Elon Is Gone Down to The Deeps, Can He Come Back Up For Air and Greatness?
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| Illustration by the New York Times. Photographs by Picture Alliance and Kjohansen |
People like Elon get bored easily if their brains are not being stimulated and at their maximum production. It's been a while seen we seen new things from him. We all hope he comes up for air. Soon the board of directors at Tesla will meet to consider a pay package for him. But whatever it is it should be astronomical, so how do you keep a mind like that occupied so he doesn't start destroying instead of building. This is my own though when I see him defending certain actions from Trump. He has never been a friend of the LGBTQ community, nor women's right including reproduction rights. He likes to dabble on the dark side to see the difference and feel stimulated. Remember when he allowed to be seen high like a kite with a humongous pot cigar sticking from his mouth. Actually, he is not the pothead guy, his brain works in a different orbit. You can see him string different things like family life, but it didn't work. Multi-dating famous ladies, it didn't work. I would love to interview one of his ex-girlfriends, it's my guess that he must be a dud in bed. But like him or hate him he is the genius of the 22 century. Believe me, I wish him luck and goodwill.
Adam Gonzalez, writer (Opinions expressed here are facts published and known information. My ideas of how he is or would be are my own characterization of Elon and nobody else's)
By J. Bradford DeLong
The New York Times
Dr. DeLong teaches economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.”
Elon Musk is not just another inconsequential Silicon Valley billionaire.
Most of his inconsequential peers have two primary accomplishments: showing up at the right place at the right time and being sufficiently arrogant to continue the course rather than diversify. Had their shoes been empty, someone else would have stepped into them, and things would have been much the same.
But Mr. Musk changed the world.
He wanted to jump-start the decarbonization of human civilization’s energy. He succeeded. He drove Tesla to create the electric vehicle industry as we know it. Yes, he overpromised. But he often over-delivered and over-delivered spectacularly. Truly wonderful things happened with Tesla’s performance as a technology inventor, deliverer, and deployer.
But “happened” is in the past tense. Much has changed since 2018, the year Tesla dreamed up an unorthodox pay package that, in theory, tied Mr. Musk’s pay to the company’s performance. Problem is, the performance was not for making high-quality cars or making affordable cars or making cars at scale. The performance was for pushing Tesla’s stock price up.
This pay package was, I think, bad for Mr. Musk. And it was, I am sure, bad for Tesla and, by extension, our nation’s crucial fight against global warming, by far. Tesla is now asking its shareholders to reapprove this pay package, which would hand Mr. Musk an eye-popping roughly $46 billion, making him, the world’s richest man, one of its highest-paid executives.
I have a recommendation for Tesla shareholders: Vote no.
The board promised Mr. Musk — at his urging — that if he made the board and the shareholders truly wealthy by boosting the stock price, by whatever means, he could have 12 percent of the company. Yet I believe this pay package helped drive his descent from visionary business leader to bizarre carnival barker. And that set of incentives and responses should not be validated.
A changing climate, a changing world
Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
What people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the types of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith points to how Australia shows the way on rooftop solar. Meanwhile, small changes at the office might be one good way to cut significant emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.
Here I need to back up and tell you what meme stocks are. The standard example is GameStop, a company that runs about 4,000 video game and electronics stores. Trading at $5 a share at the start of December 2020, its price rose to a staggering roughly $150 a share at the end of January 2021. Mr. Musk joined the fun by tweeting one word — “Gamestonk!!” — and the shares soared to $483 two days later, before beginning a long, jagged decline. As of the start of 2024, it was almost $17 a share, far above the $5 of 2020, even though nothing much had changed about its (struggling) business. And a recent revival of GameStop mania has since pushed it up to $30 a share.
Who is behind all of this crazy? It is not people who want to invest in a slice of Gamestop’s business over the long term. It is, rather, that people who are buying GameStop as a way of pledging allegiance to an idea, a meme, a cultural-technological movement of some kind — and a few hoping to get rich by tagging along and selling at the top. Past stock manias and bubbles involved people who believed that the company involved would be profitable or at least that they would be able to make money selling their stock to a greater fool than them who had just arrived in the marketplace and still believed. But GameStop stock became disconnected from the profit-and-loss statements of the 4,000 GameStop stores.
And so it has become with Tesla. It was no longer about getting better at making high-quality electric vehicles for which there was strong demand. For Mr. Musk, incentivized by his pay package, it became about a stock price that must go up.
After 2018, Mr. Musk went all in. He made noise, particularly on Twitter. He was still overpromised, but he no longer over-delivered; instead, he jumped from the moonshot theme to the moonshot theme to boost the meme-stock association of Tesla. Humanoid robots! Cybertrucks! Fleets of Tesla robotaxis! An artificial intelligence supercomputer whose brain would be all the idle Teslas in the world, networked! And the share price did zoom, making him the richest man on earth, from about $20, give or take, around 2018 to over $400 in late 2021 before beginning a jagged and often interrupted decline to its still lofty $174.
Tesla had always had build-quality problems. But it used to have a road map for fixing them. It used to have a road map for gaining manufacturing expertise, adding capacity, introducing models to crawl down from the rarefied technoexperiment and luxury car markets into the enormous market of providing what Americans see as their basic transportation. But those seem to have fallen away. The idea that there would soon be a truly affordable mass-market Tesla receded from real soon to maybe someday. Instead, we got the Cybertruck, for which demand is rather limited, as it is not set up to do the things that people who use pickup trucks need them for. Meanwhile, in China, BYD’s blade-battery technologies and process-manufacturing expertise grew by leaps and bounds.
Unlike GameStop, Tesla sells products a bit more critical to our future than games like Call of Duty. For the world, Tesla has been nothing short of a beacon of hope, a carbon-transition technological spearhead to a more sustainable future with less damage from global warming, via a rapid build-out of electric vehicles and power. For our shared future, the world very badly needs to return to the Tesla before 2018, when it was creating the societal knowledge of how to design and efficiently build electric vehicles at a truly ferocious rate.
A management focused on the actual business Tesla is engaged in is far better for society than a management focused on what the pay package incentivizes Mr. Musk to focus on every hour he spends working on the company: continuing the run of Tesla as a meme stock.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, with characteristic British understatement, “When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.” Voting for the pay package would validate this focus, and that is a damned shame, for Elon Musk is truly consequential. And that is a big deal.
Or perhaps shareholders should vote for the pay package out of fear: If Mr. Musk regards himself as betrayed, he may no longer spend time talking up Tesla and its share price — and without his meme stock mojo, the shares could falter. Toyota makes generally higher-quality cars and has revenue that in 2023 was more than four times Tesla’s but commands only about three-fifths of its total market capitalization. That is how far down Tesla stock could go.
But I argue that we must accept the possibility of short-term pain for a forever payoff. Tesla almost certainly accounts for a plurality of Mr. Musk’s fortune. SpaceX makes up the bulk of the remainder. And SpaceX appears to be in excellent hands, as he trusts the awesomely competent Gwynne Shotwell, who, as chief operating officer of SpaceX, has managed the marriage of fire and ice, building an organizational culture that combines an astonishing attention to detail with a willingness to experiment beyond the limits of what had been thought possible. She proves that Mr. Musk is capable of far better business judgment. A business judgment that Tesla desperately needs. Right now.
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