It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.
Tesla was eating their lunch in terms of software, integration, capabilities, apps. Then rivian came along and a few other companies doing a much better job than the awful legacy companies.
Now of course tesla/musk are destroying themselves through various idiotic actions. Sales are dropping through the roof. But the technical quality of the software ecosystem (car, web, app) is still better than all the incumbents. Think about Rivian getting a billion dollars from VW for their much better ECU and and software integration, for example.
I feel like Rivian is almost as good as tesla. Tesla still has all that, even as the company is in awful shape sales wise. Lucid seems to be better than the legacy auto, but I haven't looked into it as closely.
Apparently, 300k+ people in 2025 Q1, and that is with a refresh in the most popular model happening in March (presumably people who would have bought held off until the new one came out and will buy in Q2 or beyond).
Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too?
Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models.
Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple device?
After WW2 Volkswagen didn't change their name or Nazi branding (if you haven't seen the uncropped version of the VW logo you're in for a surprise) exactly because people in Allied countries refused to buy German cars after the war. Even if VW or BMW or Mercedes had rebranded and apologized it would have made no difference. Their ties with Nazi leadership was too strong for any apology to be credible. What Frenchman would buy a Nazi car over a French car in 1950s? And so the German car companies focused on domestic sales, which meant they had to appeal to humiliated (former) Nazis for sales for which any rebranding would have been a negative.
German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.
At least some people are probably putting "I hate Elon" stickers on because assholes are out there destroying people's cars because they have beef with Elon, and they don't want said assholes to destroy their car. It's lamentable that people are willing to act so poorly that they think it's OK to destroy innocent parties' property as a form of protest, but so it goes.
I needed to replace the 12v battery in our Tesla a few months back, and was surprised to see a protest out front. I laughed to myself, glad I had driven my Porsche to the service center instead.
Thankfully, I said to myself, none of our non-Tesla cars have problematic histories.
While I think Musk seems to have duplicated Jobs' Reality Distortion Field*, the second CEO-ing of Jobs didn't strike me as quite as severely attaching Apple to Jobs as all of Musk's businesses are now with Musk. For example, quite a lot of the industrial design of that era is (and was) strongly associated with Jony Ive, not Steve Jobs.
I think at best, out of all of Musk's business empire, the closest you get to a Jony Ive-esq "it's not Jobs" is that Gwynne Shotwell is well regarded and seen as being highly competent in her own right; the second closest is that Linda Yaccarino gets named a decent amount in the news, but even then she's very much in Musk's shadow. The public perception of Neuralink and The Boring Company is just "Musk announced his company, [Neuralink|TBC] did ${thing}".
The majority of the owners of the other shares voted to compensate him more (by market value of shares that cannot be sold for 5 years, not cash, which is a relevant distinction) than Tesla has ever made in profit.
And since the compensation is equity, comparing it to profit, which is cash, makes no sense. One can discuss if the market price of the equity is too far removed from current profit, but surely even Elon doesn’t have any influence over what millions of investors around the world choose to pay for Tesla shares.
Should majority owners of a business not be able to vote on compensation?
Will an increase in sales primarily increase his compensation or profits?
I do find it surprising that such ridiculously generous pay was approved by shareholders and think it rather prove what GK Galbraith said: "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself".
On the other hand there are limits, and at this point I wonder whether shareholders will decide he is a liability and not pay him so well in future. If I was a shareholder I would want to sack him.
I've seen the video. His excuse isn't good enough.
It's not just that I live in a city with small brass plaques on the pavement, in memory of those who were made to disappear last time[0].
It's not just that protestors projecting the image of the guy himself in the middle of that salute, on the walls of his own factory in Brandenburg, was enough to warrant an official investigation because such symbolism is unlawful in Germany[1].
He tried to support to the AfD political party in Germany, who were already suspected of being an extremist party (and have since been officially determined as such), and where several party members had already faced legal problems for using banned Nazi slogans[2] while their former friends at the EU level dropped them for trying to rehabilitate the image of the actual SS[3].
This is who they were before Musk chose to support them. And you trust his word on the innocent interpretation?
It's not like Musk has otherwise got a reputation for being particularly trustworthy — Musk got away with calling someone a pedo by claiming it was a joke; he's been punished for claiming that an offer to buy Tesla for 420/share, which can only be interpreted as a joke, was serious, and that he's really upset to be accused of saying anything untrue; he's mislead people about how close his cars are to full self driving, leading to out-of-court settlements[4].
