jschwefel
Tesla fan/TSLA, Model Y and Cybertruck owner.
In Drew’s own words…”I made the difficult decision to move on from Tesla after 18 years yesterday.”
This sure doesn’t sound like he was fired.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
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This sure doesn’t sound like he was fired.
we don't know if he had an ultimatum to do something he didn't want to do or leave
working for elon you need to be both and engineer and a leader
Raisin45567
Member
My hope is fired over a coordinated quitting of two top execs.
Krugerrand
Meow
As you can probably guess, I’m tired of the unnecessary drama displayed here and elsewhere.
Obviously, there’s risk associated in this case so it’s getting fixed by holding CTs at the factory. Depending on the fix we might see a SuperCharger recall, or mobile service recall, or a SC recall. There aren’t that many CTs out there with many concentrated in CA and TX.
I’ll take my CT as is, right now, and fix the pedal cover myself. Seriously.
Drumheller
Active Member
27 years in IT, I've never worked at a company that offered a sabbatical. You want a break? You have to resign. Maybe they will hire you back. Maybe.
I worked nearly 9 years in a company moving from edge of bankruptcy to multi billion valued public company. One time I asked for a 2 week long vacation. My manager did not like that. He finally agreed if I agreed to take my laptop and check my email every day. That was my "vacation". I warned that I was burning out. Didn't matter. He did try to talk me into staying when I finally resigned but it was a decided matter for me by that point.
I see many attitudes on this thread about the corporate world that I don't recognize in the experiences I've had. I started at 18. I'm 45 now. I've never seen a pension. I've not seen loyalty to employees from the top.
From speaking to employees, my impression is that Tesla is a better place to work than many places I've worked, but it is stressful and burns people out. I don't know why Drew left but 18 years in that kind of environment is an epic run.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
If adhesives work that well why is the problem happening? Did Tesla make a poor initial choice of adhesive? Did they fail to properly field test in enough conditions over enough time to find the flaw in whatever they did use?
The reason there's a (minimum) 1 week pause in deliveries is because a responsible company needs to go figure out why it happened-- and then how to properly fix it both in the field and in the factory.
"Just slap more glue on" is....an incomplete answer to any of this.
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
I don't think I've ever seen an instance of him saying that he personally wants to save mankind.
He has often pointed out the long-term consequences of random chance wiping out the only known existence of consciousness if mankind doesn't take steps to preserve it.
Then, he offers a few ideas toward that end and uses his talents to bring forward as much as he can in his lifetime toward achieving that.
All this has a basis in logic, reason, and the vision to bring forth a shared goal to reality.
Where is the tie to ego found?
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
This is a ridiculous question to expect an accurate answer to in an investor's forum. You would have to ask Drew, wouldn't you?
Or,
Ask yourself about why you make decisions when you do, then extrapolate.
None of us know that answer...and theoretically, the best clues should be in his own words (spending time with family, and finding the next interesting professional challenge eventually).
This is of course complete speculation on my part, but some possibilities:
Maybe some big challenge he was working toward has finally been "solved" in the sense that the path is now clear and obvious...and there will just be more mundane work to plod along that path to bring it all to fruition. Perhaps in that regard, the work ahead looks less interesting.
And, maybe, as time has gone on and he has become more wealthy, he has hit a personal crossing point between chasing work/wealth/professional desires versus spending more time with family.
That seems to fit with his own words.
I also suspect (again, just my own speculation and putting pieces together) that Karpathy left Tesla when he felt like the AI for FSD was "solved" and just more compute and video data and compute time was needed. Perhaps when he left in 2022, all of the needed methods and techniques were in place for FSD v12, and it just required that much time to collect all the data and build the clusters and get the neural network working.
So, hopefully theres something big coming in the next months or in a year or so in the areas where Drew worked. But even then, we won't know if that news is because of what Drew put in place before he left, or because his replacement got over some hurdle that had blocked Drew.
Personally, I am going to hold a half-full glass and believe that 4680 is on a good path, and the next big bump is just going to be copy pasting some new upgrades from their prototype line into the production line, and copy-pasting that production line a whole bunch of times.
As Sam Altman said, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.” (source)
You may disagree but I personally find it accurate in this decade of reading/listening everything Elon said.
The simple fact that he wants to be able to "control" AI and doen't want to develop AGI at Tesla if he's not in control (i.e. 25% shares) speaks volume. I'm not even saying that he's wrong, just that he really, really, really likes to be in control (WaitButWhy profile called him "the nanomanager"). Dating divas, driving McLaren's, carefully building a 125M followers Twitter profile are other clues. The man has an ego the size of Texas, and this is kind of the reason why he is who he is.
maybe his wife gave him the ultimatum
Andrej took a sabbatical
Isn't it pretty reasonable to have a giant-sized ego if someone (and the team(s) they lead) start landing rockets en masse?
Don't leave out the CT production line hour trim, the vehicles piling up in the pipeline, the still unexplained talk of the M2 going on the back burner with the only response being a knee-jerk announcement of a many months from now unveiling date for RT, chopping the FSD subscription price in half...
Clearly everything is going great!
What I do know is the margins are going to stay in a more normal range for auto companies moving forward.
Oh no. I'm the biz dev director of an IT company and I'm taking a half-year sabbatical next month. The plan is to bike from Vienna to Istanbul before traveling across South America. I got a stock package a few week ago so I hope I won't get fired from the company when I come back.
Oh wait, no worry: I work at a French company and taking a sabbatical is a legal right
I believe what we are hearing and seeing these last few weeks is part of a big pivot going on at Tesla.
Elon is on the one hand seeing how hard the car market can be (increasing cheap competition from China, high interest rates, huge capital expenditures) and on the other hand he is witnessing the huge steps FSD is finally making. The Reuters story last week about cancelling Model 2 to focus on Robotaxi wasn’t true, but may have contained a kernel of truth: Tesla will slowly be moving from traditional hardware (cars that people own and drive) to a company only producing autonomous cars, robotaxis, software (licensing) and robots.
This process will still take years - if only because the car business funds the R&D and provides the data. But I believe the 10% layoffs and the resignations of execs (who were probably given the opportunity to resign gracefully) are part of this pivot. I expect that the layoffs will not affect teams working in parts of the company which are considered to be future proof. The execs leaving now also did not work there.
Elon is on the one hand seeing how hard the car market can be (increasing cheap competition from China, high interest rates, huge capital expenditures) and on the other hand he is witnessing the huge steps FSD is finally making. The Reuters story last week about cancelling Model 2 to focus on Robotaxi wasn’t true, but may have contained a kernel of truth: Tesla will slowly be moving from traditional hardware (cars that people own and drive) to a company only producing autonomous cars, robotaxis, software (licensing) and robots.
This process will still take years - if only because the car business funds the R&D and provides the data. But I believe the 10% layoffs and the resignations of execs (who were probably given the opportunity to resign gracefully) are part of this pivot. I expect that the layoffs will not affect teams working in parts of the company which are considered to be future proof. The execs leaving now also did not work there.
Slight correction:
If I recall, the 25% desire wasn't for his personal control, but for his view of a balanced level of influence. Elon wants to keep control away from profit-hungry investment firms focused on short-term gains and no care for the longer-term future.
Elon wants himself (who he believes to value humanity over profit) plus "regular" shareholders who theoretically also care about something beyond this quarter's profits to be able to out-vote institutional shareholders that are motivated more purely by short-term profits. And, likewise, if Elon's own wishes become bad, then with "only 25%" he can also be out-voted by "the people".
Elon's tweet:
"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.
Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla. You don’t seem to understand that Tesla is not one startup, but a dozen. Simply look at the delta between what Tesla does and GM.
As for stock ownership itself being enough motivation, Fidelity and other own similar stakes to me. Why don’t they show up for work?"
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Anybody know offhand what Drew had for outstanding options? Saw mention they need to be exercised within 90 days of separation (and presumably some shares sold to pay taxes)
10k from a couple years ago included an Outstanding Equity Awards section showing options on like 500k shares, but more recent ones didn't have that section so probably not material but was curious.
10k from a couple years ago included an Outstanding Equity Awards section showing options on like 500k shares, but more recent ones didn't have that section so probably not material but was curious.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having an out sized ego, as long as the person is on the good side of the line that divides out sized ego with arrogance.
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