What a surprise, yet another lie-off.

Musk has for many years announced a new product - usually vapourware - to cover up failing with an existing one. The semi truck masked appalling build problems with the Model S, the Cybertruck masked the non-appearance of the semi and, of course, "self-driving" is announced as regularly as Tony Blair announced votes on fox hunting, and for much the same reason. Keeps the supporters on side.

Did investors actually fall for this crap?

Look at how many people bought stock in Truth Social. Saw an article the other day about some guy who invested basically his entire retirement fund into it, and despite the fact that the price has been in freefall after an initial surge, he was still looking to buy more. People don't look at the stock market as a kind of gambling anymore, they seem to think it involves guaranteed returns. You have people who buy into the cult of personality for a particular CEO and can't seem to understand it when they wind up penniless.

is that it is a penny stock masquerading as a $20 stock.

This is not investment advice and I don't own any shares that are traded in NYC

But honestly,.... If you hold stock in DJT then SELL NOW. The company has filed the documents that would allow Trumpo to dump all his shares in 6 weeks and not 5 months.

As soon as he sells even one share, the price will plummet like a stone. He will walk away with 1-3 billion leaving everyone else with nothing.

He will walk away with 1-3 billion leaving everyone else with nothing.

Which was, of course, the plan all along.

As George Dubbayew once mumbled:

"[...] fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” ... but that's not true anymore, now, is it? There's a new brand of fool out there that will willingly and actively be taken for ride after ride. (Hint: they tend to wear red baseball caps....)

I'm pretty well convinced that a big part of taking Truth Social public was so that the Chinese and other foreign officials could just bribe Trump directly by buying stock in this company. Just like all the foreign dignitaries and other assholes stayed at the Trump hotel in DC before he sold it. Only you can hide your purchasing of stock, you can't really hide going in/out of a building.

Of course a lot of people also don't really understand how stock works. A lot of the cult members faithful think that if they buy a share of Truth Social that money goes directly into Trump's pocket. It doesn't. He owns some millions of shares in the company, which are completely worthless until he sells them. Unless you're buying one of the shares Trump owned, you're not giving him any money. And as has been reported, he can't sell his shares for about 5.5 more months. Even then, unless you work out some kind of private deal directly with Trump, you're never going to know if you're buying one of his shares or some other random cult member true believer, or even just a random speculator. You could be giving money to the Chinese Communist Party if the share you buy is one they bought to try to bribe influence Trump.

And I always liked the SNL spoof on that Dubbya quote: "Shoe me once, shame on me. Shoe me twice... and I'm keeping that shoe!"

He will walk way with nothing. In 6 weeks, the stock is dead. [1]It took another -18% today as the urge is now to flog even more worthless paper into small investors' hands before the boat sinks like a stone.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/15/investing/trump-stock-new-shares/index.html

What are the odds that it's just going to be a Tesla with a sign stuck on top saying "TAXI"?

Don't forget a guy in a robot costume in the driver seat.

Are they going to call it "Johnnie Cab"?

How many of those employees could keep their jobs if one of the highest paid CEOs, who's only a part-time employee (and that's being generous) were among those to be cut from the workforce? My empathy goes out to those affected by this decision, but really the blame lies squarely with top management and investors who have inflated the stock price of Tesla well beyond anything rational.

I saw a Cybertruck on the road the other day. I’m no longer all that confident about Tesla’s future.

Seriously. I thought Hummers were ridiculous. These are even dumber.

May I congratulate the author on correct use of the word "decimated", which means 'reduced by ten percent or more'?

A linguistics grad student was walking across campus with his girlfriend when they came upon three descriptivists beating up a prescriptivist. The girlfriend turned to him and said, “Well, aren’t you going to do anything!?!”

The grad student replied, “Nah, I think three’s enough.”

regarding how many are 'enough':

Q: How many IBM processors does it take to execute a procedure?

A: Four- three to hold it down and one to rip its head off.

If we'd apply descriptivism to law, then crime would quickly become legal.

" "decimated", which means 'reduced by ten percent or more' "

Actually it means reduced by exactly ten per cent. It was a Roman military punishment for such offences as mutiny -- execution of every tenth man. Hence 'deci' (10 in latin)

Well, sort of : https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/decimate

"to kill a large number of something, or to reduce something severely:"

That's no proof: you're not citing a Roman dictionary but an English one.

"Decimate" is an English word. "Decimare" is a Latin one. They do not need to mean the same.

After all, it must've been vetted by a lawyer, right?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/08/musk_takes_sec_twitter_sitter/

I believe there's a disconnection between Elon's reality and that of his customers. He believes that the vocal minority that cheers him on to bring out the outlandish-looking Cybertruck represents a large part of America's middle-class. He's now finding out that this is not the case and that the Cybertruck is turning into a wrecking ball tied to his neck.

I'm not saying the Cybertruck will doom the company but it could play a substantial role in it.

It's being reported that two senior executives at Tesla have resigned.

Senior Vice President Drew Baglino is one of four named executives at the company, and lead the power division for 17 years.

The VP of public policy has also resigned.

In other news, Tesla continues to cut prices on it's products, halving the price of FSD... which is being reported as causing a high number of curb hits that Tesla is refusing to repair.

I would say the wheels are falling off, but...

Can you imagine how absurd it would seem if Toyota, or Honda, or BMW were subject to the whims of one guy at the top of the pyramid who said "today, I'm announcing a stupid looking truck!", or "today, I'm spending half our share capital on Twitter!", or "today - we're going in big on Robotaxis!"

Tesla's aren't bad - there are issues, but they're fairly decent cars in many ways. But I genuinely have no idea what the company will look like in 5 or 10 years, and 100% of that doubt is because of Musk. I seriously considered a Tesla about 5 years ago, but the sense I dodged a bullet in buying a different EV just gets stronger every day.

I was in the market for a new car just over a year ago. I'd been planning on getting an EV and a Tesla was top of my list. But hearing that you can't buy spares alomg with Elmo's mental decline put me off too.

C'mon man... One is a muppet that helps teach children valuable life lessons. The other is a drug abusing narcissist.

How about, "Today I'm going to poach a bunch of employees for one of my private ventures!"? He's been hiring a lot of the FSD employees from Tesla for xAI, which is a very significant potential conflict of interest. Never mind how he's already been embezzling Tesla resources by having Tesla engineers working on Xitter. Unless he secretly sold Xitter to Tesla, like his brother's failed solar panel company, it's a great big no-no from a corporate governance perspective to be tasking employees from one to be working on things for the other.

At the risk of sounding smug in an "I told you so" sort of way... many years ago, when Xitler was still a media darling, I remember reading the odd story here or there about how someone talked to the press about an issue with their Tesla. The guy would go to all the trouble of tracking down the logs for that specific person's car, and then probably pulling some of the software engineers off of whatever else they were working on to go through the logs looking for anything they could use to discredit the person. It always struck me as odd in 1) that they would have that kind of telemetry to begin with, and 2) he would go to this kind of trouble. The CEO of a company should have far more important things to be spending their time on than worrying about what maybe a half-dozen customers may have said to the press. I also just hate the look of every single Tesla model. It's like a station wagon fucked a hatchback. Then when I realized the fondleslab in the center dash was basically the CiC for about 90% of the car's functions, I noped that so fast. Not only is it a huge safety issue for multiple reasons, but it's also a giant single point of failure. If the eMMC that stores the settings on it fails, it takes almost the entire car with it. Touch screen overlay dies? Hope you didn't want to change radio stations or anything else. It's just a huge engineering, safety, and UX fail. I've had the occasional thought about going to a rental car place and renting one for a day just to experience it, but usually it passes within a couple minutes. My guess, is that within 10-years, Tesla will be just another brand in the stable of a company like Ford or GM. If they fired Xitler within the next year or two, they might be able to carve out a small, but profitable, niche for themselves in the luxury EV sedan space, but there's no way they'll be able to compete with the major auto makers on price or volume once they start churning out EVs in bulk.

I'm just really hoping Toyota's solid state battery tech lives up to the hype. Even if it's half as good as they claim, it'd be about on par with EVs right now. There's also this fascinating tech where they suspend basically thousands of little batteries inside of some kind of fluid, and then you "recharge" your car by just replacing this fluid with some that has charged particles. Then "gas stations" could use solar panels or something to charge old fluid in storage tanks. The fluid is supposed to be completely non-flammable too, so if you spill it, it's less dangerous than gasoline.

I wonder if Tesla has sent WARN notices to anyone... after the fiasco with Twitter's lack or WARN!