
The Smartest Guys in the Room Eerily Describes Tesla - camjohnson26
https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/bq06lc/the_smartest_guys_in_the_room_eerily_describes/
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camjohnson26
Unrelated to Tesla, but WeWork recently set up a holding company to buy stakes
in buildings it rents from. The name is ARK, which the CEO said in an
interview stands for Adam, Rebekah, and kids. The company quickly said his
answer was a joke and gave a real definition.

This is interesting because at Enron The LJM company set up by Andy Fastow was
created to let Enron move assets off their balance sheet, even though Fastow
kept his CFO job and control of LJM. Over time this allowed Enron to hide
losses and was one of the main reasons the company fell. The funny part is
that LJM stood for Lea, Jeffrey, and Matthew, who were Fastow’s wife and kids.

You seriously can’t make this up.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-15/wework-
wa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-15/wework-wants-to-be-
its-own-landlord-it-also-wants-2-8-billion)

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jdsully
Yes this was the core of the Enron fraud. I was a bit disappointed this was
never touched on as everything else feels superficial.

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bwanab
Except - Tesla has a real product that has a real demand. Enron's smart guys
transformed the company from a traditional energy company which met that
criterion to a financial engineering company that didn't know enough about
financial engineering to survive.

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Traster
Tesla is a car company valued like a tech company right now. Unless they solve
the problem of self-driving their stock is overvalued. Let's check-in shall
we? Uber - self-driving is dead, BMW self-driving is years away, Alphabet -
self-driving is in its very early stages, Tesla - We'll have it by the end of
the year or I'll eat my hat!

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miemo
Google is _maybe_ the only other company with the capability to collect the
data necessary to solve self-driving. But they don't own the car production,
they need to partner, and hence are at the whims of traditional automakers'
margins and product designs.

Tesla is collecting sensor data from their entire fleet, probably mapped to
when the user needs to override autopilot. A really elegant source of training
data when you think about it.

[https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data-
floodgat...](https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data-floodgates/)

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himeexcelanta
I was expecting an actual analysis in the Reddit post. Perhaps something along
the lines of a quantitative analysis with market data. Seems like many
companies could “eerily” be described by the collection of passages outlined
in the post (Uber? Snapchat? Theranos?). Would be nice if there was a
corresponding anecdote from Tesla’s company history alongside each quote from
the book.

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socalnate1
Only tangentially related; but if you want to understand the Enron scandal;
Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools is a better treatment of the topic.

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rchaud
I have that book, but I only got through the first couple of chapters. Is it
factually sound? The narration of conversations between Enron people is so
descriptive (down to what they were wearing), that I kinda got the feeling
that this is a "dramatic re-telling" as opposed to a more investigative
review.

I actually found the storytelling style pretty gripping, but again, I wasn't
sure how much of it was fact vs. embellishment for narrative purposes.

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Traster
I've got to say, I don't find this analysis compelling. I'm not a fan of
Tesla, but this analysis doesn't add much new.

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TimTheTinker
If you look a little further down in the thread, there are (purported) former
Tesla employees talking about what sounds like a really horrible experience
working there -- being treated terribly, all the really experienced people
leaving, etc.

To me, _if_ those are real former employees telling the truth, that's a lot
more meaningful than the comparison to Enron.

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dmode
You can say the same thing about Amazon employees, yet Amazon is not really
comparable to Tesla

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forgottenpass
Don't worry guys, reddit OP is just a short seller. Buy the dip!

