Well fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed.
Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.
At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy.
Though I'd be concerned about the effect he is having on their brand image. Even two years ago I was on the verge of buying a Tesla but ended up cancelling my order in large part because I just couldn't stand the obnoxiousness of Elon and he has gotten orders of magnitude worse since then. His new "demographic"/cult also seem to be climate change / green energy skeptics, not convinced they will be gobbling up Teslas at quite the same rate as my demographic would.
My father finds Musk entirely reputable. I am currently subject to at least a 30 minute call a day from him, a retired model S owner, who has nothing left in his life other than the Tesla. The calls are 30 minutes of him reeling off Tesla PR bollocks. He chased everyone he knew away, speaks of nothing else and cannot see reason or error in this or any of Musk's things. He thinks the Twitter thing is a freedom grab, he literally thinks SpaceX are building rockets to take the good humans off and build a new world order on Mars. To get the model S in the first place he cashed in his annuity pension and sold his house and is now on a downward spiral of financial oblivion.
This is exactly cult behaviour.
I'm at a loss of what to do other than refer him to mental health services here in the UK.
I couldn't even possibly consider owning something associated with someone so utterly socially damaging on every front.
Edit: I'm actually fucking crying while I'm writing this. Posted anon as my other account has my GH and stuff on it.
Ugh, Sorry to hear youre going through this. Unwinding an entrenchment is hard, wonder if theres a support group or something for those deep in techno-optimism.
For me, the frame breaks in me have been deep thought from both an engineering perspective and cultural scaffolding perspective, paired with real travels to places where technology was limited (either be practical circumstance like going to a rural village or intentionally like a silent meditation retreat).
A graphic I still come back to is the good life project ( https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ ) with inquiry around how many planets of stuff even the alternatives require from a planetary boundaries perspective. There's more technical works like https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m .
This is extremely sad and I hope you and your father can try therapy together or separately, but the fundamental issue is not Tesla or the car. Those are the symptoms. Best of luck.
It might never go away but that doesn’t mean it has to be filled with religion or something equally as bad. There is such a thing as community and public service that have some actual meaning and benefit to society, they just don’t get as much airtime as corporate ad spends.
Literally. People thought the death of God would bring enlightenment to society. Instead, God was replaced by stupid idols. You only have to look at the resurgence of astrology among young women.
We find ourselves living in a vetocracy, where very little groundbreaking work actually gets done. Critics rule the roost at this current cultural moment. So there's a lot of pent-up energy that will be rewarded to anyone able to articulate a concrete positive vision for the future. Of course people are going to bow down and worship the one guy actually making progress against all odds. The only other person might be Zuck with his metaverse bet, but although he has the concrete positive vision, unlike Musk he hasn't delivered (yet). Anyone have other examples?
I think we need to look at the assumptions made. Has Musk and Zuck actually improved the world or merely reorganised it to gain market for their ideological purposes?
Delivery or not doesn't imply improvement. Progress for the sake of progress is not necessarily an improvement either.
Yes and no. Yes, progress for the sake of progress isn't strictly an improvement.
On the other hand conditions are ever changing and our knowledge of the world changes our understanding of those conditions. To me these things nearly always imply that we should act in some direction to improve our lot. I don't see many people willing to put in the work. I see a lot of people willing to sit on the sideline and talk about how the people on the field are dumb or what they're doing obviously won't work, and that they are evil scheming villains who will surely change the world for the worst for their own benefit.
Would you kindly present an argument as to why one should believe we are living in a vetocracy? I see people pursuing all manner of projects all the time, I don't really buy that the world has been narrowed by criticism. What I see limiting people's ability to pursue projects they're passionate about is a lack of funding and opportunity.
People are, as are companies, but public works are increasingly bogged down but polarization, litigation, and bureaucracy. I think this creates a sense of unreality because campaign promises and outcomes end up feeling so disconnected from each other. 25 years ago it was more common to see public officials pop up in the news and say 'we're gonna start doing X' and then see construction crews or the equivalent at work the following Monday. It was also easier to keep track of 'progress bars' because the media landscape wasn't fragmented into 10,000 tiny snowglobes depicting a particular narrow view of the world.
The internet is part of the issue, but only part. Long-term political strategizing is another part, and a third factor is 9-11 which seems to have permanently traumatized the USA. As a simple example, information displays on subway platforms in my area are still putting up announcements about how public bathrooms in the subway station are closed for security reasons. It's been 21 years since 9-11 and major cities in the US are too freaked out to figure out basic things like public bathrooms and instead live in a permanent state of mental emergency.
A billionaire tells his critics they should build stuff instead of criticize him, as if their opportunities to do so are equivalent, and as of criticism and building stuff are mutually exclusive? That doesn't hold a drop of water.
We didn't have enough respirators because of critics? My recollection is that we failed to invoke the Defense Production Act and impress companies into building them. This was based on the values of the Trump administration (who saw this as a violation of free market principles) and not an overabundance of criticism; as an executive order, it would have been immune to veto.
The piece goes on to argue the federal government is a vetocracy, and I can agree that Congress is in a state of gridlock like 90% of the time. But that isn't because of critics, that's because of party politics and deficiencies in the structure of Congress. This is a cynical power play to sabotage one's opponents, not criticism run amok.
I can agree that there's "vetocracy" in the sense of gridlock, but when you say "critics rule the roost," I remain unconvinced. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the book you recommend, I have not taken a look at that yet.
I think you're on to something. At every other point in history the wealthy were expected to use their wealth. Victorian wealthy funded folly and public libraries and other stuff. Roman aristocrats paid for entire armies.
Our billionaires subscribe to greed is good capitalism and hoard their wealth though. Musk bucks this trend and therefore gets a ton of my sympathy despite his erratic nature. We need more Elon Musks not less.
Please, be aware that if you call the mental health services on someone it can be extremely difficult to unwind. Once a giant bureaucracy tags you as a risk, sane decision making can go out the window. No-one will want to say you're not a risk even if you are sane, because their reputation suffers if they are wrong. Only a trained psychiatrist can make such a judgement legally and they may have an hour with you once every 3 months to make it. The psychiatrist will be acting in their forensic capacity, and will be unlikely to agree that you are sane unless you agree that you have a personality disorder and need medication. Being in that position can 100% drive a sane person mad.
I am so sorry. I don't know what to advise other than talking to a family lawyer. Regrettably, the highly networked society we have collectively created has spawned its own sort of mass media and cultishness has become widespread because it is easy and profitable to engineer.
I don't know what to suggest for your situation - maybe talk to a family lawyer? I have the impression that the NHS is probably not up to providing the kind of mental health support needed to deal with a broad spectrum social problem.
This is not even the only case of Elon musk related psychosis that I've heared of.
Sometimes I legitimately believe that the SCP foundation or something like it is real because it feels like elites who are totally asses have reality distortion fields around them.
> It sounds like you are afflicted with the same affliction as your dad, just in the opposite direction (especially if you actually cried over typing this post).
I don't think it's exactly completely delusional or obsessive to be sad that your dad is now financially unstable and obsessive about a single thing to the point it's alienated the people around them.
You can be well adjusted and sad that someone close to you is on a bad path.
You can even resent people you blame for enabling that path.
You literally described it as an affliction. If you prefer the criticism to be, "don't pathologize someone based on a few sentences," fine, don't pathologize someone based on a few sentences.
If your stated belief is real, then I'd encourage you to reflect on why you were willing to violate this principle, and why, after being challenged on it, you deflected.
I'm sorry, English is not my first language, but I don't think "affliction" means "disease". I used it as a "cause of persistent pain or distress", which I still think the OP has, given that he/she admitted to crying while writing a blog post (you can read his/her other posts to see that it's a bit of an obsession with Musk).
Well I'm sorry, I didn't realize English isn't your first language, but I should have been cognizant of this possibility. (In my language community, it's more commonly used to mean "a cause of mental or bodily pain, as sickness, loss, calamity, or persecution." I think even this is broader than I generally hear it, it's rare that I don't hear affliction refer to a disease.) You also said they were "hysterical", which, unless you're using a quite different usage, generally refers to someone's mental health & their inability to manage their emotions; not something we should say about someone because they took the risk to share a painful experience in public.
TIt is common to dismiss someone discussing something they care about, on the grounds that they care about it; they created this account to talk about Musk, so we shouldn't be surprised that's what they're doing. They related something painful, so we shouldn't be surprised it upset them. None of this should be held against them or discredit them.
If you were in there shoes, and assuming everything they said was true - is there really a different way that you would have expressed it?
Seriously True. I bought my 3 in 2019; and my biggest hesitancy at the time was Musk being (insane) and tanking the company preventing me from keeping the car on the road long enough/resale value.
Today? I do <3 my car, but I'd likely not touch new one with a 10 foot pole; especially as a new customer and there actually being other EV Options available. It's distressing because Tesla does (mostly) what I want in a daily driver well.
> At this point I'd imagine Tesla is better off with Musk being distracted by his shiny new toy.
I think that's probably correct. One question I find interesting: What is Musk actually good at?
He's clearly good at hype-driven PR and painting himself as a Tony Stark character. That has been great for Tesla; he's been able to raise gobs of money cheaply. Money that apparently kept Telsa from going bankrupt. [1] But that genius for hype also makes it harder to figure out other skills.
Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal. The jury's still out on Telsa; it recently got into the black, but it has always had its troubles, and its first-mover advantage is eroding. As is its stock price, down by half recently, something surely not helped by Musk's delusional promises (e.g., 1 million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020). The Boring Company and Neuralink both look troubled. [2] [3] And of course Twitter is an extremely public clusterfuck.
That only leaves SpaceX as possible evidence that he's good at anything other than hype and raising money. But recently a former SpaceX intern posted about his experience there [4], saying "Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions."
So I think what we're seeing with Twitter is the real Elon. And yeah, if I were at Telsa trying to pivot from hype-driven startup to solid company able to compete with everybody from GM to Toyota to BMW, I would much rather Musk stayed at Twitter.
I am not an Elon fan or anything, but I don't think you can say the jury is out on Tesla. Tesla is the first successful new car company manufacturing in the US in more than fifty years. It changed people's perception of electric cars and changed the car market. Even if it has a ton of troubles going forward it will be a very valuable company. I think you have to give him his due for that.
It is perfectly possible that Tesla will be marginal or out of business within a decade.
Tesla did a good job hyping electric cars and selling them to an early-adopter market when they had no real competition. But now that the market is proven and the discussion has shifted, every major car company and a bunch of other players, possibly including Apple, are going after the much bigger mainstream market. If you look now at Consumer Reports and their recommended BEV cars, Tesla only has 1 of the 5 models listed, and its score is a middling 78, behind the 91 for the Kia EV6 and the 84 for the Genesis GV60. Once the rest of the competition has a few years to iterate, the picture could be significantly worse for them.
It's possible that Tesla could be the Google of electric cars, where first-mover advantage leads to decades of dominance. But it's also possible that they could be a Groupon or a Pebble: companies that were initially leaders and darlings, but that couldn't keep up over the long term.
> Looking at his track record, he got fired from Zip2 and PayPal
Technically, no, he got fired as CEO from X.com twice, once before it had PayPal as a product, once after it bought Confinity which had PayPal as a product. X.com became PayPal right after the second time he was fired, so he never actually got fired from (or worked for) PayPal.
He was also fired from Zip2, which was a separate company. You are technically correct that PayPal at the time was called X.com, but it's still the same company.
It really feels like he used to have advisors who would push back on his more outlandish ideas and that provided a good hype / pr vehicle for Tesla and SpaceX. That seems gone now.
He seemed to go steadily off the rails since the Thailand rescue debacle but that might have just been the first gaffe that I noticed as being an obvious misstep.
You're lucky. My family (father, sister, etc) have pretty much fully outfitted themselves in Teslas, but hate Musk. They could stand him enough before, but now they are ready to move on to Lucid or anyone else really. I'm glad I never pulled the trigger -- Musk just always came across as extra creepy too me.
What is with this Cult of Elon? I really don't care who the CEO is, I love my Model 3. It costs me literally one sixth the cost per kilometer than my previous Nissan was costing, when comparing the cost of electricity and gas. And that's before considering that I haven't had to change the oil or do any other scheduled maintenance in the 35000 or so KM I've put on it.
And it's not just the price. My kids who previously couldn't stand long drives now want to go places, at first because of the glass roof but now because they love when I sqeeze them into the seatback with the throttle. It's car number 15 for me, and the best of any of them by far. Who cares about the CEO? I don't even know who the CEO of Nissan was when I had that, or Ford when I had that, or Renault when I had that.
> The CEOs of those other car companies were not raging egotists
Actually, from the stories of 1950's and 1960's Detroit, in fact they were. I don't know about today.
> backed up by a crowd of howler monkeys chasing a parasocial dopamine hit.
_This_ is the problem. Who cares if Elon eats kittens or promises Mars rocks in the glovebox? It's the Twitter Shitters magnifying every musing into predictions and three-page blog posts that is the problem. Just don't listen to them.
So instead you bought a car from a company run by people who are afraid to ever travel to the United States because they know they may be subject to personal prosecution for Dieselgate, which they so far evaded.
I mean I agree he’s super obnoxious, but if making car purchase decisions based on the virtue of company leadership, I would have called it a tie and bought the better car instead.
I had the same exact response and cancelled mine around the time of the tweets about the Pelosi attack he made. It’s a shame, we loved our last Tesla but I can’t stand the thought of being associated with him. We were supposed to pick it up the week he made those tweets.
I was his former prime target demographic. I feel very strongly about protecting the environment, I hate gasoline engines after working on them most of my life, I loved how economical it was to drive an electric car, I love technology, and I could afford a Tesla. I don’t know what his new demographic is but I don’t think they even can buy a Tesla or will. I wish him lots of luck. Based on my experiences in a small town, his new demographic buys dually trucks listening to alt right propaganda and lives check to check working in the oilfield. Or is on a very fixed income and is retired and stays at home afraid, watching Fox News, with their last car in the driveway, a 1997 Oldsmobile or Buick.
From what I've seen there are quite a lot of Tesla drivers in major southern suburbs.
Southern suburbs tend to be fairly conservative. Maybe not quite as Trump loving as rural areas. But conservative nonetheless and likely not turned off by Elon's recent emergence as a right wing political figure.
Also, if you read enough /r/elonmusk you'll see that a lot of people have bought into Elon's schtick that he's actually just a centrist (apparently centrists love DeSantis)
You know, my decisions on things are mostly based on the product...
But if I know I'm going to enrich someone that I find completely obnoxious, it gives me pause. (Of course, dealing with an organization helmed by someone obnoxious tends to have its own costs: they tend not to be super laser-focused on the customer experience).
Ordinary political disagreement isn't enough to do this for me. But seemingly systemic wanton disregard for others gets me to the point that it's a lot harder for me to justify buying that product.
There's a pizza place in my town co-owned by a notorious jerk. They have pretty good pizza. I still don't go there anymore (even though he is generally not there and the risk of running into him is low).
It seems that 5% or more of the country views everything through a binary lens of "Is this something my media and political group will be upset about or not" so if you are a Republican/Fox News person you feel that you should buy a "MyPillow" when buying a pillow.
and if you are part of the Democrat/NYT group buying a "MyPillow" is a bad thing.
To your point, this is crazy because both sides probably buy the exact same Tyson Farms chicken and have spent zero time learning about Tyson's business and labor practices and Tyson executives political beliefs. They are just thinking about which businesses Fox News / NYT has told them to care about.
Ever since Madison Avenue taught the postwar consumerist middle class to consider purchases as buying into aspirational lifestyles, tying it into personal identity, the same process has shifted from simply patronizing businesses all of the way to political choices. Thus, charismatic and attention-seeking CEOs no longer sell their businesses simply no the basis of the quality of their goods or services, but buying into entire constructs of Zizek voice ideology. Thus, perhaps paradoxically, consumer individuals, craving belonging, are buying their way into tribes of like-minded individuals with similar convictions.
In short, don't blame the country themselves; these businesses and their management are pushing politicizing as a tactic to sell, sell, sell. As we in tech know, everything is ads.
I've not studied this specifically but I do have a general interest in the complex control systems now in cars —and I try to avoid them.
I think that, from watching the likes or Rich Rebuilds, who ostensibly operates without any approval from tesla, the cars will run without the internet but I guess they'd become "feature complete" and when modules die it will be on the car hacking community to pick up the mantle.
Traditional cars aren't in a much better position as somewhat superfluous modules (think a radio head unit) can take down one of the many CANbus networks in your car and leave it a brick.
Many (most?) auto techs are not well versed identifying these types of low level problems and will fall back to firing the parts cannon at the car rather than identifying the issue definitively. Just like in Battleship you can get a hit by random guessing but this is a waste of money and resources.
The random superfluous modules also become unavailable and if they're critical to making the car start then your car might be out of commission for the foreseeable future. GM and Ford just don't have as much of a social media halo around them.
You do see a few headlines around particularly egregious money digs, like one company making remote start a subscription feature. That module and the car it's in is not built to last in my view.
> him exposing all the censorship that was going on at twitter.
What you mean is that Elon Musk has made a series of self-contradictory claims with no evidence about what was going on at Twitter before he was there, and you believed his empty claims unquestioningly.
I don't generally accept claims without proof, because no rational person should. When we're talking about a serial liar like Musk,
> Amazing how much a group of people have gone from loving him to hating him because he is allowing free speech.
Nope, there's no proof he's doing that, either, and plenty of serious researchers on the left who have been thrown off the platform with no reason given.
---
You should learn to demand proof for people's claims before repeating them unquestioningly. It will help the quality of your belief systems.
It is totally fine if you don't like Elon, but in the real world there isn't an EV that is cheap and available and has a good charging network.
The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option.
And gas cars are not good for CO2 emissions, so sometimes you have to accept that you sometime buy products made by companies that have executives you don't like. And realistically I find it very unlikely that every product you buy on a regular basis today is run by people who have much better morals and politics than Elon.
Interestingly I did end up buying an ID4 and it's been great for a full year now.
It's not perfect but I like that is has more of a "traditional" interior compared to Tesla, which felt kind of like a giant tablet with a car-shaped case around it. That design was already making me hesitant and Elon with his endless stream of nonsense was the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.
> The ID4 is decent but that company was started by actual Hitler and Nazis, so if you are interested in not buying from companies that have a history of evil leadership that one isn't a good option.
This is a wild comment. The current leadership is slightly more important than the leadership 80 years ago. It is especially strange considering you could have made moral arguments against that company based off much more recent misdeeds.
Yep, there was 'diesel-gate' back in the early-mid 2010s and even today the way the company overlooks the behavior of the Chinese government is also very unsavory (a problem Elon has as well)
Good thing that this publicly traded company hasn’t loaned out employees to other unrelated businesses which happen to be owned by their CEO. I’d that happened, I would worry about the distraction being more widespread than just the CEO.
Employees at Musk companies have the freedom to moonlight, or even transfer entirely.
Tesla benefits from SpaceX materials engineering, for example. Tesla now effectively has access to a massive comms/PR engine, with far more reach than traditional advertising, without paying gatekeepers.
Ford spends $2B a year on advertising. Elon can reply directly to Tesla owners.
The issues are the mixing of company and personal funds.
If you're an investor in Tesla and Musk pulls 50 engineers from the Autopilot team to come work at Twitter [1]. How exactly are you benefitting from that? Autopilot development just pauses for the team to go work on blue check implementations?
I am genuinely convinced Tesla is better off when Musk is focusing on something else instead of managing it.
Tesla need Musks public charizma, his money, his connections and him bullying everyone who stands in a way. Sure, especially his ability to convince public about dreams is super key aspect. But, his management style and the way he runs things seems to be something company needs to protect itself from.
People have attributed a lot of overinflated image to Musk and his effects and skills over the years, regarding Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies of his.
They still are doing so about this Twitter thing. It’s all a nothing burger.
Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.