rb Posted May 18, 2018 Share Posted May 18, 2018 The pacific ocean will suffice for the amount of water needed. Are you trolling now? Obviously I don't literally mean that there's no enough water, I meant that when you're trying to pipe in lots of water into the parking lot of SpaceX and pipe out lots of slurry, things get complicated quickly, including with logistics and permitting and such. Driving away with trucks filled with dirt, though, is a lot easier. No, I'm not trolling. I thought you were referring to the fact that there may not be water available since LA has water issues from time to time from drought. I was just pointing out that for the process sea water is just fine and that it's plentiful in LA. I'm not 100% sure what normally happens with the slurry. But I'm pretty sure that usually they have a waste water station on site where they process the slurry and recycle the water. I'm also not sure what the Space X parking lot has to do with anything. If you optimize a process to drill tunnels under the Space X parking lot it doesn't mean it's an optimized process to drill tunnels under a city. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted May 18, 2018 Share Posted May 18, 2018 The pacific ocean will suffice for the amount of water needed. Are you trolling now? Obviously I don't literally mean that there's no enough water, I meant that when you're trying to pipe in lots of water into the parking lot of SpaceX and pipe out lots of slurry, things get complicated quickly, including with logistics and permitting and such. Driving away with trucks filled with dirt, though, is a lot easier. No, I'm not trolling. I thought you were referring to the fact that there may not be water available since LA has water issues from time to time from drought. I was just pointing out that for the process sea water is just fine and that it's plentiful in LA. I'm not 100% sure what normally happens with the slurry. But I'm pretty sure that usually they have a waste water station on site where they process the slurry and recycle the water. I'm also not sure what the Space X parking lot has to do with anything. If you optimize a process to drill tunnels under the Space X parking lot it doesn't mean it's an optimized process to drill tunnels under a city. There's our problem. You haven't watched the video, right, so you don't know what was said. They described and showed their test tunnel setup, not what they would use to tunnel under the city. Their test tunnel opens into the SpaceX parking lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 Diesel Engines? That’s Elon’s BS. World leader is Herrenknecht. They have demonstrated 550m progress in a month through extremely hard rock in Norway. Doesn’t not like guys that have been doing nothing innovator for a 100 years to me. I am not claiming that Elon cannot do anything new, but it’s not like there is none out there innovating: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 There's our problem. You haven't watched the video, right, so you don't know what was said. They described and showed their test tunnel setup, not what they would use to tunnel under the city. Their test tunnel opens into the SpaceX parking lot. Actually I've watched parts of the presentation and read a couple of summaries of it. There's no point in spending an hour watching someone who is obviously BS-ing. From the presentation: 1. He proudly affirms that their TBM is all electric like it's an achievement. TBMs have been electric for a loong long time. This is like me going in front of an audience and proudly affirming that i can breathe. 2. He says that they've made modifications that made the TBM 3x more powerful. While this may be technically true it doesn't actually mean anything. It's very easy to make these machines more powerful. Power isn't a problem. Friction and not damaging the cutting head are the problems. 3. He proudly affirms that their TBM lays reinforcements as it moves along. This is nothing new. TBMs have been doing this for decades. See point 1. 4. Their TBM is powered by batteries and no cabling. This is probably out of necessity because no one would give them a mid voltage power line to play with. It also probably means that the TBM ran like crap. But again spoken like an achievement. 5. All the diesel crap replaced by electric is all bs. They haven't used diesel stuff in tunneling for ages. 6. I guess the big cop-out. This works when trying to drill a test tunnel from space x parking lot. Yea but you're preparing to drill tunnels under space x. You're doing the test cause you want to do this in the real world. Real tests are done under real conditions but at a smaller scale to be cheaper so you can work out the kinks in the process. By the way, anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of tunnel boring would know all of the above. What Musk did there is go in front of an audience that hasn't the foggiest about boring a tunnel and bs-ed his way through, acting like he discovered fire or the wheel or something. You're just getting upset because I called BS on your boy. Btw, it's not true that the tunnel boring industry hasn't progressed in decades. There have been great improvements but they aren't made in the US. They're made in places like Germany and Japan. And you don't hear about them because Elon Musk doesn't tweet about them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tombgrt Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 If his drilling speed forecasts are as accurate as his production forecasts at Tesla, we'll have a good laugh about this in a few years! Claiming there hasn't been any innovation in this market for decades, lol. Who does he think he is fooling? Do people actually believe this crap?! I'm really getting fed up by his loose math and way of marketing his products by overpromising and underdelivering. And no, it's not because he was able to achieve extraordinary feats in other businesses, that it is replicable in other fields. He might be able to improve some stuff because he attracts capital and talent quite well, but by a factor of 100?! Btw, much of the increase in speed he has achieved so far, has simply come from halving the diameter of the tunnels, which has its price in terms of transportation capacity. So you need more tunnels anyway to get the same capacity. So you probably have higher total costs and upkeep to get the same capacity when you have to build more tunnels vs one big tunnel. At least, that is my take on it. I don't see how this would make much sense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enoch01 Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 By the way, anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of tunnel boring would know all of the above. What Musk did there is go in front of an audience that hasn't the foggiest about boring a tunnel and bs-ed his way through, acting like he discovered fire or the wheel or something. ... Btw, it's not true that the tunnel boring industry hasn't progressed in decades. There have been great improvements but they aren't made in the US. They're made in places like Germany and Japan. And you don't hear about them because Elon Musk doesn't tweet about them. +1000 Anyone interested in starting to learn about state of the art should pick up the proceedings of the North American Tunneling Conference, held bi-annually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 By the way, anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of tunnel boring would know all of the above. What Musk did there is go in front of an audience that hasn't the foggiest about boring a tunnel and bs-ed his way through, acting like he discovered fire or the wheel or something. ... Btw, it's not true that the tunnel boring industry hasn't progressed in decades. There have been great improvements but they aren't made in the US. They're made in places like Germany and Japan. And you don't hear about them because Elon Musk doesn't tweet about them. +1000 Anyone interested in starting to learn about state of the art should pick up the proceedings of the North American Tunneling Conference, held bi-annually. Don‘t ever let the truth get in the way of a good story. His audience would have learned more watching YouTube videos on the subject than from Elon‘s talk. He is the master of fake Inventions. People believe hime because he did some really good work in SpaceX and to some extend Tesla and neglecting that he is even better at selling BS. ( Hyperloop, Tesla, Boring company). As ScottHall pointed out, the world lives on good stories and Elon is one of the best mixing truth with fiction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Investmentacct Posted May 19, 2018 Share Posted May 19, 2018 By the way, anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of tunnel boring would know all of the above. What Musk did there is go in front of an audience that hasn't the foggiest about boring a tunnel and bs-ed his way through, acting like he discovered fire or the wheel or something. ... Btw, it's not true that the tunnel boring industry hasn't progressed in decades. There have been great improvements but they aren't made in the US. They're made in places like Germany and Japan. And you don't hear about them because Elon Musk doesn't tweet about them. +1000 Anyone interested in starting to learn about state of the art should pick up the proceedings of the North American Tunneling Conference, held bi-annually. Don‘t ever let the truth get in the way of a good story. His audience would have learned more watching YouTube videos on the subject than from Elon‘s talk. He is the master of fake Inventions. People believe hime because he did some really good work in SpaceX and to some extend Tesla and neglecting that he is even better at selling BS. ( Hyperloop, Tesla, Boring company). As ScottHall pointed out, the world lives on good stories and Elon is one of the best mixing truth with fiction. Looks a bit of envy in air. When you go on air from West LA, going to build tunnel under tinsel town, it will be huge deal. However, someone calling BS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted May 20, 2018 Share Posted May 20, 2018 The BS part is not building the tunnel, it’s the $1 cost for a ticket. https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/05/18/1526655545000/This-is-Musk--when-s-the-crash--/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted May 21, 2018 Share Posted May 21, 2018 I don't know much about tunnels. It's really not my area. It's possible I've been duped about everything. Personally, the way I see it is that a lot of the things they talk about that people hold against them in the presentation are them just describing stuff to a public that, like me, isn't used to this stuff. You might not go to a tunnel boring trade show and talk about how your digger is all electric because everybody in the room knows, but if you make a presentation to an audience that will be 99.9999% people outside the field, you mention these things. Not to brag or pretend you're the only one who has it, but because it's interesting and educative. Other things might be actual mistakes, but people said all the same things in the early days of Tesla and SpaceX and yet here we are, so it's not like any wrong thing disqualifies the whole thing (it's called confirmation bias: You disregard everything that doesn't conform to your view and magnify anything that seems to prove your point). That's how I interpret most of these things, anyway. As for the rest, I think there's a high chance - as usual with Musk - that things will change, shift, transform, be delayed, be more expensive, etc - but I don't really care much about that. The interesting thing about it to me is that someone's doing it at all with this kind of ambition and vision and is actually making stuff happen pretty quickly (seems like yesterday that Musk was talking about the traffic problems in LA and how it was soul killing and he wished he could do something about it). I'm not seeing anyone else talking about orders of magnitude improvements and digging tons of tunnels under cities to try to solve the traffic problems that most of us never even conceived of improving by anything more than incrementalism and probably thought of as evergreen problems like taxes. I also find it pretty ridiculous to try to downplay Musk's other achievements. Like, oh, he only revolutionized and catalyzed massive progress in two incredibly difficult and entrenched capital-and-technology intensive industries within a decade, starting from almost zero, and going through all kinds of stuff that would've made anyone else quit and/or go bankrupt (2008-2009 alone...). Why should he be able to make any contribution to this other field, right? I'm sure it's true that other companies have some diggers able to do X or Y or it's been demonstrated that whatever, but from a higher vantage point, I'm seeing that digging tunnels seems to be ridiculously long and expensive and costs are only going up and that nobody's even proposing doing anything ambitious with the huge amounts of technical and financial capital that our civilization has at its disposal. We're spending more on all kinds of useless crap than trying to solve big problems that, so kudos to the people who throw their hats into the ring and stick their necks out rather than play it safe and follow the well worn path... It could all blow up, and Musk's the first one to say that on most of his endeavours he originally thought that the most likely outcome was failure. But that's not a reason not to try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tenyearsout Posted May 21, 2018 Share Posted May 21, 2018 Excellent post Liberty. Thank you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 The thing is not that he's explaining things to a public that is ignorant of such things as an educator. He's not saying that the TBM is electric. He's saying that they've made the TBM electric. Then there's all that nonsense about diesel and ventilation, power, batteries, etc. What he's trying to do is create a false narrative in order to give the impression that his company engineered huge efficiencies over current processes implying that he be able to deliver the output for a much lower cost. Which is flat out untrue. You can wrap it up and tie it with whichever color ribbon you want. But that is the definition of 100% pure grade bullshit. People have been digging tunnels for transportation under cities for generations. They're called subways. Yes digging those tunnels costs a huge amount of money. Musk's tunnels will too. The difference is that mere mortals need to have a business case and a budget before endeavoring to do so. Musk doesn't need to because he can take a pile of money and set it on fire. Apparently it's his superpower. Also Tesla is not some huge automotive success that upended the automotive business with a superior model. They have a tiny market share and can't even fulfill the demand for that. They're only success is getting a high market valuation - that's a very different thing. For comparison, Walmart was a huge retail success that upended the retail business with a superior model. Wherever Walmart went, they took market share. A lot of market share. They also had merchandise on their shelves and made money. But coming back to digging tunnels. Here's a question for you. That presentation video was about 1 hour long. You've obviously watched it. After you got push back on this here, did you go and spend at least an hour doing independent research on the physics, engineering, and operations of digging tunnels? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oddballstocks Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Edmunds: https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-3/2017/long-term-road-test/2017-tesla-model-3-monthly-update-for-april-2018.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobp Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Edmunds: https://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-3/2017/long-term-road-test/2017-tesla-model-3-monthly-update-for-april-2018.html Wow, That's worse than the CR review. That computer screen in my face would annoy the hell out of me. I'm obviously an old fart and have no understanding of consumer preferences, but I don't get why a touch screen works better than a knob to change my radio station. Yeah, I still listen to radio. It seems to me that the screen is dangerous. And if I'm not at my computer, I don't want it in front of me bolted on to my dasboard. Had to get my 2 cents in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 The thing is not that he's explaining things to a public that is ignorant of such things as an educator. He's not saying that the TBM is electric. He's saying that they've made the TBM electric. Then there's all that nonsense about diesel and ventilation, power, batteries, etc. What he's trying to do is create a false narrative in order to give the impression that his company engineered huge efficiencies over current processes implying that he be able to deliver the output for a much lower cost. Which is flat out untrue. You can wrap it up and tie it with whichever color ribbon you want. But that is the definition of 100% pure grade bullshit. Around 14:20 he says that all boring machines are electric. Doesn't look like he's saying that others aren't. You know what's easier to predict than the future? The past. I'm a patient guy. I'll just wait and see if when they come out with their internally designed boring machine, if it does better than what has come before, and if so, by how much. People have been digging tunnels for transportation under cities for generations. They're called subways. Yes digging those tunnels costs a huge amount of money. Musk's tunnels will too. The difference is that mere mortals need to have a business case and a budget before endeavoring to do so. Musk doesn't need to because he can take a pile of money and set it on fire. Apparently it's his superpower. I might not know much about tunnel digging, but I can do a bit of pattern recognition, and this is exactly what people said about Tesla and SpaceX just a few short years ago. So excuse me if the argument "others have done it and it's as good as it gets" doesn't resonate completely. No new automotive startups in decades, impossible for a small company to make a car that people will buy at what it'll cost, the competition has decades of engineering and design experience, any new car will look and drive like crap, electric cars are golf carts and will have worse performance, where will you charge them on long trips? You'll never get enough range! We've been making rockets since the V2s and thousands of top engineers - literally rocket scientists - at NASA and ESA and private contractors have spent billions working on this, not to mention all the military funding for ICBMs, they have looked at reusable rockets and low cost rockets already and studied them from all angles, what's Musk going to do that they can't with fewer resources and no background in rockets and no government backers and look his rockets are blowing up one after the other.. He's just some internet guy, what does he know about any of this? And the existing experts in all those fields weren't even doing anything in bad faith. They really thought that everybody was doing their best and that it was impossible to do much better or make things change faster than they were. Sometimes it does take someone with some rare traits to break the logjam and put all the pieces together in a new way. Also Tesla is not some huge automotive success that upended the automotive business with a superior model. They have a tiny market share and can't even fulfill the demand for that. They're only success is getting a high market valuation - that's a very different thing. For comparison, Walmart was a huge retail success that upended the retail business with a superior model. Wherever Walmart went, they took market share. A lot of market share. They also had merchandise on their shelves and made money. This shows how much you know. I've been following EVs on an almost daily basis for close to 20 years, and Tesla was the iPhone moment for the industry. Its influence is way outsized to its market share (mindshare, if you will). You can look at smartphones before and after the iPhone, and sure, with enough time maybe we'd have gotten to something pretty similar to the modern smartphone without it, but there's something that happened that changed everyone's perception, that catalyzed everybody else to throw away their previous plans and start building from that template, and it made things happen much faster than they otherwise would have (even Bob Lutz said that he could never have gotten GM to start developing PHEVs and EVs without Tesla). Basically all the EV that you're going to see come out from everybody in the industry are happening now and are specced the way they are because of Tesla. Personally, I don't give a crap about their market cap or profits or whatever, and it's definitely down on the list of priorities for Musk. If he cared about that, he'd go much slower and just slowly expand out of the high-end luxury-performance-EV niche and be nicely profitable (well, if he cared about money, he'd have gone into any other industry than these). But he cares about the tech and changing the status quo, so he has to build the biggest battery factory in the world, and then build more of those, and them try to make a model of EV that can be made by the hundreds of thousands, and build semis and crossover SUVs, etc, as fast as possible within a few years. That's kind of hard to do, so yeah, the road's pretty bumpy, and there's a good chance he'll fail. Here again, time will tell if he pulls it off. I don't have a horse in this race financially, but I want to see EVs replace ICEs as fast as possible, not over decades as the legacy automakers would've liked to see to avoid cannibalizing their existing sales and obsoleting their existing investments in ICE production. But coming back to digging tunnels. Here's a question for you. That presentation video was about 1 hour long. You've obviously watched it. After you got push back on this here, did you go and spend at least an hour doing independent research on the physics, engineering, and operations of digging tunnels? No. I'm not that interested in it, frankly. It's a bit boring (har har). Just like it doesn't look like you've looked much into EVs or rockets. But we don't have to know about everything, and I don't have to try to predict things when I don't have a horse in the race. I'll just wait and see what happens, and we'll see if it's all just BS and they can't improve on tunnel digging, or if they can actually make it faster and cheaper and more useful for society, and if their vision influences others to try new cool things. Personally, I don't really believe in all the glossy CGI presentations about everybody zooming around for a dollar and all that. But I like people with ambitious vision who actually work on improving things, and whether they succeed entirely or just a little, at least they moved things forward and didn't just care about building another social media app or going into finance and making billions by shuffling money around to very little societal use. I'll take 10 more Elon Musk over all the CEOs of nicely stable and profitable aerospace or automotive companies, or tunnel boring companies, that we have now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oddballstocks Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Musk is ambitious, his biggest downfall is relying on others to finance his visions. If you can generate internal cashflow you can do anything you want. Look at Google, they have internal cash flow that they can then redirect into moonshot projects. Same with Amazon, they're building rockets too, but they aren't relying on outside financing. To me that's Musk's fatal flaw, if you're relying on the goodwill of others you need to product a return, or eventually that goodwill will disappear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Musk is ambitious, his biggest downfall is relying on others to finance his visions. If you can generate internal cashflow you can do anything you want. Look at Google, they have internal cash flow that they can then redirect into moonshot projects. Same with Amazon, they're building rockets too, but they aren't relying on outside financing. To me that's Musk's fatal flaw, if you're relying on the goodwill of others you need to product a return, or eventually that goodwill will disappear. So he just has to first build a Google or Amazon. Piece of cake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nickenumbers Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 The thing is not that he's explaining things to a public that is ignorant of such things as an educator. He's not saying that the TBM is electric. He's saying that they've made the TBM electric. Then there's all that nonsense about diesel and ventilation, power, batteries, etc. What he's trying to do is create a false narrative in order to give the impression that his company engineered huge efficiencies over current processes implying that he be able to deliver the output for a much lower cost. Which is flat out untrue. You can wrap it up and tie it with whichever color ribbon you want. But that is the definition of 100% pure grade bullshit. People have been digging tunnels for transportation under cities for generations. They're called subways. Yes digging those tunnels costs a huge amount of money. Musk's tunnels will too. The difference is that mere mortals need to have a business case and a budget before endeavoring to do so. Musk doesn't need to because he can take a pile of money and set it on fire. Apparently it's his superpower. Also Tesla is not some huge automotive success that upended the automotive business with a superior model. They have a tiny market share and can't even fulfill the demand for that. They're only success is getting a high market valuation - that's a very different thing. For comparison, Walmart was a huge retail success that upended the retail business with a superior model. Wherever Walmart went, they took market share. A lot of market share. They also had merchandise on their shelves and made money. But coming back to digging tunnels. Here's a question for you. That presentation video was about 1 hour long. You've obviously watched it. After you got push back on this here, did you go and spend at least an hour doing independent research on the physics, engineering, and operations of digging tunnels? Rb writes well, he is smart and witty. I give RB 98 points because I was totally amused with his response. ;D ;D I agree with RB also, by the way. The beauty of this forum is that we share ideas and we can respectfully disagree... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 I don’t like about Musk that he is telling a lot of obvious BS. Facts and truth need to stand on their own, they don’t depend on who said it and what this person has done. Musk has and is doing some great things- no one can take it away from him. However his ambitions perpetually seem to be far greater than his funding sources, which sooner or later leads to him ending up broke, imo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SmallCap Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Musk is ambitious, his biggest downfall is relying on others to finance his visions. If you can generate internal cashflow you can do anything you want. Look at Google, they have internal cash flow that they can then redirect into moonshot projects. Same with Amazon, they're building rockets too, but they aren't relying on outside financing. To me that's Musk's fatal flaw, if you're relying on the goodwill of others you need to product a return, or eventually that goodwill will disappear. Your point about Musk and his financing being a weak point is very true. But your two examples are of companies as of now, but back in the day both of those companies relied on outside financing, Amazon was famous for saying that his shareholders shouldn't expect them to make a profit for many years. Yes now they have plenty of internal money but back then they were dependant on financing like he is... ok so maybe not just like he is, i don't think they ever had his cash burn but they both had serious cash burns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 I certainly can't defend Musk saying things that aren't true, knowingly or unknowingly, and I certainly don't have his risk tolerance and wouldn't run things so close to the metal as he does (but who's to say that's not a rational thing to do if you feel problems are big enough and there's enough urgency... Every extra year you take by slowing down has an opportunity cost in both how much you help and how far you ultimately get in your lifetime, if you don't blow up -- though even the risk of blow up isn't as high as it seems, IMO, because Musk has a niche of one that will almost always find funding somewhere). I also can't defend a lot of what Steve Jobs did on a personal level, especially when he was younger (everybody forgets that he matured because his youth was in the public eye and he became very secretive when older), or how Bill Gates got to where he is in business, etc. Doesn't mean I can't admire how a lot of people that are doing things very differently than I'd do them are accomplishing things. If we're waiting for a perfect person to admire, we'll wait a while. There's tons of criticism of even Buffett out there, and if some of it is correct (a lot of what I see is BS), it won't stop me from admiring the good parts and trying to learn from them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oddballstocks Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Musk is ambitious, his biggest downfall is relying on others to finance his visions. If you can generate internal cashflow you can do anything you want. Look at Google, they have internal cash flow that they can then redirect into moonshot projects. Same with Amazon, they're building rockets too, but they aren't relying on outside financing. To me that's Musk's fatal flaw, if you're relying on the goodwill of others you need to product a return, or eventually that goodwill will disappear. Your point about Musk and his financing being a weak point is very true. But your two examples are of companies as of now, but back in the day both of those companies relied on outside financing, Amazon was famous for saying that his shareholders shouldn't expect them to make a profit for many years. Yes now they have plenty of internal money but back then they were dependant on financing like he is... ok so maybe not just like he is, i don't think they ever had his cash burn but they both had serious cash burns. There's a term in tech, premature optimization. It's when you spend a bunch of time optimizing something that doesn't need optimization yet. I don't know of a similar term, but I feel like moonshots should be similar. You don't go for moonshots when you aren't sure if you can make payroll. I believe Amazon only raised capital once correct? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SmallCap Posted May 22, 2018 Share Posted May 22, 2018 Musk is ambitious, his biggest downfall is relying on others to finance his visions. If you can generate internal cashflow you can do anything you want. Look at Google, they have internal cash flow that they can then redirect into moonshot projects. Same with Amazon, they're building rockets too, but they aren't relying on outside financing. To me that's Musk's fatal flaw, if you're relying on the goodwill of others you need to product a return, or eventually that goodwill will disappear. Your point about Musk and his financing being a weak point is very true. But your two examples are of companies as of now, but back in the day both of those companies relied on outside financing, Amazon was famous for saying that his shareholders shouldn't expect them to make a profit for many years. Yes now they have plenty of internal money but back then they were dependant on financing like he is... ok so maybe not just like he is, i don't think they ever had his cash burn but they both had serious cash burns. There's a term in tech, premature optimization. It's when you spend a bunch of time optimizing something that doesn't need optimization yet. I don't know of a similar term, but I feel like moonshots should be similar. You don't go for moonshots when you aren't sure if you can make payroll. I believe Amazon only raised capital once correct? agree on the optimization concept. On amazon, I know he got some from his parents when he launched, he later raised a whole bunch from VC's and i think that might have been enough to sustain him to the big money raising event of an IPO, after that he used his shares as currency to buy some businesses. But your right I don't remember him having to constantly go back for more funding. Though Musk "Claims" that they don't need to raise any more money if you believe that sort of thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rb Posted May 24, 2018 Share Posted May 24, 2018 Totally normal behaviour from a 50B mkt cap CEO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk/teslas-musk-bashes-media-proposes-credibility-check-idUSKCN1IP27O?il=0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Investmentacct Posted May 25, 2018 Share Posted May 25, 2018 Totally normal behaviour from a 50B mkt cap CEO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-musk/teslas-musk-bashes-media-proposes-credibility-check-idUSKCN1IP27O?il=0 Sure, sleeping on factory floor when you are worth 20 billion is normal behavior as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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