Report: Musk Replaces Senior Management of Starlink Program
Elon Musk (Credit: SpaceX)
Reuters reports that Elon Musk fired at least seven senior members of the management team of SpaceX’s Starlink program back in June over disagreements about the pace of developing the satellite Internet constellation.
Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX’s first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said….
Among the managers fired from the Redmond office was SpaceX Vice President of Satellites Rajeev Badyal, an engineering and hardware veteran of Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard, and top designer Mark Krebs, who worked in Google’s satellite and aircraft division, the employees said. Krebs declined to comment, and Badyal did not respond to requests for comment.
The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX’s Behrend offered no comment on the matter.
Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk’s famously short deadlines.
“Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites,” one of the sources said. “Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner.”
Starlink aims to launch 4,425 satellites to provide Internet and other communications services to any place on the globe. A future constellation would bring the total number of satellites to about 12,000.
In February, Starlink launched two test satellites named Tintin A and Tintin B. The program faces competition from OneWeb and other companies that are aiming for the same market.
161 responses to “Report: Musk Replaces Senior Management of Starlink Program”
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With Falcon, SX and Musk has history, and technical assistance with engines, structure, GNC and years of EELV development and operations to use as reference points. Now with BFR and StarLink they’re very much in their own new coordinate system. Moves like this are reviewed by history as either folly, desperation, or excellent leadership. Being older now, it seems the links between desperation, folly and excellence are both tighter and weaker than I thought in my youth. However my own prejudices go in favor of people who call for more testing. Sirens go off in my head when leadership is forcefully trying to bypass test cycles. If the press is accurate on the nature of the conflict, Musk will own any failure and any success that comes from early StarLink performance.
They’re not rockets that can go boom and kill people. They’re just sats that, at worst, will be DOA. Where’s the risk? Why not get the post Tintin train moving and continue to learn as you go. These are swarms, right? lots of redundancies and ‘engine’out’s.
Do these satellites have thrusters and onboard propellants? If so, they can go boom. If they’re made to de-orbit themselves, it’s a problem if they can’t. Not testing a system you can’t put your hands on and repair, esp when you’re going to deploy and operate a very large number of them is silly.
Nobody is suggesting doing all testing of everything on orbit. But there are a lot of usable well-proven legacy components available off-the-shelf at SpaceX, such as various sizes of Draco thrusters, that should be pretty much plug-ins and require minimal ground testing as part of a satellite bus.
We don’t know what systems the argument is over. My question/point was if there’s onboard propulsion and the satellites need to be de-orbited, then you need to make sure you have minimal functionality on orbit to maintain spacecraft orientation, communication, and propulsion. Again, I’m speculating. But the point I was responding to was …. “They’re not rockets that can go boom…”.
That’s, in the abstract, a reasonable point. But not in this particular context. SpaceX, for example, has been building small, medium and very large thrusters for a long time. Come to that, they’ve also got a lot of experience with attitude control, space-capable RF electronics, solar panel deployment mechanisms and a lot of other things newby satellite makers have to spend time getting up to speed on. Spacex is not, say, Scaled Composites, operating well outside its traditional wheelhouse blowing things up through ignorance and lack of relevant experience. You, Doug and Kenneth Brown don’t seem very capable of appreciating the difference for some reason. I thought you progs were supposed to be world-class aces anent subtlety and nuance. Not seeing it here.
Well we’re talking abstracts because we don’t know what’s going on specifically. So yes, it’s reasonable. I think your Chinese partners’/masters’ attitude on fealty to the great leader has rubbed off on you too much. You’ve forgotten your Yankee skepticism of all forms of leadership.
No, it isn’t. You and Doug, being lefties, are simply bone-deep frightened and/or resentful of personal exceptionalism and any non-trivial activity that occurs unmediated by government bureaucracy. Despite SpaceX’s now quite lengthy history of solid achievement, you persist in treating both the company and its CEO as know-nothing, heedless cowboy yahoos utterly lacking judgement and experience.
As for the rest, you might want to consider getting some rest as you seem to be starting to babble incoherently. “Chinese partners’/masters’ attitude on fealty to the great leader?” Who are the latter supposed to be? Methinks you have gotten loopy from fatigue and mixed me up with someone else entirely.
Mr ‘Duh’ ‘Eagle’ … You are simply wrong and think of people who don’t agree with you as cartoon characters. Yet even in your screen name, you are a cartoon. Okay I might be wrong, but I remember a Mr Eagle on this forum who designs auto audio amplifiers that are manufactured in China, and that he participated in a investigation of his partners who were manufacturing those amplifiers in extra curricular production runs? Not you? As for fatigue, we’ll I’ve been on the night shift for 4 days now. I’m in the dome near the “E”.. Sleep well, I’m literally standing night watch over the planet.
As the old song says, “It ain’t me, Babe.”
Well okay then, I’ll take your word and stand corrected.
Bone deep frightened? Chinese masters?
Seriously, stop with the rhetorical excesses and the personal attacks on people here.
Andy brought up “Chinese masters,” not me. I found that a completely out-of-left-field remark and had no idea at all what he meant by it or why he addressed it to me.
Scaled is in a class by itself. Ken and I know more about Scaled and SS2 than we probably want to. And more than a little about what goes on at SpaceX. We’re perfectly capable of understanding the difference.
These insults are really unnecessary.
Based on my reading of your relentlessly negative coverage of all things SpaceX, I see no sign whatsoever that you do understand the difference. On the evidence, in your mind it’s pretty much Musk = Branson.
ha ha ha ha!
Ummm…..no. Nope. Nyet. What a ludicrous charge. OMG! That I would think they’re the same. You’re not even in same galaxy.
You made my day with that one. So funny!
Yes, they could be used as a weapon. Assuming they are not using Green Fuel and finding a way to reenter. AMOS fuel looks to have exploded when it hit the ground. Not much fuel,but might be enough. Maybe they use gyros.
I hope they are testing C or L bands. These are not affected by rain. If not they may have found with the tests they have done, that they will not work.
With no TPS, nothing as small as a Starlink LEO comsat is going to survive re-entry.
An Iridium fuel tank was just found in an orchard in Cal. The end was blown out.
I found some stories about that. I stand corrected.
Pictures show the tank fragment with only one intact end alright, but it’s not obvious whether the missing end was blown off or burned off. Metal tankage on satellites is typically titanium which is pretty tough and fairly heat resistant. Even so, it is interesting that a piece of a sat that weighed only 700 kilos in total when it was launched managed to reach the ground intact. I believe the Starlink birds will be appreciably lighter than this which would make it less likely any bits and pieces of one of them might survive re-entry.
Comsats wouldn’t make very good orbital bombardment weapons, though – can’t aim them well enough.
You are thinking under the old space paradigm. The BFS does indeed allow them to be recovered and repaired, as well as replaced rather then deorbited. You don’t need to build to the old standard needed when you had no way to reach a satellite. And let’s not forget the Tesla model of constant software updates.
You’re not thinking it through…… What if the satellite is tumbling? You can’t just go pluck it out of orbit when it’s out of control. Again, we’re speculating far out of bounds to the story. But a space shuttle does not obviate all need for maintaining control.
Musk has always owned both his failures and his successes. I’m all in favor of testing a lot too. So what’s wrong with doing as much of it in parallel, in space under actual operating conditions as is reasonable?
Obviously that’s a decision to be made by management. But when the managers ‘on scene’ want to do more testing and upper management comes in from 35,000 feet and says ‘no’ I’m doubtful of upper management.
Based on much anecdotal and journalistic evidence, I don’t think Musk is exactly a “35,000 feet” type of manager.
Whatever the altitude, that there’s a mismatch is telling. Nothing we can do but sit back and watch and remember. If they start losing birds in flight, we can remember this. If nothing happens then I guess he’s a dear leader after all.
I’m sure there was a mismatch, but I think the problem was still far more likely to be with the erstwhile Starlink managers than with Musk – other than his having hired them in the first place. Elon doubtless expects to lose some birds. He didn’t get bent out of shape after losing F9R or any of the F9 1st stages that didn’t quite make it aboard the ASDS’s intact. He’s used to losing things a lot bigger than a LEO comsat in hammering out new technology.
It sounds as though the folks he hired from Microsoft simply couldn’t make the mental leap required to embrace Elon’s development philosophy. That suggests that things have gotten very buttoned-down, tight-assed and risk-averse at Microsoft since Gates left. Not exactly an unknown progression for companies passing from founder control to “professional management” control.
That’s quite the jump to a conclusion when we don’t know the specifics. ….. The great man is always right …. RIGHT?
The great man has proven to be right a lot more often than his critics. The recent results at Tesla kind of underline that. Musk catches pluperfect hell from all the sidewalk superintendents in the known universe for months, then catches even more after he chops off some heads. Then… the problems disappear. You do the math.
I would argue that he’s right when it matters, most of the time, and his failures are forgivable given his successes. And that is ‘great’ in the real world. I’m sure you can think of a good list of his failures on your own … but if not, I can list a few to remind you.
As you say, no need. Though I’m betting my list would be shorter than yours. A lot of things lefties regard as failures or bugs, I regard as successes or features.
It seems pretty typical of Elon to hire people with experience and then fail to take their advice leading to their leaving the company “to spend more time with their families” or, in this case, getting fired outright.
I still stick by my previous criticism that the government should require SpaceX to prove their hardware and substantiate their business model before they are allowed to put thousands of satellites into orbit along with many thousands of pieces of incidental orbiting debris.
Most of the world where there is sufficient customer density has internet access. There are also existing satellite internet providers for those living in low density areas along with point to point terrestrial technologies. While it may not be possible or easy to get a connection in the South American jungles or in the Democratic Republic of Congo, people there have annual incomes far less than what somebody in the First World pays for a month of feeding their coffee addiction. That’s not a great business target for a very expensive technology.
Take Tucson Az, Cox Communications charges $42/month for carpy 5 Mb/sec internet. That’s with no cable TV and I own the modem. It gets crazy expensive above that. If Musk can provide a better throughput per cost he’ll be able to penetrate the developed world as well.
Whoa, that’s crazy. Here in Sioux Falls S.D. I have no cable tv, & also own the modem, and pay $45 per month…but my speed is way faster.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Do you have competition in Sioux Falls? We have a enforced territorial monopoly where Comcast takes the north side of town, and Cox takes the center and the south. There’s no overlap. Yeah, Tucson is positively third world, wait, the third world is probably better. I’m sure Tucson is not alone. I think StarLink will have more customers than one would think. In fact perhaps StarLink is not really aimed at the unconnected world but rather at the engineered monopolies that have been built in the US.
Yes. I believe 3-4 options, but Midco (Midcontinent Communications) is by far the biggest. I’m glad we don’t have any monopolies…well, for internet anyway…electricity is a different story of course. I have to pay whatever they feel like charging me. I utterly hate monopolies, and I agree that Star-Link (and others) aren’t building their multi-billion dollar constellations just for the 3rd world, and rural 1st world.
I’m happy with Midco…but who knows, if SpaceX can give me gigabit speeds for the same price, I’ll be jumping ship.
Everyone lives with power monopolies. I’m slowly becoming my own power provider. I’m slowly taking more of my house offgrid with a small battery backed solar setup. Each time I add a panel it has a payback time of 3 years. If I can keep it up by the time I retire I’ll only be paying grid hook up fees with my power bills being minimal. You can break the power monopoly by becoming your own power company selling only to yourself. I’m becoming so disappointed with the web and its content I’m considering gatewaying via my phone and focusing on mainly static web content and text. In that case I’d cache video content at work, use my phone as a text/static web content gateway and dump my ‘broadband’ ISP.
Well done Andrew, we’re on exactly the same journey. We’re going full electric and dumping gas. Solar is already on the roof. Battery storage next year – we’re looking to the future and driving these changes from a selfish point of view but the local environment will benefit too.
In Texas you just sign up with a utility like Green Mountain they only sells renewable energy.
The Texas energy sector is a example of what US states should be doing. Experimenting with other states taking note of failures or successes. It’s too bad most other states don’t share Texas’ taste for all things energy. That said, I want to be a yeoman energy producer as much as I can. I don’t think I’ll be a power island, but I might become a power atoll.
Yeah, but all they are doing is copying what CA had until the energy companies, esp multiple Texas companies, colluded to screw over the customers.
The screwing over in California was due to the corrupt legislature and permanent bureaucracy here setting up a monopoly sandbox for Enron and its cronies to play in.
No, Texas has deregulated the electric industry and there are multiple firms begging to get my business offering sign up bonuses like $100 gift cards or one month free. Same with cable. Spectrum provides me with 20mb downloads and 10 mb uploads. Competition is good ?
Yup.
We have 10kw of solar city, and a Tesla 85.
Next year, we will add a Tesla power pack to the home.
Finally, waiting for dandelion geothermal HVAC to hit Colorado.
No need to answer if you don’t want to. My speed test on DSL shows 500k. I never get more than 136K on downloads. Where is my problem? Faster computer? I did get smoother streaming with a ’18 laptop. What is your max indicated download where that is shown? I could go to cable for the same price. A lot of trouble to change. Is it worth it? Are your downloads instantaneous?
You are assuming that the cable company has no way to lower their prices to compete. They will charge all the market will bear up to the point where they have real competition. If you had another provider in the area, you could call Cox and they’d drop their price in a heart beat. I beat up Charter all of the time. There is a small time high speed wireless provider in my town that keeps Charter’s price down or I’d certainly be switching. I have 100mbs down and 20mbs up, but I really don’t need that much. I’d cut to half of that for a $10-$15/month savings.
The challenge comes when SpaceX has to compete with the lowest price that the cable companies will drop down to. With a brand new fleet of thousands of satellites, SpaceX will have a very healthy loan to pay back and/or investors that want to see return on their money right now.
While I don’t need 100mbs speeds, some people do and there are certainly businesses that need much more. A satellite is going to max out and it will be expensive for them to have enough birds so that high usage areas are well served. These satellites will be orbiting so much of the time they might be over barren stretches of ocean and not seeing much use. If a hardwired or wireless provider needs to deploy more capability to an area, they may already have unused fibers that can be connected up or they can add more antennas to target a specific area. If a cable is cut or an antenna fails, repairs can be made very quickly. If a satellite dies, there will be a hole in the coverage that will need to be addressed and that can take some time to arrange a replacement.
What you describe is just part of the risk profile that StarLink has to consider. I assume they’ve done their homework. I find it easy to believe that the Cox/Comcast monopoly has not invested much in their infrastructure and as such may not be able to lower costs that much least they drive investors away. If investors have an expectation of return on investment, they may not be able to lower fees to their customers without backlash from the shareholders preventing the company from acting in its own interests.
While I completely hate Comcast as a service provider, you can’t argue about the continued improvements they make as an ISP. Without even asking, they have steadily increased my download speeds for no additional costs. Every 6-12 months, I see an unexpected speed bump. Now that I’m at the 250MB range (and they deliver based on repeated SpeedTest checks), I won’t be completely surprised if I just wake up to 1GB service one morning.
You will have 1 GB when either starlink or 1 web sells in your area. In addition, your price will be dropped to $50-75/month. This is what Comcast did in areas that Google delivers 1GB for 75/month.
Otherwise, they sell you 200 MB for 100/month.
It amounts to a different way of saying pretty much the same thing, but it’s worth pointing out, in particular, that all the major cable players are the products of recent mega-mergers. These deals were financed based on calculations of future revenue that may not have a whole lot of give to them.
You will. I remember a time folks were wondering what they would do with a huge 2mb hard drive and how anyone would need 2400bps Internet speeds.
In terms of 100mb, think of VR, anywhere, anytime, in HD. That bandwidth will get used ?
1200 baud on a Commodore 64 was AWESOME! 2400 baud on a IBM XP and doing my FORTRAN hw on the VAX11/780 at 3AM was positively romantic.
How futuristic. I did my Fortran homework with 80-column Hollerith cards and IBM model 026 card punch machines. Ran the programs via batch processing on a CDC 3600 mainframe. Did I also mention I walked to and from the computer center with three 2000-card boxes, plus books, in my backback? Through Michigan winters? Uphill both ways?
We must be the same age. lol
Though never taking a real Fortran course. While working for the university computer program center as a printer slave and sometimes manning the help desk. I did manage to to create my own crude Interactive 3D graphic program using Fortran 77 and tektronix subroutines. It was a fun waste of time.
Filling in for the Help desk was usaully easy because I would figure out the problem with the first computer student that asked for help. Then the next 10 people usaully asked the same question. Lol
Ah, the Good Old Days – may they never come back.
But you’re probably still appreciably younger than me. The Fortran I learned first was Fortran IV for CDC 3600. The year was 1969. Not much later I also programmed in the Fortran IV dialect used on the Xerox Sigma 5 & 7-series mainframes and in a more limited Fortran II dialect that ran on the IBM 1800 “minicomputer.” That was my first, but – sadly – far from last, experience with proprietary truncated language dialects IBM developed for its diverse zoo of pre-PC small computers. Also did a lot of assembly-level code for both Xerox Sigmas and the CDC 6000 series.
You did not, but now that I know it you’re one of those lucky few remaining trained computer scientists who had the right mix computer and avail software to turn you into a real computer user, I’ll look at you as having a greater insight than most. I really think kids should go through similar era’s to your’s and mine. The base understanding of …. yes … KIDS TODAY, is horrible. In our era computer interfaces were so limited you had to learn some basic computer science to extract useful work from the computer. Hat’s off. I totally missed out on Hollerith cards and punch tape. If I ever retire, I might buy a reader and try to turn it into a USB HID device.
A thing like that would be useful as a means of translating any ancient NC (not CNC) parts programs from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s into modern, preservable file formats – assuming there is any significant body of such stuff still extant. Given that B-52’s and KC-135’s are still flying, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that some of it is still around at Boeing, at least. Given the Hecules’s longevity, maybe at Lock-Mart too.
I’ll show my ignorance here, so this is a question. But I thought the old NC machines had sequencers for any of the G codes, while a modern machine has a CPU with software doing the parsing and either feeding a sequencer or emulating a sequencer. If my understanding is right, then a modern g code parser should not have too much difficulty parsing old g G code. The oldest I’ve ever run on one of my machines was a G code listing from 1977. LinuxCNC parsed it with minimal additions.
The earliest NC machines date, I think, from the late 40’s or early 50’s. There was no G-code in those days because there were no CPU’s that could have run something like that that wouldn’t have cost vastly more than the machine tool being driven – and probably take up more room too.
I think the early systems just took encoded motor control commands one-for-one (or maybe two-for-two or three-for-three or even four-for-four as we’re talking multi-axis machining here) from the paper tapes. I don’t know the detailed early history of this stuff, but I think the human-readable encodings of parts programs were done with something fairly analogous to assembly code for a given CPU. Later, there seem to have been higher-level languages developed that were at least somewhat hardware-independent.
A late friend of mine who made a living as an itinerant contract parts programmer in SoCal in the 60’s and 70’s did most of his work in something called APT (Automatic Programming for Tools). APT preceded G-code, apparently, but I know nothing in detail about it. My impression was that APT was translatable via a compilation step into paper tape motor control command sequences for NC machines. My late friend did a lot of work for Rocketdyne when it was still a subsidiary of North American. Modern CNC didn’t really take off until the advent of microprocessors in the mid-70’s made computing power small and cheap enough to hang on the side of the machine.
I just found that same article. The Wiki says G code RS-274 was firmed up in the late 50’s which fits with my past readings on the type of sequencers that were used back then. I appreciate your answer, but I think it goes back further than that and there was no need for a CPU even for parsing as a simple shift register was all you needed to parse each line. So something like
G02 X1.285 Y3.257 I4.213 J4.526
The G would set a bit indicated that the next data was an address to a motion sequencer
02 is the address for the clockwise circular motion sequencer.
X is the place holder for humans, but 1.285 gives the destination X from the current pos in absolute space.
Y is a place holder for humans and 3.257 gives the destination Y from the current pos in absolute space.
I is the relative center point offset in X for the center of the circle.
J is the relative point offset in Y for the center of the circle.
I can’t say I’ve done a truth table or Karnaugh map reduction of clockwise circular motion, but I’ll bet they did. You don’t need a general purpose CPU with a full up ALU and FPU. You would need an adder for sure. I’m pretty sure they were operating at this level even in the 50’s.
I didn’t know G-code went back that far, but what you say makes sense. The early NC machines certainly didn’t use anything we’d recognize these days as a general-purpose CPU, but you are correct that a great deal of functionality can be built using a surprisingly small amount of optimized logic circuitry.
I remember that being quite a revelation to me when I first took switching circuit theory classes in my long-ago undergrad years at MSU. My prof for those classes, by the way, was the late Carl Page, father of Larry Page who co-founded Google.
Cooooollllll!
Yeah, he was. He built some batch software that generated both a unique quiz for each person in each class section and a matching key so he could quickly grade them. We got one or two of these quizzes a week. Everything came out on 14″ green-bar pin-feed paper. You’re right about man-machine interfaces being uber-primitive in those days.
He was very much a proto-geek. No surprise the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
No. You did NOT miss out on cards. Believe me. Hated those things. It was nice moving to a teletype with 45 baud.
Yes, I remember when they replaced the old IBM360 with a DEC20. It had a keyboard and monitor screens. And you could play Star Trek on it. The Enterprise was a Capital E ?
But you know, using slide rules, drawing on a drafting table and writing code on punch cards really forced you to learn how to visualize problems in your mind and develop a good sense of how things actually worked.
Ditto. Did cobol on cards in Northern ill while in high school in 1974-5. I hated cards and cobol. Got first degree in microbiology/genetics because of that. Second degree was comp sci. Loved z-80 assembler and C.
Same here, FORTRAN IV and COBAL on an old IBM at NM Tech when I was a Geological Engineering Major. You actually needed to understand what is going on when you used punch cards. First you diagram it on paper using a pencil (lots of erasing needeed) then write the commands down on a coding sheet, then run the program in your mind before making the punch cards and visually checking them for typos. Then when the program doesn’t run, or you got into a “do loop” you needed to figure out what went wrong. You also learned to number the cards in case you ever drop the pack ?
Which required a re-run of the corrected code and often took another entire day to get turned around. Batch processing turnaround was a real good incentive to be rigorous in bench-checking one’s code.
And, yes, one always had to be careful to avoid the dreaded “floor sort.”
Cable company corporate structures are built based on their historical expectations of revenue. As most “markets” are artificial local government-enforced monopolies, those prices have been high and the companies have operated “fat.”. SpaceX, on the other hand, has been lean and mean from the get-go and has a certain amount of relevant practical experience knocking off government-backed monopolies.
SpaceX has no impatient investors. Any loans taken out can be adequately serviced out of on-going launch service revenue until the minimum constellation population required to offer initial service is on-orbit. It’s far from obvious that SpaceX will need to take out any such loans given that its birds will be engineered for low cost and produced in large quantities over a multi-year period. Deployment will be via company rockets at cost.
Providing adequate bandwidth to high-density areas won’t be too difficult. Starlink will include a lot of birds and many will be simultaneously in line-of-sight-from any given location. The birds will also have their own line-of-sight links to neighbors in the same and adjacent orbital planes allowing sophisticated in-space data traffic management. The “death” of any individual bird will be inconsequential.
Nope. Rural areas in western nations alone will bring plenty of money. More importantly, read the surveys about any of the american communication companies. Every last one is rated horrible. Many of us will not care if they clean up their act. We will switch due to hating Comcast and century link. The idea of paying 250 / month for GB is a joke.
Do you realize that T-Mobile is rated horrible in America, but considered decent in Europe? Why? Because Europe regulations AND competition forced them to be. And that is cell.
No, starlink only competition, at least in America, for the next 5-10 years will be 1 web.
You have all these drivers that will be bored out of their mind in their robot cars soon enough. All that adds up to millions of hours of porn downloads and ads to these mobile mini-RVs roaming the roads…. burning up all them oil it suppose to save. LOL. These sats may have its use, but how it will survive the lack of credit in an down economy, and a down cycle in geo sat biz in the next 7 or 8 years is a different question.
Oh, that won’t be a problem. Some future Democratic presidential candidate is sure to advocate a government program of Porn Stamps so the poor can get their “fair share” on the public dime.
Tesla has seen a small army of top executives depart over the couple of years. Elon either fires them or drives them out by ignoring their advice and wisdom. It’s worse than the White House churn.
Then Model 3 production is in hell, then distribution is in hell and Elon is on the phone with The NY Times bemoaning how he’s all stressed out and working 120 hour weeks and sleeping under his desk and woe is him. An appeal for sympathy that masks bad business decisions and management.
And you just want to say, This is your own fault, bro. You didn’t plan properly, your logistics suck, and you’re doing this all yourself because you’ve driven out all the people who knew what they were doing by ignoring their advice and treating them badly.
Starlink seems like another big bet to generate enough money to fund the Mars plan. Instead of going big Elon has gone giga — 4,400 sats with plans for up to about 12,000 total. Whether there’s a market for that remains to be seen.
Tesla also built over 50,000 Model 3’s and generated a profit of over $311 million in the most recent quarter. It looks to me as though the company’s production and other problems actually were the fault of those execs Musk kicked to the curb as said problems seem now to have followed said execs out the door.
As for Starlink, I think Musk is exactly right to get some test birds up early, test in space, then quickly iterate the design to fix any discovered problems, de-orbit the prototypes and quickly replace them with Mk. 2’s, lather, rinse, repeat. The cubesat end of the smallsat world does things this way routinely – e.g., Planet and Spire. That’s the way Microsoft used to do things too, but that company is now two generations of leadership beyond its founder and it would seem that some lethargy and middle-aged spread has crept in since Gates stepped aside.
There’s a clock ticking on the Starlink deployment and it certainly sounds to me as though the former management cadre there simply had an inadequate sense of urgency anent their mission. Their successors will, one hopes, be less likely to repeat their predecessors’ mistakes.
Some want to do and some do not. No excuses for Musk’s inhuman HR practices but there’s a dire need to change this culture of space lethargy. Thank you Elon Musk for making the effort to get things DONE.
People who want nice, cushy, low-stress 40-hour-a-week jobs shouldn’t work for driven geniuses – full stop. I’m sure Musk pushes his people very hard. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison do/did the same. So did Howard Hughes and Henry Ford.
I’ve met a fair number of SpaceXers as I live less than 3 miles from the Hawthorne plant. I run into them in supermarkets, at the Lowe’s across the street from SpaceX HQ on Crenshaw, in my veterinarian’s office, in a body shop waiting room, in a smog check waiting room – lots of places. They’re easy to pick out by their SpaceX-logo apparel. To a man – and woman – they speak well of their company and snicker a bit at the Musk-as-Simon-Legree meme. They’re proud to be good enough to work there and to have lasted. The average tenure of the SpaceX-ers I’ve talked to is on the high side of five years.
Perhaps there are people working at SpaceX who feel as though they are Roman galley slaves. I just haven’t met one. Could be because anyone working there who isn’t happy about it probably doesn’t wear any company-logo clothing.
As i understand it, it’s largely because they WANT to work for Elon, it isn’t like early Ford where building cars was the only job available
There were a lot of jobs available. The turn of the 19th into the 20th century was probably the high water mark of demand for unskilled, even illiterate, labor in the U.S. Ford established his famous $5/day wage rate to both attract the best workers and keep them once there. The Rouge plant was engineered and re-engineered constantly to take as much labor as possible out of Model T production. Despite the “high” wages, the price of the vehicle dropped over 60% from its introduction until its last unit was produced. Ford was able to make up for his above-market wages by continually boosting labor productivity and “making it up on volume.”
I was thinking more late 20s period
That level of demand for unskilled industrial labor actually lasted, to some fairly significant degree, into the 50’s, but was fading fast by the 60’s and has virtually disappeared since except on farms. Even on farms, things are a lot more automated than they were back in the day.
As colonial company at some point Space X will have to become a company people can work for and have children along with the time to raise them to be constructive, functional, well balanced members of society. I can mention some other, real life non-sci fi characters in history who thought that the main function of people was to execute the will of the exceptional man, and all else be damned. So yes, cushy well paid jobs are essential to the propagation and formation of society.
Yes but not in periods of high development rates, such as is the case for Starlink, once things are going, they can afford to be cushy, but right now they can’t
Development will always be an emergency. In the private sector it’s always an emergency when a new product is being developed and not providing return on investment. Space development will always be a real emergency given the harsh environment. At some point leadership and the investors have to learn some patience and realize their people are people and you can’t milk them dry forever no matter how great the cause is. As an evil lefty I’d say it’s part of governments job to make sure management does not go overboard in the milking process. You know, it’s part of that “Provide for the general welfare” bit.
No it won’t always be an emergency, once they can meet the deployment deadlines it will not be an emergency
You think that, but will management? Once SX has BFR and BFS working there will be the emergency of developing colonial infrastructure, then getting it ready to ship to Mars, then there will be the flights themselves. It never ends, and it never will. It’s going to be a real effort to scale expectations vs what you can get out of the colonial work force without dooming your new society due to milking them dry.
And that will only apply to the mission managers not the rest of SpaceX
You seem to think that the Employees aren’t compensated a lot extra for their work, right now being a SpaceX employee is the only way to get SpaceX stock unless you are google or fidelity, at least 2 rocket companies have been seeded on this stock.
I’m not saying the government should come crashing down on SX. For now I agree, these people know what they are getting themselves into, and they’re well paid, and their experience is invaluable. I think once you get a critcal mass of legal complaints and court cases then it’s time for government intervention and a union vote. However as a colonial company they have yet to develop a key quality of the enterprise, the fostering of reproduction and stable family life. They’ll have to do that. They’re going into an environment with no other means of fostering that.
Fair but they need to get the transportation end solved first, they are not shy about wanting to collaborate on the stuff they will need there as well as the people I imagine. They see themselves primarily as the transportation company primarily.
Agree 100% for now it’s fine. But it would be a real loss if that group of young engineers pass up having a family in order to ‘give it all’ to space X. When you take a large group of people to the heights that Space X has done over the years, it would be a real shame for everything to die with them. It would be nice to see echoes of Space X ripple through society they way we do Ford, General Dynamics, Hughes, IBM, the Army etc.
I don’t think they will, if they decide to leave, by the time they do, they will already have a nice little nest egg, and a very good item on their resume
First, not everyone currently at SpaceX is necessarily going to stay there forever. Those bailing out will, I suspect, disproportionally be those looking to have families at a certain point. But SpaceX is a great place for the young and not-as-yet-encumbered to work. And there are always going to be more good prospects coming along to replace those that tap out.
Second, companies have a life cycle just as do live organisms. Companies founded by charismatic genius visionaries tend to have a hard – nay, impossible – time maintaining that ineffable magic once The Founder dies or steps aside. American business history provides a wealth of examples. The most recent really big one is Apple Computer. Steve Jobs is dead and Apple is now just another big company, not a magical land of unicorns. I see no reason to expect SpaceX to be some kind of singular exception to this pattern, though I also don’t expect to live long enough to see this expectation come to pass.
A stable and healthy extraterrestrial economy is going to have to consist of a whole lot more than just SpaceX. It won’t be too long after the founding of the Grand Duchy of Muskovy that there will be plenty of comparatively low-pressure jobs available in all sorts of mundane enterprises that are not high-pressure hives of cutting-edge engineering derring-do.
Given that SpaceX is located in Deep Blue California, a state which is not only the nuisance litigation capital of the planet and with a policy of encouraging in-migration of those incompetent to support themselves and looking for others to do it for them, it is no surprise that SpaceX has been the occasional target of baseless suits by the opportunistically disgruntled. The last such to attract much attention was, I believe, settled for an average payout of under a grand each to the complainants and a seven-figure payday for the tiny firm of ambulance chasers who ginned up the class action.
While the future is unknowable in detail, I think it is safe to say that the idea of a union organizing drive succeeding – or even being attempted – at SpaceX is essentially nil over at least the next three decades. By that time, unionism is likely to be dead or so tiny a thing as to be irrelevant.
When you say “and with a policy of encouraging in-migration of those incompetent to
support themselves and looking for others to do it for them” … I assume you mean all those corporations looking for state grants, tax breaks, and state loan guarantees?
I’ll bet you’re one of those types who thinks that if an employee is not working their ass off 150% of the time, they’re stealing.
Actually no. Especially since, so far as I know, there isn’t much in the way of official inducements on offer by California to attract new business, except perhaps for cronies of the state’s thoroughly corrupt Democratic party ruling mandarin class. Established California businesses, on the other hand – especially small ones and any that do manufacturing – have been flooding out of the state in droves for years.
What I did mean is that California, with about an eighth of the nation’s total population, includes among those better than one in three of those on welfare programs of one sort or another – especially homeless people. Mayors in cities throughout the other 49 states routinely give their homeless free one-way bus tickets to California. San Francisco, a much smaller city, may now be roughly at par with NYC in terms of homeless population. Someone once described NYC as “the great unflushed toilet of Western Civilization.” Owing to its now-infamous human-waste-in-the-streets problems, San Fran looks to have taken that title over.
If SpaceX had its people chained to oars on benches you might have a point, but they don’t. Anyone who tires of SpaceX’s relentless pace is free to leave at any time for someplace less frenetic. Given the value of a SpaceX entry on one’s resume these days, any restive SpaceX-er who wants to kick back a bit, for whatever reason, should have no difficulty doing so.
Considering that cushy, well-paid 40-hour-per-week jobs have only been available in significant numbers since WW2, I wonder how society was propagated and formed before that?
I thought so too until I went and looked at more than one history on the subject. There’s a whole hodge podge of working models used in different societies at different times. The real 20th cen addition was the two day weekend. Before that you’d only get the sabbath of your choice off. Our Sat – Sun weekend was a great way to meet the sabbath demands of Jews and Christians. However you’ll see the 8 to 10 hour work day coming in and out going back to Magna Carta days. Before that you’ll see it mentioned in monastic “Book of Hours” from the middle ages, and even in writings about the founding of Iceland. 1/3 of the day work, 1/3rd of the day sleep, 1/3 rd of the day eat and tend your family and home.
Yes, but in the Goode Olde Days, “tending your family and home” was not a euphemism for leisure time. As a practical matter, people generally worked as hard as they could, the majority of said work, for much of the year, being agricultural stoop labor. That got to be a shorter and shorter effective work day as people aged, and they did that pretty damned quick back in the day – life expectancies in the 30’s and all that. Then there was the fact that the essentially full-time job of child-rearing and home-tending was done by wives who were relatively seldom otherwise gainfully employed.
In the middle ages women were serfs and worked the fields too. They figured into the quota a serf had to hand over to the land lord. Housewives as an institution went in and out of practice. Ever wonder how women could run the family plot when their men went to war in the early United States? Because they already had been doing all the work along with the men just less of it. During the middle ages it was women of Scandinavia who ran the Tings (the legislature) and kept the farms going during raiding season. You’re invoking Victorian Europe and the US before and after that it was much more nebulous.
As for leisure time, come on man, people are people. They had hobbies, drank too much, had affairs, played sports, danced, and made music just like we do today. In fact those things were even more widespread in society than they are today because it was all amateur. They needed time to do all that.
Well, yes, women did do a lot of the aforesaid agricultural stoop labor back in the day. So did the kids from a very early age too, for that matter. That was going on as recently as ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ That doesn’t invalidate my general point, which is that modern work of almost any kind is a lot less onerous and debilitating, on average, than what a medieval serf or immemorial Chinese peasant would have regarded as normative. A 12- or 14-hour day of running engineering sims or whatever is hardly the same as an equal amount of time spent bent over at the waist in calf-high water planting rice seedlings by hand.
Yes, his style management hadn’t been seen in the automobile industry since old Henry Ford, who went through a lot of engineers to get his “impossible” V8 that made Ford famous in the 1930’s. Generals Patton and LeMay were also known for going through multiple officers until they found those, like “Bulldog Walker”, who could keep up with them. Unlike other CEOs Elon Musk has no tolerance for letting dead wood accumulate. American industry would be a lot more competitive if there were more CEOs like him.
Quite. On another forum I opined that Musk’s management philosophy seems to have much in common with that of the formidable Lt. Rasczak in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers – “The job is yours until you’re either killed or I find someone better.”
…. That’s science fiction. Fantasy. And you use it as a metric for leadership as if it’s been tested and calibrated in the real world …… Okay. That speaks volumes.
I merely point out the correspondences. To the extent that Elon has applied something with a more than modest resemblance to “The Rasczak’s Roughnecks Handbook of Command” in the real world, it is being tested and calibrated. At Tesla, it looks to have worked. Starlink will provide another data point in the not too distant future.
Actually it is a real world strategy, not uncommon in periods of mass development or wartime, it loses effectiveness as the need for the very best dies down, but currently that isn’t the case
It works when you’re an Army Lt and you have to get your rifle team to charge into the other guys well aimed rifle fire. You don’t run society like a rifle squad.
Unlike you progs, Elon has no interest in “running society.” He wants to build rockets and electric vehicles and bore a lot of traffic detour tunnels under a lot of cities – some of which might, someday, be on the Moon or Mars. It’s a bit rich that lefties indict Musk for arrogance and overreach when, compared to their own ambitions to remake human nature as well as all of human society, Elon’s ambitions are really quite modest and well-circumscribed.
Could not disagree more. He’s out to change society via transport, energy, and spaceflight. He himself says he’s trying to save humanity by making it multi-planetary. Sorry dude, if it were about the money for him he’d have sold out Tesla and Space X by now and moved on to the next big money maker.
Disagree all you like. Spaceflight is a genuine game-changer, to be sure. The electric, driverless car, tunnel and even Hyperloop stuff is just improvements to what we’ve already been doing for two centuries since the invention of steam-powered railroads.
Point is, lefty notions of “social change” go well beyond these rather modestly circumscribed areas of affect. And – key difference – Elon has no ambitions to deploy force in furtherance of his aims. He figures the advantages will be sufficiently obvious that people will change their ways of doing certain things out of self-interest. On the left it’s always “Come the Revolution, Comrade, you will eat strawberries – and you will LIKE them!”
Again the comic book characters you throw out in an attempt to ‘shame’ the people who disagree with you. You know both the extreme right and the extreme left think people are tools to be used then thrown away. You with your love of Victorian Dickensen style labor practices and the left with it’s various means of forced labor. Neither side can see the rest of humanity as anything other than friend or foe, someone useful or useless to be discarded by one means or another. Say what you want, I know what the reflection of my lifework and craftwork is. You’re fun to talk with, but in the end you’re entertainment who can throw out a good argument from time to time, and useful for insight into the thoughts of the extreme right.
Allowing for the fact that the normative prog these days seems to acknowledge no non-exteme right, you may so regard me if you like. I’m a minimal government, strong defense, free market, consent of the governed, rule of law, libertarian-ish sort. You know – a veritable demon.
The actual extreme right – based on the origins of the left-right terminology originally employed as shorthand for the seating arrangements of the French Estates Generale – would be royalists and other defenders of hereditary aristocracy. So, yeah, not much respect there for modern notions of human rights. The nearest analog for these folks in modern times would be post-Meiji Japan through the end of WW2 and most of the Islamic Middle East today. But the modern American, or even European “right” are hardly believers in the Divine Right of Kings so attempting to conflate the two requires ignoring more than two centuries of evolution in usage.
The extreme left – well, we saw what they think of modern notions of human rights in far too many places during the bloody 20th century – Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba. There are a lot of smaller fry too.
The current extreme left in the U.S. are in the relatively early stages of going all brownshirt and blackshirt on their enemies, but street mobs of bully boys are already a standard item in their political “toolbox.” And these tactics are both endorsed and encouraged at the highest levels of one of the two major political parties in America. I don’t think you and Doug are that sort of people, but you brainlessly parrot a lot of their tropes and appear to have imbibed and internalized a lot of their worldview. The extreme left, in short, appears to have dragged way too much of what used to be a much less extremist left-wing American party well into its accretion disk. Beware getting sucked all the way inside the singularity.
A lot of us here have the same registers hooked to slightly different switch logic. Look at your list. “minimal government, strong defense, free market, consent of the governed, rule of law, libertarian-ish”
You realize the contradictions there don;t you” How do you have minimal government and a strong defense? How do you have a strong defense without forward defense? How do you have forward defense without forcing other nations to be your friend? How do you force other nations to be your friend and call yourself a libertarian?
I have a similar set of contradictions, we all do. Running societies is hard and is set with conflicting sets of interests and it’s even a conflict to define what those interests are. Understanding that makes me left’ish, not a party liner. I can step outside my own belief system take in information, and recalibrate my stance. You come across as much more an absolutist. As if your politics are written in the firmament as an absolute good. For instance when I read your writings on labor, it seems to me you believe that a ‘better person’, a richer person owns a ‘lesser person’ and is owed the labor of ‘the lesser’ human, and that an exchange of paper gives that ownership a moral compass, and that that ownership is morally good. You come across at times as if an exchange of paper is all an employer owes an employee yet the employee owes everything to the employer, and that such inequality is good and just.
Okay, you’ve provided some Q’s. I’ll provide some A’s.
How do you have minimal government and a strong defense?
The current defense budget is about 3.6% of GDP. The entire federal budget is about 21.1% of GDP. National defense can certainly be done more cheaply, but it’s not the primary driver of big government.
How do you have a strong defense without forward defense?
In general, you don’t.
How do you have forward defense without forcing other nations to be your friend?
Appeal to their mutual self-interest in fending off the same enemies we are. Not too difficult considering said enemies are a lot closer to any foreign nations we would have any interest in forward-defending from than they are to most of the U.S. That has worked pretty well, historically.
Or are you suggesting we “forced” Western Europe to join NATO or the Japanese to support us in resisting Chinese expansionism?
How do you force other nations to be your friend and call yourself a libertarian?
If there’s no force, there’s no problem.
Well, as the philosopher Simon once wrote, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
I have no idea how you parse, “a richer person owns a ‘lesser person’ and is owed the labor of ‘the lesser’ human,” from anything I’ve ever written. Or do you actually believe that the employer-employee relationship is akin to slavery? I know there are some complete dingleberries on the left who have that view, but you haven’t, heretofore, struck me as being one of them. The relationship of employer to employee is one of a mutual and voluntary exchange of labor for suitable wages and possibly other valuable considerations. There is no “ownership” involved. The employer doesn’t “own” the employee and the employee does not “own” his job. Or do you disagree with any of that?
Your apparent severe aperception, whatever its origins, seems also to explain the otherwise inexplicable phrase in your previous comment about my alleged “love of Victorian Dickensen style labor practices.”
I assume you actually intended to write “Dickensian” there. If you mean workhouses and debtors prison, no I don’t love those things. The pervasive European attitude – also quite prevalent even in modern-day U.K. – that bankruptcy should be an offense that forever removes you from the purview of polite society is something quite alien to American sensibilities. I think our very different approach to such things is one of the things we got right and much of the rest of the world continues to get wrong. I also think it’s one of the things that contributes to American Exceptionalism. In much of the rest of the world, honest failure is an unforgivable offense equal to deliberate fraud. America, in contrast, has long been a land of second and even subsequent chances.
Actually, most of the damning of musk comes from far right, not the left.
That’s very debatable, but there’s no question the right is in the thick of things. There are several reasons for this:
1) People who are obsessed with politics often have a complete inability to comprehend people who aren’t. Musk is not obsessed with politics.
2) Musk has taken advantage of pre-existing government subsidy programs aimed at artificially stimulating the supply of electric-only vehicles. That’s a big no-no on the right.
3) Ever since Musk showed Obama around on the latter’s visit to Kennedy/Canaveral just before Falcon 9 first flew in 2010, there has been this meme on the right that Musk and Obama are besties. Based on no evidence at all, there is also a widespread belief in certain circles that Musk has been a major Obama campaign contributor. Neither is true.
Countering this is widespread right-wing admiration of Musk as an iconic embodiment of the American Dream. He is also admired for showing up an ossified and rudderless goverment space program (NASA) and for knocking one of America’s consequential enemies entirely out of the commercial launch market (Russia).
Left-wing opposition to Musk is also substantial and is, in general, a mirror-image of the admiration Musk garners on the right – i.e., he’s a self-made uber-capitalist tycoon embodiment of the American Dream and has made both the U.S. and Russian governments look like chumps.
Great quote.
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It’s a tough management style to be under or to use, but it is effective. And its not like he’s firing randomly, just those who claim they can’t do the job,
Also no accident that Ford, like Musk, was himself an engineer.
Plenty of CEOs have BS in Engineering. Problem is that they then go get MBAs that teach them the wrong ways; basically follow others.
Wrong.
Musk style was also the same as Japanese in 50-60s. It was because of that, they did not follow Detroit, but instead learned to do quality correctly .
The one mistake that all car makers make, is that 50 years ago, GM tried to automate everything. Automation was not ready. As such, Toyota/Honda’s approach of subbing out helped them. Now, Tesla is bringing everything in-house and automating it all. Yes, MY will be the most automated vehicle ever made.
You believe these numbers. Not everyone does. Let’s wait for the 10Q.
I have no problem doing that; I guess we have no more than another month to wait. But I’ll confess I see no real long-term gain to be had by Tesla in reporting numbers in advance of a 10Q filing that differ materially from same once filed. I don’t even see any short-term gain to be had from doing so. But you’re a prog, of course. To you, big corporations don’t need rational reasons for doing deceptive and evil things; that’s just what they do.
Profit is an opinion.
Cash flow is a reality.
It’s hard to analyze Tesla but the cash burn seems fantastic.
Maybe in the movie business profit “is an opinion.” Everywhere else, it’s pretty straightforward.
I suppose it is hard to analyze Tesla if you don’t know how to use search engines. From Tesla’s official statement anent 3Q 2018 results:
1) GAAP net income of $312M, non-GAAP net income of $516M
2) Operating income of $417M and operating margin of 6.1%
3) Free cash flow of $881M supported by operating cash flow of $1.4B
4) $3.0B of cash and cash equivalents at Q3-end, increased by $731M in Q3
5) Model 3 GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin > 20% in Q3
6) Reaffirm expectation of continued GAAP net income and free cash flow in Q4
I wish ppl would quit saying that Tesla had problems.
Musk has followed the same road as other companies that compete against established markets. They spend like crazy, while learning to do things better than the established companies. Ford did that. Japanese car companies did that. Amazon did that. Finally, Spacex and Tesla both did that.
Agree entirely with your second paragraph.
But Tesla has had its troubles. His detractors blame Musk for them pretty much in their entirety. I think recent history has simply once again confirmed that the origin of many of them is in the fact that good help really is hard to get. Musk has never had anyone remotely as capable of deftly handling day-to-day matters at Tesla as Gwynne Shotwell has done for him at SpaceX. She is, in many ways, as singular as Musk himself and richly deserves her future honored place in the Wingman Hall of Fame.
Actually, the problems that Tesla has had, are the same as ANY manufacturing company does. For example, the FWD gave fits. Now, they fit. The ‘problems’ on Model 3 are the same as on other car companies. The difference is that Elon allowed the first 1000 off the lot, while legacy car makers never allow the first 100 off, and then the next 900 (making up numbers; I do not know what the current range of cut-offs are) are sold to employees, etc with legal conditions of no speaking about issues.
Don’t know if that’s true of manufacturing companies in general, but it’s certainly been historically true of car companies. I went to school in Lansing, MI for four years. That was where Oldsmobiles used to be built. A lot of my classmates worked summers in the car plants. I heard all sorts of stories about teething issues on the production lines after model changeovers, including the large parking lots used to hold all the “re-work” vehicles that needed repair before they could be shipped to dealers.
His problem is being able to find managers willing to break out of “that is how we always did it” mindset. In terms of Tesla it all came together despite the doom sayers, he made a good Q3 profit despite the analysts claiming it was impossible to make any profit and he is now gearing up to make bigger profits with it, which is why he is moving on to get Starlink going.
So u believe the numbers they put out last week. Not everyone does. We’ll know more when Tesla gets around to filing the 10Q.
Ha, you can’t walk 10 minutes around my house without seeing a Model 3. I see a few regularly on a 10-15 min drive to work, not to mention the parking lot is loaded with S and X. They are all over the place now. When the data breaks away from your prediction, time to reassess your model, not cry fraud.
Musk and Tesla just got slammed with $40 million in fines and he has to give up the chairmanship for three years for the fraudulent funding secured for going private claim. Your response to questions about the reliability of the latest earnings report is to look out the window, count the Teslas you see, and conclude everything is on the up and up.
Come back when you have an actual argument to make.
Musk/TSLA admitted no guilt and the SEC settled in record time because they knew they had a $hit case. Everyone knows there was a verbal agreement between the Saudis facilitated by Larry Ellison. The Tweet was unwise but you’ll still need to find a ladder to get off that horse you are on.
My window is pretty accurate. When they were jammed up in production very few Model 3s in town. I don’t live anywhere near California so when Model 3s start dropping out of the sky over here, I know production is on track.
After all these years you still don’t get Musk. He was sandbagging the hell out of shorts this quarter.
He settled after they sued him seeking a much harsher penalty barring him from serving in a public company. A non-admission of guilt is hardly a finding of innocence. It wasn’t a single tweet but a series of them in which he doubled down on his claims. Tesla investor relations also got pulled into this. Verbal agreement is far from funding secured.
Is anything you say accurate?
“Is anything you say accurate?”
This is like,”When was the last time you beat your wife?” I didn’t say anything inaccurate. I admitted the Tweet was foolish but the SEC didn’t blink 24 hours later for nothing. The Friday press conference was for show, same as the hash penalty out of the gate. They did this knowing they were going to fold with a slap on the wrist. You really don’t believe he changed their mind overnight? Yea, like anyone who believed Investor Relations is running the show needs to have their head examined.
The oringinal deal was better. Musk threw a fit with his useless board and threatened to quit so they backed away, SEC then sued, then they settled under even harsher terms. Or did u forget that already? My guess is the board and the lawyers convinced Elon to settle in a rare show of backbone because going thru legal case wouldn’t be worth it. Didn’t the stock sink that day, too.
The point is musk made his going private claims then investor relations was telling people there was a deal. He dragged the rest of the company into the mud pit with him.
In any event, it’s a public company and CEO aren’t supposed to make announcements about going private in the middle of the trading day. Especially when they don’t have funding secured.
Yes. As I put it at the time, “They came in seeking the death penalty and left having settled for a traffic fine.”
Well, the shorts, to cite one particular intensely interested interest group, have obvious reasons for trying to cast shade on Tesla’s recent numbers. Then there are people like you who are simply reflexively distrustful of private enterprise.
People like me are old enough to remember when Musk and Tesla settled fraud claims with SEC with $40 million in fines and a 3-year ban on being chairman.
We’ll know more about how they arrived at the numbers when they release the 10Q. Til then, doogiehowseagle.
Pretty much irrelevant penalties. Musk is still CEO. If you think the 3Q 2018 10Q will differ materially from numbers already released, you’ve been at the wacky terbacky again.
Is that honorific intended to indicate that I am a boy genius? Would that it were so.
If that’s what u want to believe, altho you act more like an 8 yr old than a genius.
Nonsense. I use much larger words than a normative 8-year-old.
As for “what I want to believe,” that is neither here nor there. You have, in essence, said that Tesla and Musk are lying about Tesla’s 3Q 2018 financial results, but for some reason you also expect that it and he will magically revert to telling the truth on Tesla’s SEC 10Q report when it is filed.
As you have long revealed yourself to be an unblushing statist, I suppose it is only a mild surprise to discover you have an essentially magical view of the power of government-mandated paperwork. Why, if Musk is a liar in press releases would he not also be a liar in government regulatory filings? Surely if he is such a villain as you suppose, is it possible you might consider that perhaps he lacks the same respect for sacred government documents you appear to have?
My having put that particular bug in your ear, will you now reject the Tesla 10Q when it is filed if it says essentially what Tesla reported last week? What, exactly, would you regard as sufficient proof of Tesla’s actual current financial and operational condition? Following the outside auditors around as they go about their chores? Setting up your own surveillance cameras outside Tesla’s Model 3 plant so you can count every car that leaves?
Methinks you are in serious danger of falling down a rabbit hole and ending up God knows where at the bottom. Your irrational resentment of Elon Musk and all his works is becoming a genuine mania with you.
Once I read your posts here there’s little need to pay much attention to Musk. I can read all of his arguments regurgitated by fan boys and peppered with insults.
Well, at least it’s entertaining. Just wait for his human computer interfaces to be installed in all your subcortexes. He’ll be able to feed that stuff directly into all your brains without any filters. Of course, it will all sound exactly the same. Any individual creativity will be destroyed.
In the meantime, I guess we’re stuck with this. The variety of the insults is at least interesting, but there’s a certain sameness to arguments that Elon is somehow above the criticism of we mere mortals. It’s almost like trying to communicate with Trumpians.
So, no answers then.
Responded to the only substantive part of your ranting. Most of it is BS.
I guess we’ll find out in 30 days or so.
If he was able to hire and hold onto some auto industry people who knew what they were doing, instead of constantly trying to re-invent the wheel, profits would have come long ago. That former GM/Toyota factory used to produce twice as many cars with half the labor force. Building cars isn’t rocket science.
That’s far from obvious. The term of art for modern car factories has long been “assembly plant” because little or nothing is typically fabricated at such places. They’re just major logistics nodes at which parts and subassemblies made elsewhere come together and exit as finished vehicles. Tesla is a lot more vertically integrated than that even if not to the same degree as SpaceX.
So comparing a Tesla factory, including staffing levels, to a typical assembly plant is like comparing SpaceX to ULA. ULA has maybe 1/3 of SpaceX’s workforce, but it’s Decatur works is much more an assembly plant than SpaceX’s Hawthorne works. ULA’s headcount is the tip of a huge iceberg of subcontractor headcounts employed in actually fabricating rocket parts. Hawthorne is much more comparable to Henry Ford’s original River Rouge Plant.
Execs from other car companies doubtless “know what they’re doing” in terms of industry-standard practices, but Tesla, of necessity, doesn’t operate that way because it can’t.
A much higher percentage of a Tesla vehicle’s major subsystems are sui generis because Tesla vehicles do not run on hydrocarbon fuel. That radically reduces the percentage of the total value of a vehicle that can usefully be sourced from extant lower-tier auto industry suppliers. I think one reason Musk put Tesla’s patent portfolio in the public domain was in hopes other electric vehicle makers would spring up and create a total market large enough to interest traditional or new lower-tier suppliers in serving it.
Traditional braking component suppliers, for example, don’t offer regenerative braking systems. Teslas and hybrids use these to extend their purely electric ranges. I’m sure Toyota had to build the Prius’s regenerative brakes itself in the early going. I don’t know whether it still does so or not. Ditto Tesla. Perhaps the total potential market for regenerative brakes has already reached a level that would interest a lower-tier supplier in offering them. I don’t know and I’m not really that interested in finding out.
Point is, there are a lot of things about managing a conventional car company that don’t translate very well to Tesla’s particular situation of the moment. Execs from conventional car companies might reasonably be expected to be problematical fits at Tesla.
If musk had followed your advice, he would have bankrupted. You can NOT beat monopolies/ologolopolies by doing the same stuff. You must innovate all parts. In fact, if not for the criminal behaviour of the Chinese gov, not a single Chinese car company would exist today.
The auto industry is hardly a monopoly or even a oligopoly. GM is the largest auto manufacturer in the US, and then only have 20 percent of the market. There is plenty of competition in Ford, Fiat, Diamler, VW, NIssan, Toyota, and others. Of course, Musk believes there is some conspiracy theory that the automakers and the oil barons are trying to suppress the electric car market, but that just means he is off his meds again. Sure, my local Nissan dealer sells more Pathfinder, Rogue, and probably even 380z’s than Leafs, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place for it on the showroom floor. A separate dealer and service network isn’t necessary for electric cars.
You have the mind of a European – the government should have to approve everything in advance and should also get to decide whether or not people actually “need” a new product or service. If the Europeans are content to live in that sort of permission slip society, they’re more than welcome to do so. But I’m an American. We’ve never done things that way here and I’m not about to let statist pearl-clutchers impose that sort of stultifying regime here now. Fortunately, that looks very unlikely given the results of the last election and the most probable outcome of the one upcoming.
Then there’s the not so trivial matter of how you imagine anyone in the government would realistically be able to do any of that reviewing and vetting and regulation you seem so hot for – especially “proving” a business plan before actually conducting business?
To what “thousands of pieces of incidental orbiting debris” are you referring? SpaceX satellite deployments for its customers are very clean as they employ no pyros in the mechanisms. On what basis do you imagine the company will design its own birds as LEO litterbugs? The birds themselves will be plenty big enough to show up on tracking radars, be under positive control and have maneuvering/de-orbit motors. Satellites, even dead ones, are far less numerous or dangerous than swarms of untrackably small debris.
As for who would use the services provided, well, I sure would. Most of the U.S. has fairly crummy monopoly broadband service via legacy cable providers. Those in rural areas often have none at all. The potential market just in North America is enormous. The Democratic Republic of the Congo market will just be a bit of gravy. With the network deployed and the customer paying for the dirtside antenna, the incremental cost of serving even very modest numbers of incremental customers is pretty much zero.
I love Musk’s ambitiousness, but I wouldn’t want to work for him.
Then it’s probably best for both you and Musk that you don’t.
Because Musk likes to start forest fires?
The guy did sell “not a flame thrower” so…
Yes, there’s a heavy price to pay when giving up evenings, weekends, holidays and vacations. Biographer Hansen’s “First Man” explores that human cost. There’s a quote from Armstrong about arriving home at 3 or 4am. That became ‘normal’ for everyone, but it exacted a toll.
Saw lots of happy ex SpaceX employees watching Falcons launch in Florida cheering for Musk and their stock options.
Does SpaceX pay dividends ? You realize that SpaceX will probably never go public, allowing them to collect any actual real gains from sale of SpaceX stock.
Dividends are for old, tired companies that have to bribe people to hold their shares. SpaceX has long provided a way for its employees and ex-employees to cash in any or all of their accrued options during “liquidity events” that are, I believe, semi-annual.
Fidelity, a SpaceX investor, handles regular private stock sales for SpaceX employees and fundraising for the company. Last I heard they were worth about $169/share and the company was worth about $27.5B, but that was a few months ago. Equidate reported this, and said SpaceX can raise whatever funds they need – everyone wants in including soverigns. Just ask.