
Tesla Names Robyn Denholm as Chairman to Replace Elon Musk - dcgudeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-names-robyn-denholm-as-chairman-to-replace-elon-musk-1541659771
======
logicchains
Another Australian here, surprised to hear Tesla selecting someone with a
background in such a reviled (in Australia) company, Telstra. It's like if
Microsoft had picked a former Oracle exec to replace Balmer, except in a world
where Oracle was also hated by the average Joe Blo, not just techies.

~~~
justtopost
My thoughts exactly. Telstra is a step below what even Comcast is in the USA.
Unless their plan is to ruthlessly extract capitol at the expense of the
customer, this is bad signalling at best, and more likely a shift to profit
over vision. I'm honestly hoping they fold soon so someone can use the
momentum they created as they seem intent on squandering it and their tech.
Still waiting for the right to reapir your own car Tesla.

~~~
cptskippy
> I'm honestly hoping they fold soon so someone can use the momentum they
> created as they seem intent on squandering it and their tech.

Tesla folding would be the worse thing that could possible happen for EV
adoption. No other successful car company is fully committed or deeply
invested in EVs. GM and Nissan are making compliance cars that permit them to
continue to make the same shitty ICE cars while still meeting fleet emissions
standards.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the Trump administration keeps
it's momentum then those compliance rules would vanish and GM would just fold
up shop on the Bolt and possibly even the Volt.

Tesla kicking competitors in the nuts on performance while showing everyone
that EVs are viable business model is the only thing pushing the rest of the
automotive industry forward.

If Tesla went under then we'd see GM saying "See, EVs just aren't viable with
the technology we have today."

~~~
mikekchar
> GM and Nissan are making compliance cars that permit them to continue to
> make the same shitty ICE cars while still meeting fleet emissions standards.

I don't know about GM, but that's incorrect about Nissan (at least in Japan).
Nissan has bet big on EV and is bending over backwards to get people to buy
them. They built a national recharging infrastructure with Mitsubishi. They
offer unlimited charging for $30 per month and even had a promotion where they
gave you _free_ unlimited charging for 2 years! If loan money from them to buy
a car, they even give you a rate on their EV that's slightly more than half of
the rate they offer on their ICE cars.

They are probably doing almost nothing in the US, admittedly (I don't know, as
I don't live there). But here in Japan, they are definitely and obviously all
in on EV. It will be interesting to see what happens when Toyota and Mazda's
joint venture starts producing EV cars (which I think is supposed to be in
2020). At the moment Toyota is crushing everybody (nearly twice as many cars
as the nearest competitor) thanks to Prius sales. Once they offer an EV car,
things will get interesting in Japan.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/qrhp8](http://archive.is/qrhp8)

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ChrisArchitect
[does double take] Denholm? #ITCrowd

~~~
mindcrime
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

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TheSpiceIsLife
I posted this as a response to another comment, but I think it deserves a top
level comment:

I just want to chime in here to say: when I recently tried to purchase an
iPhone SE from Telstra's online store, the device was out of stock. They
couldn't tell me when they expected to have it back in stock, or it was being
end-of-lifed. No straight answers. I spent 15 hours, over two weeks, on the
phone to Telstra trying to get the order cancelled and my money back. I gave
up with that.

And went in to a Telstra owned Telstra store and politely but sternly demanded
my money back by asking the managed to call his escalation point(s) until he
found someone who could authorise the return of my money.

After half an hour he was asking me to leave and I repeatedly said "not until
I have my money back". I wasn't being threatening at all, rather I was
pleading with him to understand my position.

He picked up his mobile and said he was dialling the police.

 _That 's how Telstra treats it's customers._

That's what Denholm is bring to the table: _the worst customer experience in
Australia with regard to telecommunications_.

That's not just my opinion, Telstra has repeatedly been voted as the worst
customer telco related experience in Australia for _decades_.

~~~
threeseed
I've worked at Telstra so can shed some light on this.

1\. Harassing retail staff for what is a corporate process problem is really
inappropriate and pointless. I'm not surprised they called the police. Instead
you should have called the TIO, ACCC or escalated via email.

2\. The customer service issues at Telstra are incredibly deep and complex.
It's a 40+ year old company where some of the processes still rely on dot
matrix printers and faxes and there are thousands of IT systems. It's a mess.
Call centres within Australia would do nothing to change the NPS which is why
they were so easy to off-shore in the first place.

3\. Telstra may not have a great customer service reputation. But they are one
of the most revered telcos globally. They transitioned to 4G better than
anyone and had the fastest network on the planet for quite some time. And they
will do it again with 5G.

4\. Denholm isn't hired to run customer service for Tesla. She was the CFO of
a 40,000 odd employee highly technical, multi-faceted company e.g. their own
venture fund. She also spent 7 years at Toyota so she has some automative
experience as well as strong technical background.

~~~
bicubic
> Harassing retail staff for what is a corporate process problem is really
> inappropriate and pointless

It's a natural human reaction. If you build a system that treats customers
like shit, they will take it out on your front line staff. It's not because
they're bad people, it's because you designed a business that treats customers
like shit. It is not exactly surprising that a customer will not be polite to
front line staff after wasting 4+ hours getting bounced around various useless
departments on the phone beforehand. The blame lies on management, not on
customers.

------
qubax
In most companies, the CEO reports to the chairman of the board and the
chairman of the board reports to the shareholders ( particularly the major
shareholders ).

The biggest TSLA shareholder is elon musk and many of the large shareholders
are friends/backers of elon musk.

So this is a purely superficial move for optics.

She gets a nice sinecure with a fat paycheck. Musk gets the feds off his back.

~~~
threeseed
That's not how it works.

The CEO reports to the board. The Chairman reports to the board. The board
reports to the shareholders but only indirectly via shareholder meetings where
votes will decide on renumeration, board composition etc.

~~~
qubax
> The Chairman reports to the board.

The chairman is the head of the board. He doesn't report to the board. He,
along with the rest of the directors, reports to the shareholders.

The chairman has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, not to his fellow board
members.

~~~
evasote
The chairman is typically elected by the board, but there's a lot of variety.
Some smaller ones just make a schedule early to basically rotate through
members for two years periods. I think there's a lot of variety in this part
depending on the company, board, shareholders, etc.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Denholm!

~~~
owaislone
Offer them a nice cup of tea...

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
I hope he doesn't find his dads old service revolver.

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andromedavision
I call John Sculley.

~~~
tomhoward
He was CEO; she's chair of the board. No valid comparison.

~~~
andromedavision
I just meant as a general trajectory. The board is losing faith in the
founder. Not a good sign. Rarely ever is.

Side note: I'm pretty sure we've interacted somewhere else online. Either on
HN or reddit.

~~~
ec109685
Tesla needed a new chairman as part of their SEC settlemant for Musk’s tweet.

~~~
andromedavision
Well aware of that. They (board) were a tad too eager to see this happen and
only 'supported' him begrudgingly.

------
NamTaf
They’ve... seen Telstra’s share price, right?

~~~
roenxi
Telstra's major asset is a large copper telecommunications network. The
government, as a matter of policy, is tearing that network up and replacing it
with a publicly owned fiber network. This is not a great situation for
Telstra, to say the least.

This has been going on for a while, but a hazy memory suggests there have been
shenanigans afoot regarding cash compensation for the damage done - that could
cause all sorts of gyrations in the share price. At any rate, the market has
become so political I wouldn't read too much in to Telstra's share price
without having a detailed understanding of the situation. The board is not in
control of the political process.

~~~
threeseed
Your assessment isn't correct at all.

Telstra sold the copper network to NBN in 2014. And NBN isn't replacing that
network at all. They are still using it for FTTC, FTTN and FTTB which will
make up the large bulk of the NBN rollout along with HFC which they acquired
from Optus.

And it's widely known in the industry that Telstra is positioning itself to
potentially buy back the NBN given they recently split the company into two:
Retail and Operations.

~~~
shasheene
Forgive me if I have any misconceptions or out-of-date knowledge, but while
Testra owned the copper telephone network (including, I believe, the copper
cabling within everybody's houses), it's only FTTN that uses the traditional
copper network -- as it uses copper cabling between the premises and the node
(with the node being those above-ground grey pillar box in every suburb, I
believe).

FTTC and FTTB don't use the much of the copper network at all: the only copper
cabling in FTTC is between the end-user's premises and the small underground
pit on every block (a very short stretch for vectored VDSL2 signals at 100
Mbit/s duplex). FTTB is fibre optic cabling to an apartment building, so the
only copper cabling there is within the building.

(Side note: From my past research, FTTC with vectored VDSL2 seemed like a
great cost-effective technology: leveraging a small amount of pre-existing
copper cabling to save digging up every garden in Australia to install the
final few meters fibre-optic cabling, with the optional upgrade path to full
FTTP being allowed to be done at any time into the future, if a households
willing to pay for the upgrade.)

~~~
threeseed
I can't remember where Telstra's ownership stopped whether it was to the first
in-house socket or to the curb. It's all a bit irrelevant now as NBN owns the
network and its problems.

Because what NBN is finding is that the last bit of copper is actually
responsible for a lot of the problems. And so even though FTTC for example
should be seeing significantly better results than FTTN in fact it isn't the
case. So much so that NBN is looking at whether to go into people's houses to
fix up the wiring.

FTTC is definitely a better option than FTTN especially since with G.Fast you
are able to attain 1Gbit/s speeds.

~~~
paranoidrobot
> I can't remember where Telstra's ownership stopped whether it was to the
> first in-house socket or to the curb.

It's at the Network Boundary Point (NBP), which varies from premises to
premises.

Free-standing houses that are more than 5-10 years old, it'll probably be the
first socket. For newer houses, there's a NBP that's either on the side of the
house, or near the edge of the property.

For Strata / Multiple-Dwelling Properties, it may be a Distribution Frame.

Way back in the 90s, before Telecom Australia became Telstra, the ownership of
all the internal wiring (defined as anything from the NBP onwards) was
transferred to the owner of the premises. This was part of the competition
stuff - allowing competitive bids on builds for wiring new premises, business,
etc.

------
godelmachine
She does not even have a Wikipedia page.

------
denzil_correa
> Ms. Denholm, the chief financial officer of Australian telecommunications
> firm Telstra Corp., has served on Tesla’s board since 2014 but has fewer
> ties to Mr. Musk than most of the company’s directors.

Yin and yang

------
louismerlin
Awesome Recode Decode interview featuring Musk from last week :
[https://www.recode.net/2018/11/2/18053428/recode-decode-
full...](https://www.recode.net/2018/11/2/18053428/recode-decode-full-podcast-
transcript-elon-musk-tesla-spacex-boring-company-kara-swisher)

~~~
spuz
I'm not sure how you can like this interview. It's extremely combative and the
questions from the interviewer seem childish like she is deliberately not
listening to Elon's answers. I'm no Elon fan but this is impossible to listen
to.

~~~
htk
Kara Swisher is like that sometimes, and I don't like it too. On Steve Jobs
last interview to her and Mossberg, Mossberg was trying to capture how Steve
thinks, but Kara was only interested in the current event of apple dropping
google on the maps app.

~~~
jypepin
Sometimes? She is always like that. Once she has someone in her grip, she
won't let go, ever. I don't understand how she can be so one-sided as a
journalist, if we can even call what she does journalism.

A few years ago she decided she'd get Uber down. Oh boy. Every single thing
she was writing was worst than a People magazine article about the
Kardashians. 0 objectivity. Straight up fake news, etc.

~~~
whtswrong
> _0 objectivity. Straight up fake news_

Please post a link to an article written by Swisher on Uber that had
absolutely "zero objectivity".

This trend of calling articles you disagree with or mediocre journalism "fake
news" is frightening.

