<story><title>Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/business/tesla-elon-musk-sec.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kirillzubovsky</author><text>These articles about Elon are interesting to me because Tesla could not have become such a valuable car company in such a short time if it wasn&amp;#x27;t for Elon, and that includes his personality.&lt;p&gt;Yet, many couch investors would prefer to have a CEO who is stable, boring and predictable. People want to put their money in for steady long-term returns, and not worry. Tesla is doing wild things which are causing crazy growth, but also crazy panic.&lt;p&gt;It seems the market really wants Tesla to slow down so they can sell more stock to an average risk-averse consumer, but Elon wants to keep running light-speed, regardless of the short-term worry that it might create. Neither is wrong, they just have different priorities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going to push back against this narrative, because it seems a lot of the &amp;quot;let Elon be Elon&amp;quot; arguments are neatly encapsulated in this line:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Tesla is doing wild things which are causing crazy growth, but also crazy panic.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;But the critics of Musk&amp;#x27;s behavior would respond, I think correctly, that there is a categorical difference between &amp;quot;wild things which cause crazy panic because they are high risk with high upside potential (&amp;#x27;crazy growth&amp;#x27;)&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wild things which cause crazy panic because they are high risk with little to no upside potential.&amp;quot; And while perhaps sometimes it&amp;#x27;s difficult to tell whether a certain Crazy Elon Thing falls into Category A or Category B, things like &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s accuse someone who criticized me of being a pedophile, that&amp;#x27;ll teach him&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;hey, we have nothing signed and this blatantly violates SEC rules, but screw it, it&amp;#x27;d be funny if I said we were going private at $420 a share, because 420&amp;quot;? Those are very clearly things that are in the &amp;quot;little to no upside potential&amp;quot; category.</text></comment>
<story><title>Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Tesla: Fight the S.E.C., or I Quit</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/business/tesla-elon-musk-sec.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kirillzubovsky</author><text>These articles about Elon are interesting to me because Tesla could not have become such a valuable car company in such a short time if it wasn&amp;#x27;t for Elon, and that includes his personality.&lt;p&gt;Yet, many couch investors would prefer to have a CEO who is stable, boring and predictable. People want to put their money in for steady long-term returns, and not worry. Tesla is doing wild things which are causing crazy growth, but also crazy panic.&lt;p&gt;It seems the market really wants Tesla to slow down so they can sell more stock to an average risk-averse consumer, but Elon wants to keep running light-speed, regardless of the short-term worry that it might create. Neither is wrong, they just have different priorities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ckastner</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;These articles about Elon are interesting to me because Tesla could not have become such a valuable car company in such a short time if it wasn&amp;#x27;t for Elon, and that includes his personality.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Yet, many couch investors would prefer to have a CEO who is stable, boring and predictable. People want to put their money in for steady long-term returns, and not worry&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A much simpler explanation, lacking the conflict, would be that early, start-up hungry investors prefer the rockstar CEO, and long-term investors would prefer a business-seasoned CEO.&lt;p&gt;To which I would say: Tesla has been around for 15 years (longer than Facebook!), and as the fans frequently profess, its market capitalization has (in the recent past) already surpassed that of other established car manufacturers. Perhaps it&amp;#x27;s time to leave the startup image behind.</text></comment>