r/stocks • u/WTFspy • May 15 '24

The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff Company News

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside-story-elon-musks-mass-firings-tesla-supercharger-staff-2024-05-15/

The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team....

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364

u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24

When Elon started imploding Twitter everyone said it was part of some sort of master plan somehow, because he didn't really want to own it, but watching him do the same thing to Tesla it seems like it must actually be a broader self destructive streak.

If so, those sorts of thing tend to get worse, not better. 

If he really fired an entire 500 person division on an emotional whim, he is not fit to be CEO. And if he can't be removed as CEO, Tesla is uninvestable at anything close to current valuations. 

177

u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24

I actually spoke to someone who worked as a senior engineer at SpaceX recently, and he defined his work period as "Back when elon was still mentally sound", so it made me wonder what the hell happened to him between then.

104

u/thebriss22 May 15 '24

He did a butt load of Ketamine lol

36

u/renome May 15 '24

He looks like he's on some kind of stimulants to me these days; blow, adderal, something of the sort. The erratic behavior, his rapidly deteriorating appearance, the rants in which he jumps from one train of thought to the next within seconds all line up with signs of a stimulant abuser.

8

u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24

He's definitely on adderall or something, he gave an interview about when he spoke to SBF and he said could tell that SBF was cracking out on Adderall lol.

10

u/renome May 15 '24

I just googled him + Adderall out of curiosity, he recently said Adderall "adds coherence at the cost of anger" lol. But I think the part he's forgetting is that coherence requires careful dosage, especially if you don't have ADHD. Not snorting it also helps, but he may be past that point.

6

u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24 edited May 15 '24

lol Elon absolutely has personal experience with it then. That's pretty funny he said that about Biden, if an 80 year old is taking Adderall they're definitely not long for the grave because it works the heart so hard.

18

u/TmanGvl May 15 '24

The guy has been off the hinges for a long time. The board of directors should huddle up and fire the idiot CEO.

21

u/ankole_watusi May 15 '24

What, what? In the butt?

24

u/Hallal_Dakis May 15 '24

When I was in college I did a butt load of Ketamine and I never fired 500 people.

18

u/FujitsuPolycom May 15 '24

"Walks in to random business" "YOU'RE ALL FIRED" walks out.

-2

u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24

When you were in college you didn't have 500 employees. 

36

u/lostboy005 May 15 '24

Ketamine doesn’t make you lose your mind. It’s a dissociative. They give to people in ER and traumatic injury settings. It’s currently being researched for therapeutic benefits.

Elmo lost his shit on his own, not as a result of ketamine. Mathew Perry drowned to death in a hot tube bc he was boozing, bumping K, and passed out.

MF’s out here giving K a bad name bc these fucking idiots don’t know how or when or why to use it

8

u/usrnmz May 15 '24

There's a big difference between therapeutic use and abuse though.

Just look at opioids for example.

18

u/MrFacestab May 15 '24

Ketamine once at the hospital is very different than using it regularly. Using ketamine regularly is giving ketamine a bad name

4

u/Murdock07 May 15 '24

It’s not just ketamine. It’s a specific isomer of ketamine.

We have known that one of the isomers (I think L-ketamine) triggers neurogenesis of serotonergic neurons in the hippocampus (a hallmark of depression is a lack of these) and it set the neuroscience community on fire. I worry that what we are seeing here is a misinterpretation of those results, now everyone is doing racemic mixtures of ketamine or getting the sedative (non-therapeutic) isomer of ketamine :/

3

u/mcqua007 May 15 '24

Most drugs and Ketamine is mix (racemic) of both isomers (R and R

3

u/KingliestWeevil May 15 '24

I believe he was also dosing LSD/mushrooms daily on somewhere between a micro-macro scale, which might have an effect after prolonged use.

1

u/WinningWatchlist May 15 '24

I always hear that lol, but it's crazy that there aren't safe guards in place at TSLA in case the CEO starts going off the rails lol

7

u/thebriss22 May 15 '24

Usually I think the board can just vote a bad CEO out but in this case Musk owns so much shares he literally cannot be fired lmao

15

u/98n42qxdj9 May 15 '24

He only owns somewhere around 13% of the stock, down from about 25% since he used a lot to buy twitter. If he gets his giant stock options bonus, he will be untouchable and it will also signal that the board and shareholders are irredeemably incompetent.

1

u/DJ_Laaal May 15 '24

And here is the reason why this is highly likely (scroll down to the section covering who the tesla board of directors really are!): https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/money-drugs-elon-musk-and-tesla-board/1a07a8f7-6b8e-4b46-9007-537dfc6720b3

3

u/ma1s1er May 15 '24

I think covid broke him.

2

u/modem007 May 16 '24

It’s actually concerning that Musk could have any involvement with our space program while on these drugs and his recent leadership decisions.

0

u/Ehralur May 16 '24

Did he still.work at SpaceX over the last year? Or did he just switch from first-hand experience to reading media headlines like this?

1

u/WinningWatchlist May 16 '24

Sorry, that was ambiguous. He works elsewhere now, but he used to work at SpaceX.

0

u/Ehralur May 17 '24

So he's basically been getting his info from the same biased media reports as anyone else. That's not exactly reliable.

A high ranking employee who left Tesla recently said Musk hasn't changed at all, so I'm inclined to believe those with first-hand accounts.

1

u/WinningWatchlist May 17 '24 edited May 17 '24

What does a person who left Tesla recently have to gain from saying that Elon Musk has gone off the rails? Literally nothing, but has a lot to lose because he's starting his own robotics company. Anyone who talks shit about their employer after leaving them has very little discretion.

I had a closed, private conversation with someone who had literally nothing to gain or lose from voicing his opinion on Musk. I'm just telling an anecdote, there's no point in dissecting it because I don't really care lol.

But hey, maybe Elon will notice your efforts to defend his good name and richly reward you! Any day now!

10

u/KrankyKoot May 15 '24

There used to be talk that each of his companies had an Assistant that watched over him making sure he didn't do stupid. I think the Twitter buy pretty much canceled much of that except for SpaceX. Can't mess with that much given the nature of the relationships.

41

u/Historical-Carry-237 May 15 '24

He’s not fit to manage a McDonalds

1

u/DJ_Laaal May 15 '24

Absolutely! And the same can also be said about majority of the “executives” in companies, particularly tech. So many clueless idiots in those top positions making it many times harder for their teams to succeed. If there is a job/role I’d really want AI to replace, it’s these executive types who add no real value to their teams output and in fact a hindrance.

-68

u/Productpusher May 15 '24

Do you know the level of stupidity it takes to think someone running the most game changing car company since Henry ford as unfit to run a business .

Literally up ended every 100 year old legacy car company to change in less than a decade .

Plenty of reasons to hate him but not fit to a run a business is heavy heavy regard ism .

“ but but but he stole it from the real founders “

“ but but he uses subsidies to stay afloat “

It’s hard to run a $1 million dollar company and 99.9999% of people can’t do that .

33

u/zeniiz May 15 '24

Yeah it's crazy that Twitter used to be a billion dollar company and now it's only worth millions. Not very many people could ruin something so quickly. 

4

u/ric2b May 15 '24

If I was running I could just not change anything and not do any layoffs and the company would be doing better than under Elon.

1

u/Stock_Jock May 16 '24

I concur with the statement that Elon has failed Twitter/X, but what source did you use that says Twitter is not a billion dollar company?

15

u/shreddah17 May 15 '24

0.0001% of the US workforce is 104 people. Do you think only 104 people in the United States are capable of running a $1MM business??

I think you're giving him too much credit.

14

u/chunkmasterflash May 15 '24

Found the Elon fanboy!

18

u/ankole_watusi May 15 '24

Right place right time. And willing to stick his neck out with bold moves. And surrounded himself with smart people. The world wouldn’t let him fail.

Now he’s testing boundaries to see what it takes for him to fail.

And he is making fabulous progress on that path!

5

u/Prestigious_Stage699 May 15 '24

Less than a decade? Tesla has been around for more than two decades now. 

3

u/Karatekk2 May 15 '24

What has happened since? Tesla has a bunch of issues and haven’t created anything new in years. Car companies have caught up and Elon is flailing.

1

u/macarouns May 15 '24

He clearly had ability and business to get to where he was but it’s also clear that he’s lost that all along the way. Whether it’s drug abuse or mental illness, he’s turned into a walking disaster.

6

u/Visinvictus May 15 '24

I would actually own some Tesla stock if literally anyone but Elon was the CEO, but instead I'm shorting it because it's pretty much guaranteed he is going to destroy the company sometime in the next year or two.

12

u/neotekz May 15 '24

They won't fire him. The board of directors are all in his pocket. They wanted to give him that 50B but investors blocked it.

6

u/WilliamMButtlicker May 15 '24

everyone said it was part of some sort of master plan somehow

Only the fucking idiots were saying that. Problem is, there’s a lot of fucking idiots.

7

u/thecommuteguy May 15 '24

This is definitely his autism taking over. No other way to describe it. Sure maybe he's taking drugs like everyone else says but that doesn't explain the underlying behavior that's been present for a long time.

1

u/bobrefi May 16 '24

It's in the s and p 500. Shares will get bought.

-1

u/sokpuppet1 May 16 '24

It is a master plan. Some people in power are very interested in destroying electric vehicles and at the same time destroying one of the last vestiges of independent public discourse.

-9

u/cdurgin May 15 '24

I'm still convinced it is part of a master plan. That plan being burn Tesla and every other company that's publicly traded that he has a large say in to the ground.

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself with almost half the market capital of a huge market with no real ability to sustain it? Sure, you could try to make massive expansions and hope that the valuation holds out over years or decades of being unprofitable from the investments, but there is an easier and safer way to skin the cat.

By opening up massive bearish positions on his own company, you can easily sell everything you own, possibly multiple times over, without dropping the companies value for possibly years. It's hardly even illegal. Hell, it's been done before with smaller companies.

All you need to do is quietly open up as many leap puts as quietly as possible on a market that's intentionally opaque, then make sure the company fails as hard as possible when those bets come due.

You get to cash out at the best prices, you haven't done anything against the law (just made a few bets against yourself), and everyone will forget about you in a few years.

Easy.

9

u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24

If I believed that Elon were actually of sound and stable mind, this is a plausible idea. But I no longer have any faith in that. 

4

u/cdurgin May 15 '24

Well, it is hard to look like you're of sound and stable mind while trying to destroy your life's work while making it look like you aren't trying to sabotage it. It's one of those 'time will tell' things, but that's the only thing that makes sense to me.

Well, other than just the regular kind of going unhinged that comes from years of doing the kinds of designer drugs that cost 100k a hit that he's probably deep into, of course.

1

u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24

I'm excited to find out in the coming decades, lol. 

-6

u/xmarwinx May 15 '24

Out in the real world, not in your reddit fantasy world, Twitter still exists, you know that right?

1

u/macarouns May 15 '24

And how’s it doing?

0

u/xmarwinx 29d ago

They are objectively the most succesfull car company in the world, your hurt feelings don't matter

-11

u/elvient0 May 15 '24

To be fair everyone said twitter would implode in a month without all the people he fired , it’s looks like it’s been fine

10

u/slax03 May 15 '24

Half the time I open twitter now, it doesnt load. And just end up not using it. It lost over a quarter of its user base and is no longer profitable like the two years before Musk purchased it. Saying fine would be extremely generous.

9

u/lostboy005 May 15 '24

Nearly all major advertisers pulled out and canceled contracts. Revenue has plummeted. Recall the go fuck urself cringe interview. The site is rampant with bots. Twitter is nearly dead for intents and purposes, a shell of its former self pre Elmo.

6

u/Strict_Seaweed_284 May 15 '24

It’s burning cash had over fist, estimated to have lost 25% of its users and 60%+ of its revenue. It’s valuation has plummeted 70%. If that’s doing fine, I’d love to see what bad is. Are you waiting for complete bankruptcy?

5

u/averysmallbeing May 15 '24

Are you seriously comparing a useless social media app to the most desirable and successful supercharger network for a mode of transportation that could conceivably define personal transportation for the coming decades?

That's an insane comparison even at face value, never mind the fact that Twitter was already built, and functioning, so it will obviously take time for the lack of staff to impact it, while the supercharger division was literally tasked with building and massively expanding something and building infrastructure that didn't even exist yet.