Actually, I’m overstating the case somewhat now that I look more closely at the numbers. Tesla now has sufficient size so that it doesn’t have to rely on credit sales for its existence any more. Though what impact Musk’s recent antics may have on Tesla is anyone’s guess.
In the last trailing twelve months (TTM) alone, Tesla generated US$1.6bln in revenues from selling carbon credits, comprising approximately 10% of its US$16.1bln underlying earnings.
While only a drop in the bucket against automotive revenues, these sales constituted over 50% of free cash flows in the latest, cash-strapped quarter.
Tesla is a battery and software company, pretending to make cars. We are now reaching the point where actual car manufacturers have access to the same technology, and can build much better, and in many cases, cheaper machines. Tesla has momentum that should lead to significant sales in the short term, but as far as I’m concerned, their long-term future is pretty much determined. When everyone from Ford to BMW is making amazing electric cars, there is literally no reason for anyone to buy a third rate machine whose only redeeming feature is battery life, and in some cases software.
or locking said software behind anti consumer subscription models after advertising things like ‘fully self driving’ (despite it not actually coming with the car) and forcing customers to pay for the module to upgrade the car to include it, only to be taken to court and told you have to pay your customers for the upgrades because it was false advertising
I don’t disagree that he’s a douche but let’s see what Musk’s got first. It could be a load of $hit or it could be something. I’m leaning towards it being a load of $hit - but let’s see. Fauci is ok and from what I’ve seen he’s a good man …….it’ll be fascinating
There’s a very real question now about his actual business acumen. He’s got a good eye for where to invest, but it’s looking more and more likely that his companies need to spend as much effort managing Musk as doing their work. They evolved over time to put safeguards around his insanity. Twitter had no safeguards, it assumed the CEO would be an asset rather than a liability to the company. This is the first unfiltered Musk that we’ve seen.
I don’t like Tesla and Musk annoys the crap out of me ……but Tesla is considered the most valuable car company in the world and have helped lead the EV evolution. Some of it has been on the back of very good technology and PR (some of their marketing is also very shoddy as you point out). How has he done all of that when Tesla didn’t turn a profit for 17 years? Musk might be a fruitcake but he’s no dummy
It’s his money - If he wants to blow $44bn on Twitter and fark it up ; that’s up to him. I’d prefer he donate it to charity but it’s his money. He’s acting like a fruitcake but maybe he’s up to something- it’s certainly providing lots to talk about
It seems that ‘no safeguards’ was a pretty comprehensive description of how Twitter did business pre-Musk. Check out this thread - from the report of an ACTUAL twitter whistleblower, not the Twitter Files bullshit that Musk and a couple of his ■■■■■■■■ rich boy libertarian journo mates are currently carefully curating.
From a software development point of view, this is screamingly scary. Highwire across Niagara Falls blindfolded and with angry weasels down your trousers scary.
Forget about Musk, this was howlingly irresponsible and incompetent of Twitter’s previous admin - and quite possibly criminal, since the previous mob testified before congress that this stuff had been fixed when it hadn’t.
But what this tells me is that Twitter has so far been kept afloat by good luck, and the hard work and deep insider knowledge of people who’ve been there for ages and know the place inside out. This isn’t a portrait of a development environment with stable or robust processes. It’s in fact quite the opposite, and its reasonable to assume that if this sort of cataclysmic state of affairs was tolerated in a few documented places in the company, it was tolerated everywhere. That makes it (paradoxically) harder in some cases to attack casually because it’s such a fkg mess that hackers wouldn’t know where to find anything. But it makes it LOT more vulnerable to things like bad internal actors, to putting bad code on the live server by accident or out of inexperience, to forgetting to apply a security patch or update a signing certificate, etc etc etc. And all those are made worse if you, for instance, arbitrarily sack 2/3 of the workforce one bright sunny day, because I’m betting that their internal documentation and handover processes are ■■■■ too. If you have a bunch of bright, experienced, and dedicated staff who believe in what they’re doing and have been doing it for years so know all the weird wrinkles of your system inside out, you can kinda-sorta make something like that work, or at least pretend to, for a while. If you don’t, you’re deeeeeeep in the brown sticky stuff.
If Twitter didn’t provide a public good, then I wouldn’t care. But if he burns down what has become the best source of free and accurate news, the world will be a poorer place.
Maybe. But the value of Twitter isn’t the software, which is a bit crap. It’s the user community that has grown over a decade. All journalists worth reading are on it. All government departments, many of which use it as their sole method of communication.
That level of universal presence won’t be repeated just because someone else makes a new site. It may not come together that strongly again.