Einhorn increased his short in Netflix today. I wonder how he feels about Tesla
Wonderful! Triangulator?Damn you!
I watched the entire thing and now I feel this urge to become a triangelist.....
And I can't even find how to spell that correctly.............
when did MMD become unintended acceleration?
Not surprising from the years I spent working in Michigan... Plenty of people leaving that state, becoming Michigoners.
I note that he does not mention how many shares were involved. I'm inclined to think that he is just making noise in the hope that the $TSLAQ lemmings will follow along.
So Karen, let me belatedly thank you profusely for this accurate blow-by-blow reference. Makes all these highly relevant facts so much easier to find for posterity (almost wrote prosperityThird Row Podcast summary:
Personal backstory...
- Interview at Gene Wilder's old house. Has a solar roof now.
- Musk initially thought Twitter was stupid, so he deleted his account. Someone else started tweeting in his name, saying crazy things. Another person convinced him that Twitter is a good way to get your message out, so he figured, if someone's going to say crazy things in his name, it should be him
- Not an investor. Only invests in his own companies, which is quite unusual. Funds new companies with loans against Tesla and SpaceX - about $1B of debt on them. You see people on Forbes and whatnot acting like he has the stock and the cash, and that "somehow he's just sitting on the cash, doing nothing, hording resources. No, it's not like that; I mean, I could just give the government the stock and they could run things, but historically, they're not good at that."
- Capital allocation ("may get me in trouble"): "What you actually care about is the responsiveness of the feedback loops to maximizing the happiness of the population. If more resources are controlled by entities that have poor response in their feedback loops, such as a monopoly or small oligopoly, or in the limit, the monopolistic corporation to its limit is the government. That's not to say that people who work for the government is bad; it's just that if those people are put in a better operating system situation, the outcome will be much better"
- "You want to have a competitive situation where it's truly competitive and companies aren't gaming the situation, and where the rules are set correctly, and you need to be on the alert for regulatory capture, where in fact the referees are in fact controlled by the players. The players should not control the referees. Which can happen. That happened for example with the zero emission vehicle mandate in California, where California was really strict on EVs, but the car companies managed to - frankly in my view - trick the regulators into thinking, 'you don't need to be so strict on EVs, fuel cells are the future'. But fuel cells are many years away - forever - so they let up the rules, GM recalled the EV1, and crushed them against the wishes of the owners."
- "The owners of the EV1 - which wasn't that great of a car - the owners held a candlelit vigil at the junkyard where the cars were crushed. Like a prisoner being executed. When was the last time you even heard of that for a product? Listen man, they're not doing that for any other GM product! Have you thought about doing the EV2? It's sometimes hard to get through to these guys."
- Talks more about how oligopolies tend to form, and how it's harmful. Mentions the candy oligopoly. "And dog food!" "You think you're buying from different companies, but it all funnels up to just like three companies. You need to have a good competitive forcing function - if a company makes worse products for the consumer, then it should have less prosperity than a company that makes better products for the consumer:"
- "When I was in high school, I thought I'd most likely be doing physics at a particle accelerator ... want to figure out the nature of the universe. But things went along, and the Supercolliding Superconductor got cancelled, and I was like, whoa... what if I was working at a place like that and it got cancelled?"
- "I had an existential crisis when I was 12 years old. What's the world about, what's the meaning of existence? So I made the mistake of reading the Nietzsche, and was like... whoa... don't do that... not until later... he's got issues. But then I read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, which is actually quite a good book on philosophy. And we don't really know what the answer.. the universe is the answer, but the issue is, what are the questions we should be asking to understand the nature of the universe. And the degree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we'll be able to ask the questions to understand why we're here and what it's all about. So to take the set of actions that are most likely to result in us understanding what questions to ask about the nature of the universe."
- "... things that I thought would be... I thought this was not a profound insight, but rather an obvious one... the internet would fundamentally change humanity, as humanity would become more of a superorganism. The internet is like a nervous system. Now suddenly any part of the human organism anywhere can have access to all the information, instantly. Imagine if you didn't have a nervous system, your fingers wouldn't know what's going on, your toes wouldn't know what's going on... you'd have to do it by diffusion. And the way information used to work was by diffusion."
- Was on the internet early because he was in the physics community. But back then it was all text and not user-friendly.
- "Sustainable energy was actually something I thought was important before the environmental issues became as obvious as they are. Simply because if you mine and burn hydrocarbons, you're going to run out of them. It's not like mining metals; we recycle steel and aluminum, it's not a change in energy stage. With fossil fuels,you're taking something from a high energy state, you're burning it to to a low energy state like CO2 which is extremely stable. We won't run out of metals, but we will run out of mined hydrocarbons. And then necessarily, if you have billions, ultimately trillions of tonnes of hydrocarbons buried deep underground, and you move them from underground into the oceans and atmosphere, you will have a change in the chemistry of the surface. Obviously. Then there's a certain probability associated with 'how bad will that be?'. And the range of possibilities goes from 'mildly bad' to 'extremely bad'. Well, why would you run that experiment, ever? Especially when you have to go to sustainable energy anyway. Why would you run that experiment? It's the maddest thing I've ever heard."
- "The obvious thing is to have a carbon tax. It's a no-brainer. 90% of economists would say this. Markets work well if you have the right price on things. If you have a price of zero... well, people behave accordingly."
- "I graduated from UPenn... physics, economics... then had to road trip to Stanford with Robin Ren... he grew up in Shanghai, yeah, very smart guy. He ended up continuing at Standard, while I ended up going on deferment a couple days into the semester. But I was going to be studying physics of high energy-density capacitors for electric vehicles. ... I'd worked at a company called Pinnacle Research that did high energy density capacitors. I was going to make a solid state version of what they were doing, which... it's going to get very complicated from a technical standpoint... they were using a ruthenium tantalum oxide... ruthenium is extremely rare and expensive, so you can't scale that... so can you find a substitute for ruthenium? But they were able to get to energy densities of a lead-acid battery with a very high power density."
- "With the advent of high energy lithium ion batteries, a capacitor is not the right path. ... It's unnecessary. I think it's possible, but it's unnecessary at this point"
- Dry electrodes are a big deal, a much bigger deal than they seem. But they're not the only thing they acquired Maxwell for.
- Getting the first wholly foreign-owned factory: China initially demanded a partnership. Tesla pointed out that they're small and young, that major Chinese automakers already had existing foreign partners, that wholly Chinese-owned companies like Faraday operated in the US, etc, and talked to them for several years; eventually China decided to change the law.
- Capex: "I think the big difference is that we're way less dumb than we were"
- More output from lines in the US as well. Model 3 body line only ever designed to do 5k cars per week; now doing 7k. Turned off a lot of unnecessary things to get 40% more production, while decreasing costs and improving quality.
- Model 3 body line in China much simpler and easier to understand. Got rid of "unnecessary movement"
- Asked about the biggest complaint about the Ashlee Vance book: That it portrayed him as firing talented people without reason. That people found that a person was no longer there and assumed they were fired with no reason.
- Talked about when he moved to Canada with $2k and a suitcase of books at age 17. Stayed at a hostel for a couple days then took a Greyhound across the country to Swift Current, Saskatchewan to a cousin's son's wheat farm to work (cleaning silos, did a barn raising, etc etc). On the way, the bus company accidentally left his clothes at a little town en route.
- Got back on the bus and went to Vancouver where an uncle was in the lumber industry making equipment. Worked chainsawing logs and cleaning out boiler rooms where they boil the pulp. Had to crawl through a steel tunnel with only one entrance / exit in a hazmat suit and shovel steaming sand and mulch out of the boilers to clean them out. Really bad for the claustrophobic, and you had limited time before you had to leave or risk hyperthermia. You have to block your only exit with what you're shoveling, passing the material off to the next person to shovel outside. Extremely dangerous; if you got stuck in there, it'd be extremely hard to get you out. But he did it because it was the best paying job he could get.
- Applied for college at Queens University and UPenn. College in Canada is affordable, but he was really worried about being able to afford UPenn. But he got excellent scholarships, which allowed him to go there and do physics / economics (where he was studying new supercapacitors for electric cars).
- Took a road trip to Stanford in '95, and realized the internet was about to explode big. Realized he could always go back to electric cars, but the internet was not going to wait. Put Stanford on deferrment and started Zip2.
- Zip2 started off with maps & whitepages - believes it was the live-maps site on the internet. Had patents on them, which have since lasped. Wrote the whole initial codebase himself, since there wasn't anyone else. When Kimbal joined with $5k, that was a lot. When the website was broken, it was likely because he was compiling code, because there was only one computer. Had to code at night so as not to mess them up. They were basically squatters in the office of an ISP (470 Sherman Way); the landlord was out of the country.
- Kimbal didn't do any coding, but he did a little html. Elon coded at night.
- Almost nobody he talked with back then understood the internet. Even on Sand Hill Road - most of the VCs had never used the internet. Were really bored. Who's made money on the internet? Nobody! Attitudes really changed when Netscape went public.
- He had tried getting a job at Netscape, at "the only internet company" that does software, even hung out in the lobby trying to get their attention. Led to him starting his own internet company.
- Their first investor gave $3M for 60% of the company. Which he thought was crazy - they're going to give us $3M for what's effectively nothing? They had like 5 people
- "I don't know about it being the good 'ol days - we were just trying to be able to stay in the country!" Kimbal was there illegally. Tried to get a visa, but it was impossible. "We had to break the news to the VC firms [we were courting] that we don't have a car, we don't have an apartment, and we're illegal." Musk: "No, *you* were illegal!" (laughter) Musk: "I was legal but my visa was going to run out in two years." But the VCs were great, the lead investor's wife was an immigrant from Canada, and they helped them take care of their status, gave them a salary so they could actually get a car, etc.
- Morning they were supposed to present to the partners, Kimbal went to Toronto to their mother, and was returning and border control wouldn't let him fly back. So a friend picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Buffalo border, and used the excuse that they were going to see the David Letterman Show to get across.
- Kimbal remembers Elon pitching his involvement in Zip2 to him as to work with Yellowpages companies. Elon remembers it differently - "I didn't even know any yellowpages companies!" They actually tried at one point, pointing out that they'd just put their books online, it'd cost them very little, they'd still own all the company, and the companies were super-arrogant. One picked up a book and literally threw it at Kimbal, saying, "You actually think you're going to replace this?" Thrown out of the office.
- They had expected the entrenched players to be their biggest customers, but it turned out it was the newspapers were better partners. Their ad revenue was being eaten away by Craigslist and seemed to have a better understanding of how important bringing their business model online was.
- The big thing they did differently with mapping that hadn't been done before was live vector-based mapping. That previously, any map on the internet was just a static image, while their maps were "live". It seems so absolutely normal today, but back then it seemed like an impossible thing. They had to cheat and use Java applets, but it let them transfer vector data rather than images, which made it super-fast.
- Made a lot of tools that made it easier to build websites, which are now abundant, but which were rare then.
- Used Navtech data, being built for Hertz in the pre-Garmin data. Took that data, which they got for free (Navtech spent $300M developing it), with the only contract terms for it being that if they ever made money, they'd have to pay a percentage.
- They had a more advanced search engine than Yahoo, which dominated at the time, but it was being misused in his opinion, only locked up in these media companies. Very frustrating to Elon. But then came Compaq that was acquiring a bunch of small companies to create a competitor to Yahoo, which at the time was seen as an unstoppable juggernaut.
- Elon's frustration with having the tech he'd built up not be able to be used by regular people is what pushed him into another internet startup (X.com, later Paypal) rather than going straight to something like SpaceX or Tesla. Had to startup something that was low bandwidth, since most people were on dialup, so things like video were right out. But there was a huge gap in one low-bandwidth field, which was money transfer.
- Early days of Paypal, there were some banks trying to compete. Ebay had Billpoint too. In the early days of Ebay they had an issue with trying to get payment for stuff; people were literally mailing checks to each other. Super-slow transactions.
- Main other competition was Confinity; crazy amount of talent between both X.com and Confinity, and many of the people in the two went on to start up major internet companies, like Yelp and Youtube. Ultimately decided it'd be best to merge the two - did so and raised $100M in the space of 3 weeks - luckily immediately before the Dotcom crash. Merged company was initially called X.com, but later changed it to their main product, Paypal.
- Musk still thinks that Paypal should have focused more on becoming a full-featured bank, not just an online purchased system. Their main bottlenecks and costs were where they had to connect to the existing banking system; the more that they would have kept people within their ecosystem, the more profitable it would have been for them, and the more it would have strangled existing banks, becoming a financial juggernaut. But Paypal never really built an ecosystem, just a payment system. Musk was vetoed; what he was proposing sounded risky, at a time when internet companies were dropping like flies, while Paypal (as a payment system) was a straightforward product.
- With Paypal sticking to a relatively straightforward, "boring" product, after it was acquired, most of the original talent lost interest and moved on to other things (which is why so many companies spun off of the "Paypal Mafia" as they're nicknamed). It's almost like all that market cap still exists, but it's spread out into all these other companies.
- When they were starting Tesla, they were inspired to be the GM of the 21st century. 4 years later, GM went bankrupt.
- Supports realtime direct democracy; doesn't like how industries write laws that entrench their position, and laws that are too long for even the people passing them to understand them, let alone the general public. Thinks it should be easier to remove laws than impose them.
- Got a near-death case of malaria in January 2001 during a December vacation to South Africa with Kimbal. Used to go out into the bush often, never took malaria tablets. Did that time. Got back to the US, and couldn't figure out what was wrong with Elon. Their uncle, a doctor in South Africa, insisted it was malaria, but Elon and Kimbal dismissed that at first.
- Maye sat next to his bed for five days with him out of it; he was yellow. She had to get him pajamas during that time. She knew he was starting to recover when he suddenly realized, "So... there's bunnies on my pajamas?" He lost 50 pounds during his illness, and it took six months to get back to normal.
- During his recovery he was thinking a lot about what to do next. Considering something related to space. "If someone told us in 1969 we'd not be back in the moon in 2020... you might have been punched, it's like, what's wrong with you, it's so insultingly rude to the future of humanity." Went on NASA's website to figure out when it was currently being planned to send people to Mars... and found nothing. He later found out it was official NASA policy to not talk about it. Bush had asked for a plan to send people to Mars, and they came back with a $500B plan, which was political suicide, so NASA was directed to not talk about manned Mars missions. According to what Elon was told when he inquired about it. This inspired his "Mars Oasis" mission idea, where he wanted to send a mini-greenhouse to Mars to inspire a renewed interest in Mars settlement.
- Went to Russia in 2001 to try to buy some ICBMs (SS-18s being decommissioned) to launch a mission, but they kept raising the prices. He could afford $9M, but not $20, and he had to buy two, because if one failed, his failed project would conversely have a net negative impact. Realized that if they were going to rip him off this much and keep changing the terms before he even signed on a deal, that they probably were going to rip him off even more after the fact.
- Frustration with how ridiculous and in general prohibitive rocket costs around the world were forced his hand into trying to lower them; it was clear that even had his mission been successful, it would not have a material impact on leading to civilization on Mars, as it would remain fundamentally unaffordable. And the rocket technology was getting better; in many ways, fundamentally it was getting worse.
- Started SpaceX in 2002. Thought he had a 10% chance of success. There had been many attempts to start private rocket companies; they all failed. It was a joke in the industry - how do you make a small fortune in the rocket industry? Start with a large one. And the fact that Musk was from the tech industry made him a punching bag. He was jokingly referred to as "internet guy". Found it very hard to recruit actual talent; few people wanted to leave a secure job at Boeing or Lockheed or whatnot to a company that was considered likely to fail, which is what led to him becoming chief engineer himself. And he credits his learning curve to being a major contributor to their first three launches failing.
- Shared an anecdote of one of the early launches, with an Air Force Academy payload. These people poured their heart and soul into it, but the rocket failed, with a fire causing an engine shutoff. But the satellite flew through the fairing onto a ballistic arc back to the island, and crashed into a shed. So they picked it up, relatively intact, and handed it back to the Air Force Academy. "We didn't lose your satellite! It may need some repair...."
- Startups really fun in the beginning. Later you get to the "chasm of doom" (for example, 2008) that you have to cross, years of grief.
- 2003 Rosen and JB called him up and set up a lunch - initially talking about space stuff. They then transitioned to electric cars, with Elon mentioning his history working towards EVs in college, and they offered him a ride in the tzero. Musk loved it, and tried to convince AC Propulsion to commercialize it; they had no interest, as it would have taken too much work to make it into an "actual car". He really pestered them a lot. But what they wanted to make was a $70k electric Scion. Musk was like, dudes, you're not going to sell these, you'll sell like 14 of them. But he was like, "Even though this is the dumbest idea ever, I'll fund 1/10th of this. But it's going to fail! But you guys, if you're not going to fund the tzero, do you mind if I do it?" And they responded that that's fine if you and JB want to. But there's two other groups who want to do so too, you might want to team up with them. And Musk breathed a sigh of relief - oh, this one's going to be easy then! (everyone laughs) He only ever met one of the other teams, though - Eberhard's.
- Musk considers Eberhard to be the worst person he's ever worked with. "He's literally the worst person I've ever worked with. I want to make a note of this. And I've worked with some real douchebags! Okay, to be #1 takes a lot!"
- "His version of the story is that, out of the blue, he pitched me on starting an electric car company and convinced me to do it. Totally false. I was creating an electric car company, and Gage was like, 'Maybe you guys can team up'."
- Jammed an AC Propulsion powertrain into an Elise. In the prototype, literally ended up just jamming it in. The whole concept was a mistake. It weighed so much more than an Elise, so it invalidated all the crash tests. The AC ran off a belt fan, so they couldn't use it anymore, so had to change the HVAC. Etc - in the end, only 6-7% of the parts were shared with the Elise, and the costs ended up being crazy.
- In 2007, a new investor came in, and in the process conducted an audit of the company's numbers. He then told Elon, hey, the numbers that Martin is telling you about the Roadster are totally false. "What do you mean?" "It's more than twice what he's saying." "We'd have to sell it for a quarter million dollars in order to not lose money. We obviously had to fire Eberhard; there was no question about that. It turned out he had not only misled me, but had also instructed others to lie. When I say someone is like the worst person to work with... it's pretty bad."
- "Eberhard was fired in July 2007. At the time we didn't know he'd instructed other people to lie, so we didn't know it was bad, but once he left the building, we realized he'd orchestrated this mass deception. He also claims that he invented the name Tesla Motors, which is a lie, that was created by a guy in '95. And moreover, he knows this, as we had to buy the trademark. This whole bull**** backstory."
- Was hard to buy the trademark. Had to send Mark Tarpenning to the owner's doorstep and refuse to leave until the guy would at least come talk with them about selling the trademark. Was considering "Faraday" as a backup name. Tesla.com was even harder to get - took a decade and $10M. Cybersquatter.
- Talks about the search for a replacement CEO, and the difficulties of the fact that nobody in Detroit knew how to run a startup, and nobody in Silicon Valley knew how to make cars. Kimbal interjects, "Tesla is a company that you tried so hard not to become CEO of!"
- There's one joint employee between Tesla and SpaceX... apart from Elon.
). But I try. (Remember to feed the birds.)
