This is silly and borders on conspiracy theory. It would be suspicious if Tesla is being attacked over technicalities or falsehoods, but all of the criticism in this article is true, representative, and on the money.
It's not just Car & Driver, there have been recently discussions on HN also where it's been shown many times over that the $500 figure is straight out to lunch and grossly misleading.
Why is it that some of us here feel the need to constantly worship at the feet of demigod Musk, He Who Does No Wrong, and anything negative said about him is dismissed as slanderous propaganda by Big Automobile? What is this, the USSR?
I appreciate what Elon Musk is doing to advance electric cars and wean us off of oil, but he is a shrewd businessman subject to the fallibilities of all shrewd businessmen. He is neither a messiah nor a saint.
"he is a shrewd businessman subject to the fallibilities of all shrewd businessmen."
Rather a broad generalization, don't you think? Like most fields, business turns out to have more variation than outsiders think. "Businessmen" range from pure money grubbers who will do whatever makes the most, to people who are in business simply because the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business. I don't know for sure, but it seems to me that Elon Musk is toward the latter end of the spectrum.
> "the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business."
I agree completely. It's easy to see how improving the state of electric
vehicles requires significant capital, so without a business, there's no
viable way to make the desired advancements.
Some of the backlash against Elon Musk seems to be caused by some people
having extremely high expectations for everything he does. Those
expectations are occasionally unrealistic, and blaming him personally
for every misgiving of the entire Tesla company is entirely unfair.
Most car sales/lease terms are horribly and intentionally confusing and
complicated, but someone in marketing at Tesla made a serious mistake.
The mistake wasn't using industry norm of difficult to comprehend
claims and terms, instead, the mistake was failing to live up to
expectations of something better, namely, clear and direct terms with
fair and easy comparisons.
As a business, Tesla must compete with all of the entrenched businesses
but by using the "best practices" of the industry in terms of marketing,
they missed an opportunity and failed to meet expectations. There are
few people on the planet who have set expectations so high as to get
blamed personally for failing to innovate absolutely everywhere, but it
seems Elon Musk is one of them.
The world would be a better place if more people had his problems. ;-)
> ""Businessmen" range from pure money grubbers who will do whatever makes the most, to people who are in business simply because the thing they want to build can only be embodied as a business."
True - but I don't think it's necessarily quite so polarized in this case. When Musk went off and screamed fraud at the New York Times for their review, one can reasonably explain it away as a passionate man protecting his dream company - an example of being on the latter end of the spectrum.
This is a bit different - and I think this Tesla financing brouhaha is proving that Musk has more of the former in him than we'd like to admit.
I for one am a bit disillusioned. We have heard the conveniently woven story many times - passionate individual starts a company to change the world for the better - but that's always overly simplistic. While I wouldn't describe Musk as a pure money grubber, I honestly do not believe Musk is as far down that spectrum as popularly believed.
Elon's more of the real deal than most of the ecosystem out there.. his degree of belief is evident post Paypal. Most exits of that scale spawn VCs or incubator dons..
“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”[1]
Why is it that some of us here feel the need to constantly worship at the feet of demigod Musk, He Who Does No Wrong, and anything negative said about him is dismissed as slanderous propaganda by Big Automobile?
It's not just Car & Driver, there have been recently discussions on HN also where it's been shown many times over that the $500 figure is straight out to lunch and grossly misleading.
Why is it that some of us here feel the need to constantly worship at the feet of demigod Musk, He Who Does No Wrong, and anything negative said about him is dismissed as slanderous propaganda by Big Automobile? What is this, the USSR?
I appreciate what Elon Musk is doing to advance electric cars and wean us off of oil, but he is a shrewd businessman subject to the fallibilities of all shrewd businessmen. He is neither a messiah nor a saint.