• StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    Musk insisted on the earnings call that protest against him are “very organized” and “paid for,” repeating suggestions he’s made previously about shadowy financiers who are supposedly funding demonstrations. Musk also said the “real reason” there are protests against him is that people who are receiving fraudulent money from government agencies that are now getting cut. Musk has never provided any evidence for this assertion.

    What a delusional dipshit. He has lost touch with reality. His ego is so fragile he has to make up fairy tales. Poor wittuh snowfwake

  • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    We haven’t heard much from him over the past few weeks, and now we get this earnings call, and it is far worse than expected. He’s known this was coming, and has been laying low, probably hoping things will improve some before making what he knows will be a disastrous earnings call. Its the equivalent of watching your diet 3 days before a doctor’s appointment, hoping your weight gain and cholesterol increase won’t be as bad as you know it is.

    Also, it’s a safe bet that his board of directors is livid, and that he has been ordered by his board to get back to work, or be removed as CEO of Tesla.

    There is almost certainly a shareholder class-action suit brewing over his reckless and irresponsible behavior over the last several months, which has directly caused severe, and probably irreparable damage to the company’s brand image AND it’s sales around the world, as well as tanking the stock price, an unforgiveable sin in the investing world. Now that the bubble has popped, it will never inflate again. As future earnings reports are released, and sales continue to slide, the stock will continue to decline, and the cycle will continue until bankruptcy. And it is all traceable to Skum’s self-indulgent, egotistical behavior.

    The only question is will Skum be the only defendant, or will the lawsuit also name the individual members of the board, for not reigning him in, or firing him. They don’t want to be sued alongside him, so they are forcing him to get back to work saving Tesla, thus letting them off the hook for legal liability.

    Its doubtful Skum will be able to save Tesla at this point, its almost certainly too late. It is also probably too late to avoid a shareholder lawsuit. Investors have lost millions of dollars, not due to the vagaries of the market, but due to Skum’s outrageous behavior, like throwing up celebratory Nazi salutes on national TV, which, as CEO, he should have realized would damage his company and its investors significantly.

    And arguing that he didn’t recognize the danger in advance is no excuse at all for a CEO, who should have been able to predict the response to his self-indulgent ego bender.

    Shareholders have lost many millions, and they won’t just let that go with an “Oh well.” He’s likely going to get sued, and the board is just making sure they don’t go down with him.

  • Grizzlyboy@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    But he did it all himself? This is what he wanted? Either the headline is lying or he’s dumb as fuck.

  • Neverclear@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 hours ago

    Pay a settlement of $10 million to each and every federal employee fired by DOGE. Then we can start to talk about your well-being, Elon.

    • root_beer@midwest.social
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      3 hours ago

      Okay but how about compensation for all those people he’s fucked over by dismantling federal programs? I want this guy to be standing by a freeway on-ramp wearing a barrel and begging in vain for spare change, before dejectedly walking up said on-ramp to lie down in front of an oncoming cement truck.

  • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
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    7 hours ago

    “America isn’t as racist and misogynist as I was led to believe!”

    No, Mr. Musk, it isn’t.

    It’s exactly as racist and misogynist as Trump believes it to be, however, sadly.

  • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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    10 hours ago

    He does the Nazi salute on the big stage and it shocked when he gets a collective middle finger salute back.

    On the other hand, he went with Trump. Everybody going that way gets burned, used up, and thrown away. That things wouldn’t work out was expected. It’s also suspected that Musk would be used as the wrecking ball to crush institutions and when the inevitable problems arise, Musk would be blamed and tossed aside to keep the rest of the regime in the clear.

    • Realitätsverlust@lemmy.zip
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      9 hours ago

      He does the Nazi salute on the big stage and it shocked when he gets a collective middle finger salute back.

      To be fair - people haven’t given a shit in years about the nasty stuff companies and their owners do. He probably just expected it to continue that way.

      • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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        8 hours ago

        Most CEOs do try to stay out of the spotlight. Those that are more in the spotlight at least try to do some positive PR and not rock the boat too much. Security through obscurity if you will.

        Of course Musk and Zuckerberg are some of the few that dance with the devil in the spotlight and have made their company/ies their whole personality. They paint their faces larger than life on the company and then act surprised when people take it personally.

  • GoodOleAmerika@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Let’s seal the coffin for Tesla. If it is profitable again, it will fuel fascism again. This brand need to go bankrupt.

    • TheFogan@programming.dev
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      12 hours ago

      With the one possible exception that Musk sells a large enough portion of his shares that not only does he not guide it, but no longer gains significant percentage of it’s profits.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        IMO, it’s not enough to just have Musk step down from the board, quit as CEO, or divest himself from the company. I didn’t like Tesla as a company or a brand very much before Elon went crazy. My issue with the company is that they were notorious slavedrivers in their factories since the very beginning and forced people to work overtime or risk being laid off to meet production quotas. I tried to interview at the Tesla Fremont factory and the guy doing interviews told me pretty straight-up that if I wasn’t willing to work 2 hours overtime every weekday, work on Saturdays and every other Sunday then I wouldn’t last a month at the company, so I didn’t take the job. As far as the brand goes, their quality control issues should be well known at this point - I see brand new Teslas with panel gaps wider than my finger rolling off of lots, so you know shit on the inside isn’t going to be any more well put together.

        If I were to ever buy one, Musk would have to not be in the picture at all, the company would have to issue a public formal apology to the consumers for both the behavior of Musk while acting as CEO and also for the numerous lies told about the features and capabilities of the vehicles, and finally they would have to start gradually repairing their brand reputation by improving the QC process and start making cars built to last.

        I don’t see any of that happening any time soon.

      • lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        No forgiveness for Musk, Tesla or its investors. If anyone in my family buys a car, a battery, a robot, a solar panel, or a stick of gum from Tesla I will never speak to them again. Investors could have gotten out when it became clear that Musk was a Nazi. They would have made a lot of money. Anyone who stayed with the company while the stock was over $400 and that piece of shit was throwing Nazi salutes deserves to lose every penny they invested. I will never walk past a Tesla without spitting on it.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    “The Teslas that will be fully autonomous in June in Austin will be Model Ys, so that is currently on track to be able to do paid rides, fully autonomously in June, and then to be in many other cities in the U.S. by the end of this year,” Musk said on the call.

    Okay, so there is zero chance that there will be fully autonomous model Ys doing paid rides anywhere for the next 5-10 years (at least).

      • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        Nazi controlled death traps. It’s about power and control:

        Punish the poor: “take the bus peasant”

        Extort the wealthy: “to bypass traffic, please insert $40. FOR $80 we’ll speed for you to shave 10 mins off your trip.”

        Murder the rebellious either inside or outside the cab: "tonights news we look at the car accident where AOC was driven off a cliff and her protesters were run over repeatedly by an autonomous tesla.

        Gate the elite: sorry, this area is restricted to C class passenger licenses or higher.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      You think it’s going to be hard for Tesla to convince a city in Texas to let them do autonomous rides?

      Texas.

      I’m not suggesting they’ll do a lot of rides, but there will be at least a handful until something goes wrong sooner than it should and they force a pause.

      Edit: and to be clear, something very wrong. Waymo does wrong things all the time and it’s allowed. It’s going to have to do enough wrong things in a short time or a very very bad thing sooner than it should. But they’ll do rides until that.

      • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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        3 hours ago

        Anti autonomous vehicle sentiment is strange to me. As long as they’re doing better than the average person, I think it’s not a terrible thing.

        For reference, I saw 6 different accidents on my drive to work today. It’s a really low bar to clear.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        4 hours ago

        You think it’s going to be hard for Tesla to convince a city in Texas to let them do autonomous rides?

        All I know is that Elon couldn’t predict the sunrise. He lies and makes overconfident statements constantly.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        9 hours ago

        Oh, I think Tesla is scared to try. They know that their cars won’t work. They know that it will be a living and dying disaster, and everyone will be posting videos on TikTok. The reason they haven’t seriously tried to create such a city is because they’re trying to ride the AI hype, not because they actually think it’s a good idea to implement.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Tesla might be, Elon isn’t. They’ll do what he says. They’re spending billions getting the cybercab ready. They’ll try it.

  • Basic Glitch@lemm.ee
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    14 hours ago

    I’m pretty sure Peter Theil fucked him over AGAIN. Thiel himself has been successfully lurking in the shadows to do evil shit and get what he wants, while Musk (although certainly far from innocent) has become the perfect scapegoat.

    For months Musk was this untouchable god that couldn’t be removed from Trump’s office. They got Elon to handle all the dirty work, attach his face and name to some truly despicable shit, made him the most hated man in the country, then gradually made him look like an annoying nuisance who was disrespected by all the “adults in the white house,” and got everyone to start questioning if his mental health was spiraling, and now that Theil’s protege is handling technology and AI policy they no longer need Elon to leave his fingerprints on everything do anything.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      thiels obsession with using palintir as a spying tool is a thing for him for like 10 years already, funny it was around the same time he brought down gawker, through the hot-dog skin maniac, hogan. i read somewhere the only reason he targeted gawker, was them reporting on his business pratices, and not because of the gay thing.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      14 hours ago

      I’m sure that there was maneuvering for influence, but he’s a grown, competent adult. Most of his wealth is associated with a company that has made its products an identity symbol for progressives. It should not be that hard to see that becoming a colossally-important financial supporter of, very-visibly palling around with, and performing some of the more-unpopular actions for the extraordinarily-unpopular-with-progressives Trump was going to piss people off. Having Trump do a sales pitch for said products on the White House lawn is just icing on the cake.

      He was not trapped in that situation. Hell, even if he wanted to make huge donations, lots of wealthy people donate money to presidential campaigns — albeit not normally at the level that Musk did — and they don’t normally engage in the kind of incredibly-visible association that Musk did. He could have walked away. He could have even just asked Trump to appoint someone who he agreed with in the role, rather than taking it himself.

      And this isn’t Musk’s first high-profile brand management screw-up. With Twitter, he was roundly criticized for the rebrand to X, given that Twitter had a very-well-established, valuable brand. Like, after the first time around, you’d think that he could reasonably have someone sanity-checking some of this for impact on brand.

      I don’t expect Musk to be mistake-free, but I really think that if you placed most business leaders in his shoes, they’d have had an inkling that this was quite likely to be trouble.

      • Basic Glitch@lemm.ee
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        13 hours ago

        I am not trying to defend Musk, just pointing out that even if he steps back from the White House it definitely doesn’t mean we’ve seen the exit of the final boss.

        • kautau@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          Yeah “blood boy” Thiel and Palantir and the like are the “deep state” the right witch hunted for so long. Pretty sure https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/Engerraund_Serac is partially based on him with the “I’ll control the future of the human race and swim through the blood to get to the ending I think is best because I’m rich”