Tesla

Elon Musk, the electric car company’s chief executive, said he would “build products outside of Tesla” unless the board raises his stake to 25 percent (approximately $80B).

He neglected to mention what exact AI products he's referring to. Not sure if Grok is worth $80,000,000,000.

I made this as a comment in another thread, but figured it needed to be its own thread.

The annual SEC 10-k for 2022. Page 40 "Research and Development Expense".

2022 was 4%, and looking back at previous years 2019,2020, and 2021 were 5%. 2023 has not been released yet but the quarterlies suggest it went up a bit.

These numbers are totally reasonable for a car company, GM, Ford, Toyota, all hitting similar numbers. You know who isn't? Technology companies. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, all spending 3-6x as much as a percentage of revenue on R&D.

I just saw this on CNN and may be the first time I ever heard of something like this. Elon Musk is (practically) demanding he have his voting power doubled in the company. This after he sold huge chunks, such as to finance buying Twitter.

In a series of posts on X Monday night, Musk said that he would not want to grow Tesla to become a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics without a compensation plan that would give him ownership of around 25% of the company’s stock. That would be about double the roughly 13% stake he currently owns.

“I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla.”

So the 2nd block he’s essentially threatening to spin off and make competition.

But how does a public company address this? If they awarded him some GIGANTIC options, it would massively dilute existing shares. If they made another voting class of shares, x20,000 voting rights, they could just give a small pile of those, but what Board could transfer 12% voting interest in a public company based on some tweets? How would that be upholding their corporate responsibilities?

Is this some insider key to the sell off they’ve been experiencing? Cuz it’s frankly scary to me. And it’s scary because I think he might get it. Which does a lot to undercut the trust I have in the Board. I had been thinking of doing an option on them if they dropped to maybe 200-205. But this is just an ugly ultimatum that seems capable of vastly changing the value of the company.

OR am I blowing things out of proportion? I admit I don’t follow the company religiously and for all I know musk makes a post like this every month.

What’s everyone’s take?

I’m so sick and tired of every EV or Tesla related sub fighting tooth and nail to defend what happened in Chicago…when the fact of the matter is that Tesla fudged the EPA numbers (1), didn’t warn owners that their range could be cut upwards of 50% in those freezing conditions (2), and finally, a lot of people without the means to reliably charge their vehicles at home are bitching about backed up superchargers. (3)

Hot take; You shouldn’t buy an EV if you are unable to reliable charge it at home.

I don’t care if you live in an apartment. I don’t care if you live in an HOA. If you cannot do it, you probably should reconsider your purchase.

What happened is embarrassing and everyone is pointing the blame at everyone else except the range and lack of a MORE reliable and vast SC network.

How are they wanting to do mass EV adoption if there were lines and lines of vehicles trying to fill limited stalls?

I can guarantee you that most of those drivers did NOT intend to get to the SC with 0% - but with the cold bite to the battery, of course it drained faster.

Many news articles are playing it as an absolute thing that EVs can't handle the cold and of course to us who have driven EVs that is incorrect. So I think we are dismissing the article for being a fud piece and I personally did that myself.

But I was digging around a bit about it and in looking at the Tesla forums it seems like there are three to four stations that are completely down in that area and the stations that are up chargers are down so they're not completely down. it's a domino effect of bad circumstances where people get a low state of charge from just waiting or they drive to another station that might be open and working and then they end up waiting there so it gets even lower driving there and then even lower waiting. So it looks like it's just kind of snowballed into this really bad situation and in reading those Tesla forms it seems odd that there are multiple stations down and they've been fine for years.