Firstly, this was not some PR event. Musk had large number of people knew what they were talking about wanting to ask tough questions. What Musk is interested in is not relevant.
Secondly, Musk can't avoid short term investor questions because unless he answers them, there may be no longer term. This kind of clear avoidance of difficult questions can easily add one percentage point to Tesla's future loans and reduce the amount he can collect.
Tesla is down almost 12% from the beginning of the year.
Investing is what we make of it. The reality is for everyone but the top 1%, investing is long term. It's tied into 401ks, it tied into RSU, its tied into Options unless you're the top 1% in which case the only benefit of short-term markets is the ability to manipulate them for your own benefit. Many CEO's know this and Tesla isn't the only company that faces this problem. Amazon has to think long-term, many tech companies have to think long term. Trying to get an entire industry/society to move forward or make systematic changes is a LONG TERM proposition.
sure, we can day trade or buy stocks and sell whenever we want, but we're not the ones causing market swings, we're positions in computational modeling where the market makers aren't even offering our positions to the market but using your sell to do another buy and make money off us reacting/acting on the market.
The end result is still that Tesla seeks a profit - but its business goal is to change the market. If you don't like that, don't buy the stock.
Even long term investing is fundamentally risk management. Tesla has so much debt and burning trough so much money that Tesla has problems with the future.
You want to quantify the risks you are taking. Answering questions would help.
What Musk is interested in is not relevant. Could you explain this statement? It's good to have these kinds of questions but let's not forget the bigger picture. Musk is making a contribution to the world. The Wolf on Wall Street not so much.
> Musk is making a contribution to the world. The Wolf on Wall Street not so much.
This is such a dumb, narrow-minded statement. Musk isn't some angel handing out miracles. He's a businessman, on a business-centric call, and was being rude to other businessmen who are essential to the success of anything he wants to do. This isn't The Wolf of Wall Street, this was Toni Sacconaghi, an extremely credentialed analyst, doing his job. And if you don't think that wall street analysts don't "make a contribution to the world", you need some perspective. Tesla as a company literally would not exist without the funding provided by companies like the ones Toni represents.
If Musk wanted to have a TED talk about how cool the future is, then he should have scheduled that on his own time. This was not that. Posters on HN complain all the time about how they get pulled into meetings and then their time is wasted because their bosses only wanted to talk about irrelevant stuff. That's exactly what happened here, only Musk was the one wasting everyone else's time.
It's dumb if you willfully select to view the statement in isolation. Wall Street did not come about to make the world a better place but came about to make investors rich. It is this single-minded focus on wealth that I couldn't give a rats ass about. This focus of wealth from quarter to quarter is short-sighted and unrealistic in certain businesses.
This is, yet, again, an ill-informed and extremely narrow-minded statement. Stock markets came about because they were a way for farmers to hedge their bets against poor crop yields and allowed them, as well as the civilizations that depended on them, to survive winters without starving. Stock markets are responsible for the growth of major trade routes that did things like spread agricultural innovation, knowledge, and culture throughout the ancient world. It was not "to make investors rich".
Today, the stock market still serves as a way to spread innovation. Elon Musk would not have been able to build Tesla, nor SpaceX, nor Solarcity without the help that Wall Street has provided. You are incorrect in assuming that this is about a "single-minded focus on wealth". They are asking questions about capital because these are the things that will determine whether or not Tesla will fail at "making the world a better place", and those are important things to know, just like it was important to know if all of your farmers are going to go out of business and cause a famine.
This story was about how Musk replied to some investor questions. He said to them you need to be accept volatility. I support this view. I suggest you keep this context in mind when reading the comments instead of reading this as a thesis on the pros and cons of stock exchanges. Do you think everything about stock exchanges is good? Everything has pros and cons. From MySQL to PHP to Java. We all draw different conclusions based on our experiences, preferences and character. I have reported to too many accountants to actually give a rats ass about their so called "tough" questions.
The purpose of the call was to serve investors. Musk should have answered their concerns.
Normally investors listen forward-looking statements from CEO, but Musk has failed all his projections so many times that they are worthless. He says that he don't need to ask more money this year. Investors look at the numbers and don't believe it. He should give something useful that helps investors to asses the risk on their own and put number to it.
> Musk is making a contribution to the world.
Musk is not in trial. People just want to ask tough and important questions. Avoidance is not a good signal.
If you read my initial comment I started by stating why I have some sympathy for Musk. Having been at the coalface I know the feeling of facing the so-called tough questions. You always have two choices, mumble something that you are aware of the issues and you are giving the issues the highest priority. All available personnel are working around the clock to deal with the issues. The truth though is most of the issues are too technical to explain to the crowd. Musk in making his statement said something I felt like saying to a whole bunch of people many times in my life. Piss off and leave me to do my job. Some of these issues took other companies decades to fix. As I said I don't hold any Tesla stock.
Musk's "job" is not fixing technical issues, he has thousands of more competent people for that. His day-to-day job is marketing and making sure his firm gets capital when it runs out yet again. This is him failing at his day job.
The technical issues with the assembling the cars fast enough are the root cause of the concerns. Until these are sorted out whatever "marketing" reassuring talk he gives to investors is speculation until the next quarter comes by then it is more of the same. I like to think Musk is aware of this hence his statement.
Secondly, Musk can't avoid short term investor questions because unless he answers them, there may be no longer term. This kind of clear avoidance of difficult questions can easily add one percentage point to Tesla's future loans and reduce the amount he can collect.
Tesla is down almost 12% from the beginning of the year.