I'm in the camp that thinks that Elon was playing the ultimate game of chicken to get rid of the shorts and this whole thing backfired on him. And now he's just completely effed himself.
I think that Tesla will never go private because it exists almost entirely due to hype. And no one gives a shit about private companies. If most people can't money money from a company - who the eff cares? Elon's ego can not exist in a private company setting because he lives on the attention.
If I was Elon it would make me very uncomfortable to be lumped into the same camp as Dell. Because what the eff does Dell even do these days? No one cares at all about Dell. And if Tesla goes private no one will care about it either.
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You know what it is though ...
ReplyDeleteElon Musk thinks that if he takes Tesla private, he can gloss over the screwups involving Tesla 3 production and that he can pay off the SEC with whatever fine they're eventually going to hand down for his company's actions.
Musk's problem is that he's too liberal and that he fundamentally doesn't trust people, any of them, and that's obvious from how he pushed for over-automation of his production facilities.
There's something else he could have done that would have been a lot more cost-effective ...
You know how there's a hot-rod culture that's big in certain parts of the country, and a do-it-yourself car mechanic culture in others?
Look at where BMW, Nissan, and Toyota put their plants.
Look at where Mercedes moved their US headquarters, and most especially where they moved it from.
It's like how there's a hill in England where you can look out at 80% of the UK's motor racing companies. Those companies moved to where the people who like tinkering on cars already happened to live.
Haynes manuals come from a little town in Somerset that is mostly known for having an RAF base ... but really, is it a surprise that you'd get a culture of do-it-yourself manuals coming up right next to the air base in Yeovil? (And there's a pretty good car museum there as well.)
So really, why does Tesla have its headquarters in the Bay Area?
Does Elon Musk want to build the auto manufacturer equivalent of Skynet because he doesn't really trust people?
Of course, if he patents and develops a line of younger-looking Amber Heardbots, the man will become a trillionaire, so let's not count him out yet. :-)
There is actually nothing nefarious going on there. Silicon Valley as a whole decided to bring ~back~ car manufacturing to Silicon Valley. I wrote about it here back in 2015.
ReplyDeleteApparently we were a huge parts exporter after WW2. By the time I grew up that had mostly morphed into .gov companies like Lockheed.
I think the reason Tesla is here is more nostalgia than anything.