What is Digg?Sponsored by Best Buy
He sings, he strums, and he works at Best Buy. view!
youtube.com - Musician and Best Buy employee, Keith Parsons, rocks his Best Buy holiday campaign audition.
35 Comments
- inactive, on 06/24/2009, -1/+19Nothing says "credibility" like a bitch fight via blogs.
- Barackalypse, on 06/24/2009, -0/+12"Musk says that Tesla will be profitable by next month, thanks to lower material costs, and increased Roadster Sport sales"
Very good, but how long will it take to earn back all its R&D costs from those early years where it sold absolutely nothing? - ripple123, on 06/24/2009, -2/+10lots of people have good ideas. that dosent really count for all that much, unless you can actually implement them. imho, elon musk took the steps nessecary for tesla motors to become a viable business. and that included firing someone who, by most reliable accounts, seemed more concerned with his own status than the wellbeing of tesla motors. imho.
- GeorgeClayton, on 06/24/2009, -0/+6With a sale price of $100k, even with an extremely generous 50% profit margin, would require 14020 sales.
- ShellShock11, on 06/24/2009, -1/+6Tesla has had a rough existence, it will be interesting to see if they make it.
- inactive, on 06/24/2009, -0/+4Sounds personal
- TheTyrant63, on 06/24/2009, -0/+4Being a public company is a good way to get funding. But as a start up one should seriously weigh the options because if you arent careful, the creator can be pushed out by a greedy board. Basically, one shouldnt go public unless they have too, or if the final product has already hit the market with good results, so you can in turn use the extra funding to expand faster.
However, I have no real knowledge on who did what on in this case. Just think before you leap. - ZippyV, on 06/24/2009, -1/+4Who says they have to pay back all the R&D costs with only the first model?
- inactive, on 06/24/2009, -0/+3Maybe that's a per unit margin? They have likely been operating at a loss per unit, not counting dev costs or sg&a. They aren't even close to recouping the $700m unless they turned a million dollar plus per unit profit.
- DarkShroud, on 06/24/2009, -0/+3Well they're getting the grant money they needed for the model S or whatever is called. They also beat their projected pre-order totals. Sadly Ford will most likly beat them to the low end of the market with the Electric Focus in 2011.
- ZenDriver, on 06/24/2009, -1/+3Sunken costs are well, sunken. Gone. History. Companies that worry about them are stupid.
As long as Tesla can get cash flow positive within the next quarter or so, than they will be OK. Once they stop bleeding money, they get a whole lot in the way of breathing room and the sunken costs haven't gone down a rabbit hole - that capital created a significant number of technologies Tesla can leverage in the future. They can build different models of vehicle by simply scaling the battery pack/motor. They can license/OEM that technology to other companies (the genesis of the Diamler deal). Once the money bleeding stops, they can get the engineers focused on finding ways to cut costs (which they are already doing).
If Tesla can execute on the Roadster plan well and if this $400M in loans from the DoE really does get the Whitestar off the ground, than the investors who put down that original $700M are going to be very pleased in a couple of years when the valuation sheets come around. - yocouchdigga, on 06/24/2009, -2/+4the troll is weak with this one...
- GeorgeClayton, on 06/24/2009, -1/+3The start-up car business is one of the messiest businesses to be in. Your contracts have to be so tight even the hardest-ass lawyers scream "wedgie."
A few years ago I met an upcoming car designer online, a man with unlimited talent. Just over a year ago he landed a contract to design an exotic car for a similar company. Now the CEO of that company is claiming to have designed the car. He's told me of other nightmares as well. Last I talked to him, he now has a lawyer, and studying industrial design, business, and marketing books. He said something about keeping quiet & a plan "because internet battles are immature." - rmxz, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1Seems the Godfather quote is appropriate here: "nothing personal, Sonny. It's just business".
- bombula, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1These kinds of stories, which are entirely about horrifically bad management, always make me laugh.
This is what you get when you put try to get hotshot engineers - probably with Aspergers or other autism-spectrum or antisocial personality disorder - to work together without any actual management: they get into a pissing contest every time. The problem, of course, is that starting in the 1980s these types of engineers began to make a lot of money because of IT - both software and hardware. So basically you've got a bunch of computer nerds who think they're the world's greatest businessman because they sold a website for $300 million or whatever trying to actually run a real company instead of ... a website.
You need real management to get douchebags like these guys to work together. It's like being a little-league coach: you have to sit them together down for an hour every morning and tell them over and over to play nice, to work together, to share, to put things back where they found them, and all the other things that normal people learn in kindergarten.
If these guys were managing the business the way a business SHOULD be run, then they couldn't possibly be able to point fingers at one another for things like supply-chain errors: they'd have reviewed and approved one another's decisions at executive meetings every morning. It's called working as a team instead of being an idiot egomaniac running a little kingdom with a Napoleon complex - when you're not out crashing your million-dollar McClaren F1 tiny-penis-compensator like a fool.
And investors and taxpayers want to give these morons money because they're 'geniuses'? Friggin ridiculous. - makotech222, on 06/24/2009, -5/+6Im on musk's side. I dont know the whole story, but Eberhard sounds like a D-bag
- Demos27, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1Is car news this empty to be posting this. There are always bitch fights going on and hearing about it with some company which is overhyped and really of no value so far to this world makes it even more worthless. If I want to see a bitch fight I'll watch Jerry Springer, at least they'll beat each other up.
- rmxz, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1This isn't the first time Musk published alternative histories of companies after disputes with founders of companies he's involved with. Elon sounds like a brilliant businessman; but I'm not sure I'd want him as a major investor in a company I had stock in.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/tech/paypal/an-alterna ... "An alternate history according to Elon Musk
...
Musk explains how he stayed friends with the Paypal crew — even after Peter Thiel, one of the founders, funded a hostile account of the company's history."
http://valleywag.gawker.com/tech/paypal/sequoia-er ... "Elon Musk has disappeared from Sequoia Capital's gallery of its greatest investment hits
...
He was involved in Paypal only in so far as he managed to talk his way into a 50-50 merger with the successful online payments service, and served as CEO until his wayward management style provoked a staff revolt. ... The story explains one of the Valley's key rivalries. The real Paypal founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, were so heavily diluted by the combination that, when Paypal was sold to eBay for $1.5bn, they owned well under 10% of the company. "
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5079875/is-elon-musk-a ... "SCHEMES: Is Elon Musk aiming to take over Tesla?
...
Why do I think this is a likely scenario? Because Musk has done something similar before.
When Musk briefly served as PayPal's CEO, he'd run the company's bank account to six weeks' worth of cash. PayPal insiders say Musk was pulling "financial machinations" to maintain his control of the company — but the board fired him instead and replaced him with cofounder Peter Thiel, who steered the company to its $1.5 billion purchase by eBay.
Unfortunately for Tesla, there's no obvious white knight like Thiel on the horizon."
Disclaimer: Valleywag seems to like writing negative portrayals of Musk and I have no way of knowing myself which side's story to believe. - rmxz, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1Or it might be just a mean way of fighting over ownership stakes in the company.
Here's an example from a different company of how petty and mean such fights can get: http://abhisays.com/sofware-companies/why-paul-all ...
"During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS, Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die. As a result of this betrayal, he lost his trust over his friends and his illness became more serious and doctors suggested him complete bed rest and no further work."
For another example, Google for the tensions and blog-flamewars between Musk and the PayPal co-founders. - rmxz, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1It's worth noting that Musk went through a similar flame-war with PayPal's founders as well:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5079875/is-elon-musk-a ... "Because Musk has done something similar before."
http://valleywag.gawker.com/tech/paypal/an-alterna ... "An alternate history according to Elon Musk" - inactive, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1That's what makes it so pathetic. Adults let the courts handle these things, not boo hoo on their livejournal about how someone was mean to them.
- ripple123, on 06/24/2009, -3/+4it is going through the courts too, in case you overlooked that little fact.
- sockpuppets, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1Elon Musk did not start Paypal. He started x.com, a banking initiative, which ultimately failed but not before it merged with Paypal.
Paypal saved Elon Musk, not the other way around.
I have had very personal interactions with Musk and find valleywag's interpretation of his actions fairly accurate.
If you type x.com into a browser you'll see it still goes to paypal. - aegis17, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1This situation required an immense amount of funding from the get-go. R&D and production costs of this car are astronomical; they couldn't have gone more than a few months as a private company. Going public was the only way they could ever release a product.
- nurbsenvi, on 06/24/2009, -0/+1Embarrassing!!
- catdawg555, on 06/24/2009, -2/+2I have no dog in this fight i missed the one where Tesla is GOD! yeah right. I do admit he was a genius but you have to admit Edison was a up by the bootstraps uneducated genius too . And yes he was wrong on a lot of things but so was Tesla they were both ummmm weird by todays standards .
- GeorgeClayton, on 06/24/2009, -1/+1Specifically $701 MILLION according to that website....
- catdawg555, on 06/24/2009, -4/+3Thought i would get a response out of you Tesla fans ummm hows that light bulb doing for you and about 999 other patents that you claim are stolen?
- TDDebug, on 06/24/2009, -3/+2He started PayPal. And I think he's actually Jewish.
I'm not one for stereotypes but... - 600Burger, on 06/24/2009, -3/+2Hows that DC transmission going for ya?
- Meor, on 06/24/2009, -5/+3This guy must be a D-bag, here's the reasoning. Why would the company fire him? Companies don't tend to fire co-founders with inventive ideas. From a monetary standpoint the guy is probably tied to the company's success if he owns a lot of stock, the only thing they can do is fire him which would only take away his salary, probably a small amount compared to his stock ownings. The company wouldn't even save his salary money because they're going to have to litigate this patent against him. The only way things add us is with this guy being a dbag with a lot of clout but incorrectly wielding it.
- makotech222, on 06/24/2009, -7/+3Very soon, because i believe orders are maxed out already, and GM is falling under, and something needs to fill the extremely large vacuum left behind.
- 2Six119, on 09/10/2009, -11/+4Eberhard had a good idea and Elon Musk muscled him out of the company.
- JoeHague, on 06/24/2009, -10/+2techcrunch sucks/
- catdawg555, on 06/24/2009, -13/+4Tesla sucks Edison rules!
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is