'We jokingly call Apple the Tesla graveyard. Cook gets our sloppy rejects. LOL' Welcome once again to our smorgasbord of tech quips, quotes and quibbles from the past seven days. This week, rocket man Elon Musk – a billionaire big-mouthed bloke who regularly features in QuoTW – outdid himself with this delightful swipe at Cupertino. Important engineers? [Apple] have hired people we've fired. We always …
Given the recent "downgrades" of Tesla stock, those engineers are maybe the first leaving the sinking ship. The Tesla is a boutique vehicle that is in effect a fashion statement. It is much like a Gucci handbag that hangs on a female's arm.
Spending $100k on a vehicle that won't get me to the ski slopes and back (a couple tanks of gas) is a bit silly. Sure you can go to nice overnight charging stations and get a fill-up, but it takes time.
As for software, the console is using Linux to do all of its work, which does translate to other platforms, so Apple is getting people with experience, good for them (and my AAPL stock by the way!).
I'm sorry when I hear statements like this from Musk. He's done an extraordinary job at Tesla; no need to say everyone who is not a fit for Tesla is somehow less than a capable engineer. People are often at their best in another environment. The guys who came up with the iPhone, the Mac etc are not "slackers" they're top notch in their business....leaving Tesla and getting a job with that organization doesn't mean you're sub-standard.....it simply means you weren't a "fit" for Elon's style....Jack Welsh at GE said it best..."sometimes a "B" in our organization, is an "A" in under different management."
"Gosh, you know what's really hard turning in the most profitable quarter of any company in history... oh, and doing it without massive government subsidies. Bitch."
Musk does some interesting things with his companies - SpaceX seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more efficient than NASA at getting things up into space - but it seems to me that every dime of profit he's made in SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity has come from the pockets of taxpayers. He's far more a crony capitalist than he is an entrepreneur.
Sadly, Apple also does dip its fingers into the public till (mainly tax subsidies for new facilities), but it's nowhere near the scale of Musk's ventures.
@ecarlseen: "every dime of profit"
Eh, did you mean revenue? I don't really know about the other two companies - they are private and information is not easy to obtain - but Tesla is most definitely not profitable. I would be very much surprised if either SpaceX or SolarCity turned out to be profitable, actually. This, of course, only strengthens your comment about tax handouts.
SpaceX seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more efficient than NASA
Is that "efficient" in terms of what they deliver at what price? If you are not profitable then you certainly can seem more efficient. Besides, it is not clear to me what is meant by "NASA's efficiency" - the US space program has always been driven by private enterprise, it's not like NASA build rockets themselves (they do make landers and rovers). So, SpaceX should probably be compared to ULA (Lockheed + Boeing) who make Delta and Atlas rockets. Again, this does not necessarily invalidate your statement (e.g., ULA certainly feel cost pressure from SpaceX, albeit not by 2 orders of magnitude), but it could benefit from some clarification.
"SpaceX seems to be at least two orders of magnitude more efficient than NASA at getting things up into space"
Taking into account who did all the difficult jobs of pioneering different approaches, finding out what worked at everything from rocket motors to life support, and which spends its budget on a few other things - like exploring Mars and getting probes out to the Kuiper Belt -
[citation with some real accounting figures very, very much needed.]
Otherwise completely agree. If anything (and I know the fanboys will not like this) Tesla has so far demonstrated the essential impracticability of electric cars, advertising dragster-like acceleration which is useless under real world conditions due to rapid battery depletion. And I say that as a deeply disappointed person who had hoped to have a decent electric car by now.
In some ways I agree and disagree with Elon. Fossil fuels, although seem nice and easy from a user perspective, are very pollutant and create smog. I am not a massive OMFGWTF melting the world concern type of person but more a case of still wanting to breath air rather than a bowl of soot particles constantly.
Personally I think electric powered vehicles are the future and we should be investing more heavily into it so that the transition is smoother. But that is where my agreement with him stops. I think battery powered vehicles are not the future, especially with Lithium based power sources as that have very limited range and we have limited amounts of lithium on this planet.
For electric powered vehicles to take off we need to have the convenience of petrol powered cars with the clean running of electric. In my book that means, hydrogen fuel cell or if batteries must be used. a MASSIVE/GIGANTIC leap in battery technology that is also not made of an extremely limited resource and charges as fast as fueling a car.
- SA
SA "a bowl of soot particles"
Petrol avoids 99.99+% of the soot you'd get from diesels.
If your city is infested with diesels and is "a bowl of soot particles", then it's possible that the modern petrol powered cars are helping to clean your air.
"Taking into account who did all the difficult jobs of pioneering different approaches, finding out what worked at everything from rocket motors to life support"
Are you thinking about the Nazis now? (Well, a very limited few of them, of course.)
The Musk fanboys are revolting.
They'll write several paragraphs 'proving' that the Model S is the cheapest possible car to own, but later admit that they can't possibly afford one (but can afford, for example, their 2014 Buick).
Mental blocks due to excess man-love I think.
It is also hard for one man bands to understand that people who do not succeed very well in one kind of organisation (theirs) may be very successful in another. It is easy for them to say that people who left were not very good - because that means they don't have to confront the possibility that their corporate management style may suck big time.
Nice guy to call ex employees sloppy rejects, it remains to be seen if that type of statements help him to find the most brilliant engineers. Until now this company just produced a $ 71.000,- useless hulk of a car for rich people, which is so much more easy than to produce a VW polo for under $ 10.000,-
Nearly 1000 miles in under 12 hours over an arbitrary route. A couple of very quick fuel stops.
Tesla can't touch this.
(No, SuperCharger stations aren't *actually* in place. And being solar powered, they don't work at night, LOL.)
And if my fuel tank wears out in ten years, it won't cost $40,000+ to fix.
Nice cars, too bad about the present state of the art in battery technology.
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