonds without knowing that Elon has decade long history of missing schedule is an idiot.
That is why there is a high bar for this, if an indictment is handed down and it goes to court. The Feds have to prove, not that He (and whoever else) were wrong, but that they willfully and knowingly made false public statements (and projections on quarterlies, which are legal documents) to fool investors. The false statements on projections would be serious. That is solidly White Collar Criminal activity. Texts, emails and sworn statements would be needed.
This last bit from the WSJ article is a bit ominous.
The SEC isn’t involved in the investigation into production issues at Tesla, people familiar with the matter said.
The SEC settlement related to a statement by Mr. Musk through hisTwitter account on Aug. 7 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. The SEC alleged that the tweet by Mr. Musk was “false and misleading.”
Under the settlement, Mr. Musk and the company agreed to pay a total of $40 million in fines and to remove Mr. Musk from his role as chairman of the board, without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
The Justice Department and SEC often coordinate investigative efforts, but the SEC’s recent civil action over Mr. Musk’s tweet on taking the company private didn’t address questions about Model 3 production disclosures.
This is pure DoJ probe, not a spin-off from the SEC thing. And it pre-dates his 8/7 tweet. That doesn’t sound good.
I seem to recall that President Obama used to have a lot of decisions made for him (dinner, clothes, the mundane) in order to make him more effective. Less stress or wasted time. I wonder if CEOs and other successful people have a similar situation.
I think of how much of my day is filled with life decision. Oil changes, insurance decisions, picking up medication, cleaning the house, making dinner, shopping, washing clothing, wrestling children. The list goes on.
And the US doesn’t make life any easier, with it’s lack of regulations.
I swear, anybody who thinks the free market works just as well for medicine or schooling, as it does for buying a care is an ignorant asshole.
Anyway, I am not surprised that most of us can’t be as efficient as Elon in 100 hours because we have other shit to deal with, because of people like Elon.
That actually doesn’t seem like a big deal. He shared a Forbes article. The fact that the article is flawed/inaccurate isn’t anywhere near the same as if Musk had thrown out his own numbers. Companies share good press, all the time, without necessarily checking out the underlying facts, particularly when the it’s coming from some place reputable like Forbes.
In the range of Musk tweet craziness, this is downright pedestrian.
Obviously it’s small beer, but if I were a shareholder (or bondholder) I’d like to think Musk has a handle on how well Teslas actually sell versus competitors.
Also, speaking as a journo, it’s always amusing to see companies spreading positive misinformation when they’re so quick to jump on any tiny error or overreach in a negative article.
I guess this is where this would go.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/05/business/carnival-cruise-pay-pollution-trnd/index.html
The company admitted to six violations, including falsifying environmental training records for two ships and deliberately releasing plastic into Bahamian waters without accurately recording the illegal discharge.
In addition, Carnival interfered with the court’s supervision of its probation by sending undisclosed teams to ships to prepare them for the independent inspections. Even after the court discovered the first team and the judge ordered the cruise line to stop the practice, Carnival persisted in doing so, the Justice Department said.
Throw the fucking CEO in prison for 10 years and the next guy will make sure that the trash is disposed of properly. Instead, they’ll keep dumping trash at sea, the company will pay a tiny fine and the CEO will still get millions in stock options.
I’ve never understood how management teams manage to survive these kinds of direction changes:
Bankers sent home as Deutsche starts slashing jobs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48906466
Management is basically saying that they have 18,000 high-paid employees they don’t actually need, and that they have been paying them needlessly for years. Why isn’t the board’s response yes, and apparently you’re some of them too?
Because boards get trained over time by the company to go along with whatever. Its like the old joke, you can successfully invade China but afterwards you will just become Chinese. They assimilate you, not the other way around.
I have never worked at a bank but for large game companies the board and executive team usually convince each other that they themselves are essential and add value (they dont) but the people who actually create the revenue are in need of some “cutting out the dead wood” to use that awful phrase I have heard over the years.
These are usually the same management teams and boards who just a year earlier were talking about talent shortages and needing to ramp up hiring to deliver growth.
So yeah, boards are in general just as bad as the more obvious clueless CEO or whoever is announcing the latest failure (and all layoffs are a failure).
I like boards to rotate members every year or so particularly when representing an investment institution, these are often just jobsworths there to talk bollocks and report back to the investment company how they “sorted it”.
In my experience private investors are usually the very best board members. Its their money after all and they are generally the most intelligent and forward thinking.