
Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors - ryanlol
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-to-larry-ellison-and-kathleen-wilson-thompson-as-board-directors-11546003507
======
golfer
Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember Larry very distinctly
telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to
customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody
being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on
anything.” [0]

Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit.

[0]: [https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-
we-c...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-we-cant-be-
successful-if-we-dont-lie-to-customers/)

~~~
darkpuma
> _" Elon stretches the truth constantly."_

That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still
prominently advertising _" Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars"_[0] even
though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the
field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5
self driving cars[1][2].

[0] [https://www.tesla.com/autopilot](https://www.tesla.com/autopilot)

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mobileye-ceo-tesla-
self-d...](https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mobileye-ceo-tesla-self-driving-
cars/)

[2][https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-self-driving-cars-
luminar-...](https://www.wired.com/story/lidar-self-driving-cars-luminar-
video/)

~~~
iEchoic
> every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree [lidar] is
> necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars

As someone that doesn't know anything about self-driving cars, how can this be
true? Humans can drive cars with only visual input. Why can't AI?

~~~
ethn
Human eyes don't work anything like cameras. The eye processes information
that isn't just intensities of photons and their wave lengths—which is the
only information collected by cameras. See Walter Pitt's "What the Frog Eyes
Tell the Frog Brain" for an introduction: 'Fundamentally it shows that the eye
speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted,
instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of
light on the receptors.'

~~~
pdxww
A simple abstraction here: we put two high-quality monitors before our eyes
and get all the data from them. Can we continue driving this way? Absolutely.
This means that no matter how our eyes actually work, an array of RGB pixels
is enough. I'd go further and say that a 64 x 64 grayscale camera at 10 fps is
enough to drive a car. The real magic happens in the brain that reconstructs
the 3D model and predicts what happens next.

~~~
ethn
That is an analogy not an abstraction but if you had read the paper or the
single quote I provided, you would know that even relatively simple eyes (such
as those of the frogs which cannot see still objects) don't only process a
distribution of light intensity and frequency. The eye measures other
information that is lost by the camera including photon phase, arrival time,
polarization, orbital angular momentum, linear momentum, and probably many
more measurements. More so, this is done by specialized organelles of the eye
rather than by the brain.

~~~
pdxww
It's great that eyes can detect polarization and orbital momentum. My point is
that none of that info is needed to drive a car.

~~~
ethn
That's true, but the main point is that current software still relies on
sampling. Eyes don't sample.

~~~
pdxww
And this is irrelevant also, because we can introduce sampling the way I
described and can continue driving just fine.

~~~
ethn
I've thought about it and yes this does make sense.

------
rossdavidh
After his failure, as virtually the only Theranos board member with a high-
tech background, to provide any good advice on tech development to Elizabeth
Holmes, this seemed incredible to me. Then, I read this in the statement:
"Larry is also a big believer in Tesla’s mission, having purchased 3 million
shares earlier this year."

So, Musk was required to introduce more outside independence to his board, per
agreement with the government. He chose one of the least credible board
members he could, and one who owned a lot of shares in Tesla to boot. Aha. I
think I understand now.

~~~
gaius
Both Ellison and Musk are vying for the position of “real life Tony Stark”, I
will wager in the next year they will have a major falling out.

~~~
rossdavidh
It is two very large egos. But, wasn't Ellison a board member for Apple when
Steve Jobs was CEO? So apparently he can get along with other big egos pretty
well.

~~~
huhtenberg
Ellison was a very close friend of Jobs. At least as per Jobs biography by
Isaacson.

------
ElijahLynn
In my eyes, Larry Ellison on the Tesla BoD just damaged the brand of Tesla by
an order of magnitude.

~~~
dotancohen
My thoughts exactly. I've lusted over the Model S for years, and the minute
that they become available in my country I'll be the first in line.

But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole
Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company
treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a
company that uses its products. They are extremely abusive.

For the first time in Tesla's history, with all its obstacles and negative
press, I now fear for the brand reputation.

~~~
DevX101
How does Oracle treat their clients badly? Honestly curious, never worked with
them.

~~~
sokoloff
They're absolute assholes during license audits and negotiations. They're one
of only two companies to earn a spot on my "Never voluntarily do business
with" list.

~~~
thsowers
And the other?

~~~
sokoloff
The other is Verisign, but I am far less passionate and communicative about
that one as it was a result of a singular (albeit terrifically bungled)
incident, not an on-going and top-down strategy to be a dickish company.

------
Waterluvian
3 million shares. Am I doing the math wrong or is that somewhere in the ball
park of 500M to 1B depending on when they were purchased? That's quite a
display of confidence.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
Yup, it's a billion-ish USD at today's price of about $332/share. That's about
3% of Larry's reported net worth.

~~~
Waterluvian
Geez. Okay I didn't realise he was hyper rich. Well, I'm delighted for anyone
to want to support electric cars.

~~~
warent
It's hard to think about the wealth of extremely wealthy people intuitively.
Just for added perspective, he bought an entire Hawai'ian island called Lanai.

~~~
njarboe
And Lanai is not just some some little place (140sq mi). It is about 1/4 the
size of Oahu or Kauai [1]. 3% of the island is still own by other
people/entities.

[1][https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lanai/@20.7523285,-158.324...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lanai/@20.7523285,-158.3241197,8z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x795536d9a3986425:0xf609afa076d8b8b5!8m2!3d20.8165975!4d-156.9273193)

------
dforrestwilson
The same guy who encouraged Elizabeth Holmes to ignore her engineers in favor
of over the top promotion. Also a board member who failed (or chose not) to
detect the underlying fraud...

Every time I consider closing out my Tesla short position something like this
happens and I get more confident that something is awry.

~~~
porpoisely
I'm no fan of Ellison or Oracle. But a guy worth $60 billion with decades long
ties and influence in media and government investing in TSLA and serving on
its board is not something that should make shorts happy.

~~~
ryanmarsh
This. It’s not surprising at all how emotional and “short” sighted people are
being about Ellison because “Oracle sucks”.

I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d
want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one
point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near
monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not
his customers, CIO’s were. He gave them exactly what they wanted.

Ellison is shrewd, not stupid. Churning out shit cars would be stupid. Helping
Elon cut waste and increase sales would be shrewd. Perhaps Ellison, if
anything, could temper Elon’s boundless optimism and pet projects.

~~~
sanderjd
It seems to me that you just made the argument for the opposition. We know
that Ellison was successful in a business that involved selling big contracts
to a small number of purchasers spending from a budget of company or taxpayer
money. But that's not Tesla's business. Does Ellison know how to sell to
individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots
of similar competitors? Maybe? But he doesn't have a track record of doing
that.

The retort here might be that people who have a track record of being "good at
business" are good at _all_ business. I personally don't buy that. I think too
much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior
experience for that to hold; if you have no prior experiences with a matching
pattern, you're no more or less qualified than the next smart person making it
up as they go.

~~~
cat199
> Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their
> own money on a product with lots of similar competitors?

are you buying a battery-backed electric power storage substation?

didn't think so..

tesla isn't just about cars

which isn't to say i like musk or ellison

~~~
sanderjd
Hmm, that's a good point. I'm definitely more bullish on their power storage
business, so if Ellison pushes them further that direction since it's more
similar to the kind of business he knows, then maybe that's a good idea. Maybe
Tesla is also big enough at this point to support multiple divisions with
different customer bases and business models.

------
EngineerBetter
Cripes. The "pedo guy" thing made me cringe and reaffirmed that Elon is a
fallible human, but this is the first time as a Tesla owner I'm worried about
the leadership of the company.

------
Tomte
Fascinating. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is a senior manager at a huge American
company, still there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article about her.

~~~
pdxww
"Senior manager" isn't a remarkable achievement. It's just a role or position
in a company that needs to be filled in. She happened to be the one who got
picked (for various reasons). If she founded a company with $1B profits a
year, it would be a different story.

~~~
tomhoward
This was downvoted, perhaps because people read your comment as being
dismissive or contemptuous of her achievements, which I don't think you really
meant to do.

I think the point you meant to make is that being a senior manager at a big
company doesn't rate highly enough to warrant a dedicated Wikipedia page -
which is more a comment on Wikipedia's notability criteria.

Let's agree that it is impressive and commendable for her to have achieved
such a level of seniority at Walgreen's.

------
glogla
Oh wow. I was pretty much decided that my next car will be a Tesla Model 3.
With Ellison? Nope nope nope. I don't want to support people like that.

~~~
kerng
I'm not sure why you get downvoted. It seems like an honest opinion and I
share it also.

------
azhenley
A lot of people seem negative about this. Can someone explain why? Are there
any implications I should expect (as a Tesla owner and stockholder)?

~~~
stevehawk
Well, it's sort of weird. He's never really been involved in a company that
manufactures, i don't believe. Plus his legacy is that of maximizing licensing
fees which isn't really in Tesla's wheelhouse given their history of opening
patents.

Maybe he's being brought in to fight the right to repair and help lock down
Tesla's to maximize some sort of dealer /service model?

Or maybe this is some sort of long play to get Tesla stuck on Oracle's
platform :-)

~~~
ungamed
Its the beginning of the end.

------
nottorp
Yay, that settles it. Now I definitely can't afford a Tesla. The car maybe,
but the legal team that should go with it, nope. Current owners, make sure you
have a lawyer on retainer.

~~~
gammateam
haha wow, what a perspective.

thanks for this

------
SmellyGeekBoy
Yup, _that_ Larry Ellison. I'm not sure whether this is good news or not.

~~~
pastor_elm
He invented the cloud

~~~
foxfired
Or didn't invent the cloud:

Exhibit A -> "What the hell is cloud computing?"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0)

------
starbeast
Given Tesla's current issues with how they have been reported to treat their
workforce, while Larry might be useful in terms of finance and contacts, I'm
more interested in discovering what Kathleen is bringing to the table and what
her attitudes to things like unions and employee rights in general might be. I
suspect that could be at least as make or break as anything Larry might do
here.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Yeah, she seems clearly brought in to help with the safety and legal issues
with the workforce. Hopefully she can help actually fix the problems and not
just manage and price the fallout.

------
curtis
I don't know if this is good or bad or what. But at least it seems like Larry
Ellison is someone that will never be intimidated by Elon Musk.

------
mhd
I guess someone needs advanced access to cryopod batteries.

Still not quite the level of Dropbox '14.

~~~
bloomburger
dropbox '14?

~~~
presty
When Condoleezza Rice was appointed to the board of Dropbox

[https://www.wired.com/2014/04/dropbox-rice-
controversy/](https://www.wired.com/2014/04/dropbox-rice-controversy/)

------
Bucephalus355
To put in context the remark that Ellison made about lying to customers that
is referenced in the top rated comment, this happened during a sales cycle to
Bank of America in 1981-1983 timeframe (can’t remember exact year). It’s
featured in the 2006 Bloomberg Ellison video bio (link below) and it’s where
Ellison wanted to exaggerate the number of Oracle programmers/engineers from 3
to 15. I have no sympathy for Bank of America, but that’s because they’re a
bank who screws over regular ppl somewhat directly. Oracle has the decently to
put a few middlemen in the process.

NOTE: I’m a liberal arts major who was hired straight out of college during
the GFC of 2008 for a non-technical role by Oracle and then later they trained
me and put me in an engineering slot (!) so I’ll always be in their
debt/totally bias. The above story I thought was somewhat relevant /
interesting nonetheless + I hate Bank of America and now bank at USAA.

[https://youtu.be/mB2V0BXH608](https://youtu.be/mB2V0BXH608)

------
cmurf
The board appoints officers, officers run the day to day and establish the
operational personality of a company. It probably won't affect the Tesla
approach to customers, but it's a very young company so - time will tell. I
think in the short term it'd be a bad idea to mess with what's been
successful, and focus on the areas that need shoring up.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Since Elon the Magnificent clearly doesn't care what the Board says, one can
only wonder why Ellison signed on for this ride.

------
anoncoward111
Proprietary presidents protect their paired patronage

~~~
chmaynard
Try saying that 10 times quickly.

------
peteradio
Wow, what is he bringing to the table?

~~~
Avshalom
Hopefully about $30-50 per share in "market confidence" in the midst of a bear
market. Otherwise Tesla probably goes bankrupt in March.

~~~
nerddoctor
Why would an increase in stock value stop a company from going bankrupt?

~~~
Avshalom
Tesla issued a bunch of bonds that come due in March. If the stock price is
above ~350 then they can pay off the bonds in by converting them to stock. If
it's lower than that they pay them off in cash.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-to-pay-march-
convertib...](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-to-pay-march-convertible-
debt-cash-stock-report-2018-12)

------
epynonymous
my guess is that elon musk will leave sooner or later, having to listen to
someone with an ego like larry ellison will drive elon insane.

------
saosebastiao
Time for all the car magazines to update all their cost of ownership estimates
to account for software licensing fees.

------
privong
Lots of discussion here already:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776883)

~~~
dang
We merged that thread into this one, which was posted earlier.

~~~
chmaynard
Finally! I've been suggesting for years that HN start merging comment threads
for duplicate posts. I hope this gets automated.

~~~
dang
We've been doing that a long time!

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20comments%20moved&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20comments%20moved&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20merged&sort=byDate&d...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20merged&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:sctb%20merged&sort=byDate&d...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:sctb%20merged&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

We don't catch all of them, though. If people see two current threads about
the same things with lots of comments, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com would
be helpful.

------
ThinkBeat
Expect software updates for Tesla automobiles to become progressively more
expensive and more difficult to install, they will also be packaged with
adware.

All patents will be closed and litigation against all other electric car makes
will ensue.

~~~
LinuxBender
Tesla cars currently use CentOS 6. I could imagine Larry suggesting they move
to Oracle Linux.

I would be less concerned with adware and more concerned about short-cutting
best practices. For example, prior to Oracle acquiring Sun, they used to build
packages that would move the compiler (out of the way) and drop in their own
packages under /usr/bin to make Oracle re-linking happy. After the
acquisition, all of the push-back on such practices were bypassed. They did
similar things in linux RPM packages. Oracle RPM's would install files to
/tmp, move files owned by other RPM's out of the way and move their files from
/tmp to /bin, thus bypassing any dependency conflicts.

Now imagine them applying this mind-set to the Tesla cars. I am curious what
could go wrong.

------
porpoisely
Dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776883)

~~~
Fnoord
True, though HN title does not mention Kathleen Wilson-Thompson. The original
title and body do.

------
tsomctl
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these
generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well,
except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer
than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less
complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has
seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that
idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this
is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This
company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon
humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off,
screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to
Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You
don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you
stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh,
the lawnmower hates me' \-- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower
can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that
trap about Oracle." \-- Bryan Cantrill
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

~~~
geofft
Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will
build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping
mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are
trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And
inertia and lockin is the game.

Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the
answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too
tied to oracle and its bugs".

And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even
their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.

~~~
geofft
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a
problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is
even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society.

Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and
intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference,
a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then
the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service
contracts.

~~~
corodra
The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem.

There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to
MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too
long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node
as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems
they were running into would disappear if they converted.

I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And
the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google
the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only
db conversion I can think of that is documented.

Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much
time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the
long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.

~~~
tomatocracy
For every one of those database migration success stories, there's a potential
TSB style disaster though[1]. Problems with migration are real and potentially
very serious. It's not just cost if it goes to plan that needs to be
considered - for business critical systems, 'don't fix it if it isn't broken'
is a good adage for a reason...

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_\(United_Kingdom\)#Migration_to_the_Sabadell_Proteo_banking_platform)

------
davebryand
I'd love to hear from some Tesla employees with awakened consciousness how
they feel about Ellison's involvement.

~~~
AlexB138
> I'd love to hear from some Tesla employees with awakened consciousness how
> they feel about Ellison's involvement.

What does "awakened consciousness" mean in this context?

~~~
davebryand
Nothing different in this context, I mean it in the universal sense:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=awakened+consciousness&oq=aw...](https://www.google.com/search?q=awakened+consciousness&oq=awa&aqs=chrome.2.69i60l2j69i59j69i57j69i60l2.2816j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

Could also look at it as Spiral Dynamics Turquoise:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=spiral+dynamics+turquoise&so...](https://www.google.com/search?q=spiral+dynamics+turquoise&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4h-D188LfAhWDTd8KHZHRC50Q_AUICSgA&biw=1440&bih=790&dpr=2)

~~~
AlexB138
Sorry, I guess I shouldn't have said "in this context", I'm not familiar with
the term at all. I was trying to differentiate from just the literal "awake"
and "conscious", as in not asleep. I assumed it was some religious term.

The search results seem to indicate it's some vague mysticism not specific to
any particular belief structure? Not an area I'm familiar with. Thanks for the
info!

~~~
davebryand
All good! That's right, it's the field called "Spirituality" that many people
confuse with Religion.

------
module0000
My brain replaced "Ellison" with "Wall", and until the first paragraph I was
terribly excited....then not so much.

~~~
AlexCoventry
Tesla cars badly need a perl 6 API.

------
Robotbeat
Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are
a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone
needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.

~~~
Robotbeat
Wow, huh, my comment was down-voted.

My theory is that innate talent (if there is such a thing) is probably roughly
evenly distributed among the sexes and races, so in fields which are dominated
by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women
and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans
effectively at an enormous discount (of course, if everyone did this, the
discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality, which is kind of
what we want).

Plus it increases the solution space you're able to efficiently explore due to
a wider range of perspective and background.

I have had several women bosses, and they're pretty much all great. We'll know
when we've achieved gender equality when it's just as common to have a crappy
female boss as a male boss.

Oh, and folks suggesting we look at "objective" metrics alone... Well, there's
no such thing. When hiring folks, there's an enormous amount of information
that just can't be known at the time. You really do have to look at the
outcome to judge how "objective" you're actually being, on net.

.

"Am I pretty much just hiring people who look like me?"

There's two answers to that question:

"Well, obviously people who look like me are naturally better than everyone
else."

Or, my perspective:

"I'm probably missing something important so I should cast a wider net."

~~~
belorn
> probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races

While some studies disagree, we can assume its true for the sake for
discussion.

> so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an
> advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to
> hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount

There is a logical error here. The assumption is that the missing non-white
men in the evenly distributed population would not be working. Instead what we
see in countries like Sweden is that people segregate, so you got the non-
white men dominating some fields, and white men dominating other fields, and
so forth. A field which is dominated by white men that want non-white men has
to compete with fields that are dominated by non-white men. Similar, there is
no discount to get white men into fields that are dominated by non-white men
because they have to compete with fields that are dominated by white men.

> if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have
> meritocratic equality

Logical error #2. If everything was equal we would not see every field being
exactly 50% men and women, with exact race distribution as proportional to the
population. Randomness would still apply. Unless the population is infinitive
you will get random variation.

