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Elon Musk laid off the Tesla Supercharger team; now he’s rehiring them
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Since it’s only been a week, a lot of those people are going to come back. But now they’re coming back with updated resumes and a linked in pro subscription. The good folks will be bailing in the coming months, but they’ll stay and work in a half ass way since it’s better than unemployment and cobra. Musk basically ensured uncontrolled attrition.
How did this idiot actually manage to ship cars to begin with?
He had better handlers and PR team back then so more people thought he was just an eccentric billionaire Playboy inventor and were willing to do the dirty work needed to make it happen.
All his pedo calling and right wing crazy got online when he fired them.
I think he was genuinely better back then too.
Not great - in a ton of ways - but way better.
Something snapped 4 or so years ago and all his worst parts have been getting progressively worse.
I think part of it was he had a really tough time dealing with California covid regulations for his business. It wasn’t something he could buy his way out of or pad someone’s pocket to make go away and they were very serious about it. In the same vein, that’s around the time his daughter came out as trans and you can see how that ended with her changing her name and completely disassociating herself from him. Combine that all with a slow (arguable) but consistent decline in the public’s admiration and opinion of him (which he craves desperately) and he began to crack.
Started running into things he couldn’t control or pay to go away and couldn’t cope I guess… I dunno
I can tell you, knowing people who worked with the guy since the original launch of the Model S, he's always been like this. He's always been a loud mouthed idiot, and he's always been insanely unpredictable. The only thing that changed has been his PR team and personal handlers, and how much the news media is willing to focus on how much of a POS the dude is.
It's why you see hyper-wealthy dissolve everh so often. When you're used to total control and suddenly things that you cannot change no matter how much money you throw at it, you start to lose it.
I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn't want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.
It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.
He let the crazy veil slip a bit during the Thai cave rescue drama, but Covid seems to have really pushed him over the edge.
Yeah I’d say it started more like 8 years ago. When he started going crazy on Twitter.
I think what changed was that he started using ketamine.
He didn't, he bought in to a company that was already set on doing it.
My point being, development of the consumer cars didn’t really kick off instill after Tarpenning and Eberhard left, and I don’t see how this current iteration of Musk would’ve pulled that off. I feel like this iteration of Musk would’ve fucked up Telsa spectacularly.
When the roadster shipped in 2008, that company could only hand make a few hundred cars a year and they didn’t even know how to make their own chassis, seats, infotainment software, etc. They had powertrain tech, and that’s about it.
The vast majority of the consumer product development and manufacturing tech was built after the OG founders left.
A company is more than its most visible members. There were likely plenty of competent people in the hierarchy that were there before Musk and were able to continue that trend of competency until Musk decided he needed to control more and more of the intricacies of the company.
The difference isnt what he was doing before to make things run smoothly so much as what he wasn't... that being getting in the way. He was a glorified PR guy. Which he was great at. Running a tech and manufacturing company? Not so much.
I mean he was not so incompetent at one point. not sure what year exactly it was but he lost it at some point.
I read in another thread that a lot of people agreed Elon lost it when he called that diver of the rescue team for kids trapped in a cave in Thailand a pedo. I mean wtf. If I remember correctly he never apologized and defended his insult. That’s completely unacceptable.
That definitely opened my eyes. Also, a lot of rich people lost their minds during COVID because they were briefly treated like the rest of us.
Like during the Pandemic, the tone-deaf video of celebrities singing because they were bored and stuck at home?
Yeah. That’s when we noticed it publicly. I was pretty online at that time period and Elon was well regarded before that. There were the his family wealth issues and the whole ousting Tesla founders and calling himself one or whatever that whole thing was.but they seemed like an alright side effect of genuis at the time…
Certainly sometime before that and the purchase of X but at one point with tesla, spaceX, and solar/battery stuff he seemed to be going somewhere. even the boring company. It was around or post hyperloop. I think he needed an excuse for the boring company and then I dunno somehow lost it with it being impractical.
The solar/battery stuff was just him saving an almost bankrupt company his cousins had. SpaceX and Tesla had both invested in the company, and he would have lost the money and like faced regulatory scrutiny had it went under.
Hyperloop was his effort to disrupt California's high-speed rail plans.
Hyperloop? The failed project he pushed just to make sure other possible projects that would just work would not be done? Yeah, he was better back then… not.
Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as "of that's just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally", with no one banking him up on that one.
Pedo Guy Musk let us know it's just a South African phrase that's common.
That's just Elon being petty and he was attacked first.
It was his trans daughter coming out and disowning him when shit started spiraling into the right wing must save the world from wokeness.
There's a big difference in being petty or vindictive or an asshole and this anti wokeness stuff which is going to cause great harm to society.
He always had the asshole/ petty thing going if you followed him before.
Also, I bet if we ever saw those 2 reconcile their relationship, we'd see a change in his public persona.
I'm not holding my breath on that one though.
He just became more public and we know him better. He's always been the same.
Nah, I have been in meetings with him before. While he was an asshole that I hated due to the way he treated my customer, he was really smart and spoke very lucidly and concisely. He had a vision and was doing everything he could to achieve it.
Nowadays it's like he has no coherent vision and is just doing whatever wild shit comes to his head. I think when he went from "barely a billionaire who spent it all and nearly went bankrupt" to "holy shit printing billions" then all guardrails came off and he let himself go free.
He got rich enough everyone said yes and or smiles. He lost the ability to have people be critical of him and never found someone to aid him.
That's a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it's probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.
He's always been incompetent. He was fired from PayPal for that very reason. He's used his parents emerald business money to fabricate a career. He's paid his way into being the engineer he clearly idolized but couldn't actually earn himself. He bought Tesla, he bought Twitter, the "HyperLoop" was a hundred year old idea called a vac-train. Even the biggest selling point for SpaceX, were just plans NASA had decades ago but the technology didn't exist at the time to pull it off. I mean the Boring Company... we've been successfully digging subway tunnels for a long time... the London Underground opened in 1863. New York had theirs in 1904. Elon in 2018 debuted a claustrophobic tunnel that was less than 2 miles long...
If it wasn't for daddy's money, he would have been a nobody. But he bought his way into some sort of 'relevance' and has conned a lot of people who don't understand science out of a lot of money. His greatest accomplishment is being a great conman.
He fired his PR team a few years ago. That's been the difference.
He said plenty of dumb shit prior with people cleaning it up. One of my favorites was probably 10 years ago now. He claimed Model 3 assembly line automation would move so fast they'd have to worry about wind resistance.
My friends and co-workers still laugh about that one now. It's such an absurd "business" mentality of go fast = good. So go crazy fast = more good. With a technology that doesn't exist and kinda doesn't need to. It makes more sense to increase system capacity (multiple lines) when you're chasing throughput like that. But what makes even more sense is accurately forecasting your production so you don't have to slap a full car together in 30 minutes to keep up with demand.
What I heard when he first started turding Twitter, is that there was a decent team of execs and managers at Tesla that were able to manage him and keep him from mucking things up too much.
It makes to me that now he’s gotten a taste of being Head Twit, he’s used to there not being a team running interference for him and is just barreling through with all his cockamamie bullshit.
Yep. Or they'll stay and do no work at all and count on it taking a long while for anyone to even notice.
it certainly isn't competent management they're working for.