You're acting like this was his standard salary. It wasn't.
His contact, approved by shareholders at the time, basically offered him a King's ransom for an impossible miracle, defined with metrics like sales and stock price.
Elon delivered the miracle. Love him or hate him, the conditions were met.
If you really think he did nothing at all, then you have absolutely no understanding of how business works or how Tesla works. It's like saying the ship doesn't need a captain because the captain doesn't personally operate or clean a part of the ship.
You are right that it is greed. But that is the very point. That is how our economy works. That is how our government works too. The whole point of checks and balances in the US Constitution is that people are expected to be greedy. Rather than rely on a king to be altruistic, it is expected that people at every level will be greedy so their greed is balanced against the greed of others.
Same thing is true with our economy, the whole point of capitalist economy is it harnesses the greed of everybody to move things forward.
Investors provide capital because they are greedy and want a return on their investment. Their greed is harnessed and put to work, This benefits all by providing a rich market of investment capital for businesses to use. And because they are greedy, because those investors have partial ownership of the company, they affect its direction.
It's not always perfect. Lately far too many business decisions are made based solely on next quarter results at the cost of long-term success, and that is driven by short-term investors. Boeing is a perfect example of that.
But to write the whole system off and say it's all greed and it all sucks and it's all stupid reflects a fundamental lack of understanding how the economy works.
If you want an economy without greed, the best you're probably going to find is communism. That's been tried, it doesn't usually work so well because without a greed incentive pushing things forward, there isn't incentive to innovate or to work at maximum efficiency.
And as for Elon's windfall, I think it's fair to say nobody needs $56 billion. I definitely support a much higher tax rate for the extreme upper income brackets. If you are making more than 50 or 100 million a year income above that should be taxed at a pretty high rate. I am extremely against the extreme income inequality that has happened in this country. When the CEO is making hundreds of millions and the guy mopping the floor relies on government assistance to afford food, something is seriously fucked up.
But I think the solution to that is to bring up the lower guy, raise the minimum wage by a fairly significant amount. I think in most places minimum wage should be ¢15 or $20 an hour.
And I also favor a prohibition that if any of the companies employees rely on government assistance the company loses all tax breaks and government benefits.
Please don't take what I said as a suggestion that what we have right now is great. Like anything, capitalism requires checks and balances. In my opinion the heyday of modern capitalism was the mid to late 1900s, because industry was operating at full efficiency but regulation also insured that the average person was able to benefit from that. All three factors of production, land labor and capital, all had a seat at the table.
We have moved a good distance away from that. Capital dominates the conversation, land has made some advances in the form of environmental protection, but labor still takes a distant back seat.
And so you get ridiculous situations like a company gets hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies while the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions and the guy who mops the floor is on food stamps.
I don't see this as good capitalism. Labor needs a bigger seat at the table. If a business cannot afford to survive without paying ALL their workers a living wage that allows upward mobility, that business does not deserve to survive. As I see it, that is part of the very base of capitalism.
That said, your suggestion that businesses don't need a leader is a ridiculous socialist/communist fantasy that doesn't actually work in reality.
Take an established business like McDonald's. From where you sit it probably looks like it doesn't need a leader, it just keeps going on its own. But who decides how much the burgers cost? Who decides when to introduce new menu items? Who decides what the promotions will be? Who decides what market segments will they focus on? Who decides whether their next new product will be a salad or a triple cheeseburger?
And if you're going to say middle managers can make these decisions, who decides who those middle managers are?
For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of employee owned corporations. That doesn't always work in every segment, but I wish there were a lot more of them. But even an employee own corporation has a CEO, the CEO is just selected by the employees.
As for Elon, your suggestion that he has done nothing shows that you are uninformed. The reason he is not listed as an original founder of Tesla is because of the handful of people who founded it, one already had a business registered and it was cheaper for everybody to buy into that than pay to have it dissolved and pay again to register a new business.
I have actually been following them very closely more or less since they started, so I know this better than most.
In the early days Tesla was headed by a guy named Martin Eberhard and Elon was just an investor. Eberhard insisted on a design with a two-speed gearbox. This is extremely difficult in an electric car because of the high amounts of torque and extremely high RPMs involved. They went through a couple different versions of this, trying to get one that would last the life of a car, and burned a year or so trying to make it work. If you dig through the archives, you'll find several news articles of journalists who got to drive the original Roadster, but it was locked in second gear because the shifting didn't work.
Eventually, Elon realized this wasn't going to work so him and the other investors pushed Eberhard out. There was no love lost, Eberhard fought back, eventually they came to a settlement and Elon became CEO.
Please understand I'm not saying this because I like Elon, I'm saying it because I was literally reading the blogs of both sides as it happened.
The two-speed gearbox went right in the trash, they went to the one speed reduction gear Tesla uses today, and upsized the motor to give better acceleration. Elon was right about that decision, and he was the one who made that decision, all EVs today use that design.
As for SpaceX, Elon basically started that from the ground up. As I recall the guy who designed the Merlin engine was his first hire.
I personally know people who worked for SpaceX and worked directly with Elon. Everyone I've talked to says the same thing- Elon is kind of an asshole to his employees, he has absolutely no sense of work-life balance and he wants employees who are 120% committed to the cause and will work late nights and weekends without complaint, he is opinionated and stubborn but in the end he's right more often than not, but however hard he pushes his people, he pushes himself even harder. Most people don't last very long in that environment, they put in a handful of years and when their stock options vest they quit, or if they don't have equity they work until they have a family and can't put in 60 hour weeks anymore then they quit.
So you want to say Elon is an asshole, you want to say he treats his employees badly, you want to say he doesn't create a positive environment at his company's, I will probably agree with all of these things.
But you say he doesn't do anything of value, that is just uninformed.
A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates....
My thought exactly. If this was back in like 2010, it would be a real oh shit moment, The key to the kingdom has been leaked. Now I don't think anybody really cares other than SEO spammers who will game the system even more than they already are.
Google search is crap and has been crap for some time. Not sure any others are better. But it started going downhill with the Google Plus social network, when they removed "+" as a search operator so you could better search for 'Google+' that was the first time they messed with Search to further some other business goal. It wasn't the last time.
Back when Google was good, they publicly said their goal was to get you off their site as fast as possible. Now the results reek of engagement algorithm bullshit.
You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...
I know, right? This seems so fucking obvious to me. Maybe I'm just old school, but I still believe if you come out with a new product and it sucks you should pull it from shelves and go back to the older better one that people liked before you drive all your customers away.
That doesn't seem to be the attitude of modern tech tho, SOP now seems to be if you come up with a new version and it sucks and everybody hates it, you double down, keep telling people why it's actually better and your customers don't know what they want and refuse to change course until either you fix it or all your customers leave.
This apparently is better in some way. Not sure how, but most of the companies seem to be doing it.
This thing is way too half baked to be in production.
A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point.
The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.
I agree. Even at $120 each. 120 times tens of millions is serious fucking cash.
We need to have a couple of big companies go bankrupt over this shit. Then maybe they will start taking it seriously. Perhaps at that point maintaining personal data on people will be seen as a liability rather than an asset. And that's what we really need.
Yup. We need more of the corporate death penalty. And when corporations are so big that 'killing' them would harm the economy, I argue we're back to too big to fail. Maybe the answer is giant fines, and if the company can't pay, wipe out the largest shareholders and then resell the stock over time.
Make people's personal information a giant hot potato that nobody wants to be holding.
Disagree. Breaking the corporate veil would have a whole lot of unintended consequences and would basically kill investment as a concept. I agree we need to do more about corporations that violate the law with impunity and get wrist slaps. I don't think that's it.
Because it would greatly increase the cost and risk of investment. Think not just for billionaires, but for anybody.
Imagine somebody buys a couple tens of thousands of dollars of a stock as part of their retirement, that company does something bad, and now not only do they lose their investment but they lose the rest of their retirement also.
I am all for wiping out shareholders, especially big ones, when a company does something super stupid. There should be an incentive for shareholders to hold companies they invest in accountable.
But suggesting that company owners become personally liable for the actions of those companies, especially when those equity owners have little or no control over the decisions of the company, that is a recipe for disaster.
Oh I'm sure there would be insurance for that, but it would be expensive. It would dramatically reduce the amount of overall investment in the nation. That is a very bad thing, it would slow down the rate of our economy and innovation.
Don't get me wrong, the current setup where companies treat your data like an asset and then lose it and nothing happens is broken. There need to be stiff penalties for it. Corporate death penalty even, especially with an ending of all too big to fail. I'm talking penalties scary to the point that whatever profit could be made from your personal information isn't worth the risk of having it, companies are scared to collect info.
This would especially be true if there is negligence involved, like when companies put their databases on open S3 buckets. Companies should be scared shitless of that.
But destroying our system of investment is not the answer.
If a company ruins people's lives, I'm okay with them disappearing and all their investors losing their shirts.
I agree that a company that can't afford to pay for the damage it is causing is doing more harm than help and should go away.
What I think we can both absolutely agree on, is that the current system where companies forcibly collect all kinds of information on people, don't take security seriously, get breached, and the only punishment that happens is a few million dollars fine they can just write a check for and everyone affected gets a year of credit monitoring, is a broken system.
In many of these breaches, they happen because the data was stored so poorly one could make a serious argument for gross negligence.
When a company does this and the punishment is a wrist slap, I have a problem with that. It becomes a cost of doing business, not something company management is actually afraid of.
Also, as somebody who actually works in IT, I can tell you cyber insurance is a thing. For small businesses it covers this sort of breach. When you sign up for it they send you a whole questionnaire that asks about your security practices. It's all boilerplate bullshit. Real cybersecurity involves an insane amount of complexity and required understanding at every level, and the insurance questionnaire is like do you use multi-factor authentication for your email y/n?. If you check no you get a higher insurance premium.
Perhaps a solution would be a mandatory payment of $250 per person made directly to that person if their information is breached. And if the company fails to report it within 60 days, it triples. If the company intentionally conceals it, it quadruples. And should the company go bankrupt and liquidate, these payments to users will be considered the primary creditor and take priority over all others.
So no more of this '$10 discount on your next purchase and a year of credit monitoring' class action settlements, put some real fucking teeth in a law. People would get some real compensation. And personal information would no longer be seen as a $20/person asset but rather as a potentially destroy the company liability.
Oh the plane will be fine.
Being a whistleblower is very stressful though. I would not be at all surprised if many if not all of them find it just too hard to go on and end up committing suicide by shooting themselves twice in the back of the head before jumping off a building.
There's actually a really good explanation for this.
This is a mixing pump. It mixes ethanol into the fuel. Because the mixing happens before the part of the pump that measures how much is being dispensed, you need at least a few gallons to fully flush things out and get somewhere close to what you're actually buying.
Nobody is going to come arrest you if you buy 2 gallons of gas. But the gas you get me not be the mix you wanted.
If ByteDance doesn't want to sell their stupid algorithm, they could simply rip it out of TikTok, replace it with a random number generator or any other off-the-shelf recommendation engine, and proceed with the sale.
Find their lowest paid summer intern from the university computer science department, tell him to write some sort of recommendation algorithm and he has two weeks to do it, then whatever he comes up with make it live and that's all the new owner gets.
Tesla Shareholders Approve Musk's $56 Billion Pay Package in Early Voting ( www.ibtimes.co.uk )
Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation ( www.theverge.com )
A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates....
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information ( futurism.com )
You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...
Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search ( www.theverge.com )
Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected ( www.bleepingcomputer.com )
Is Boeing in big trouble? World's largest aerospace firm faces 10 more whistleblowers after sudden death of two ( www.hindustantimes.com )
Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling ( www.pcgamer.com )
Just saw this while getting gas. Why is it illegal to get less than 4 gallons? ( lemmy.world )
ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say ( www.reuters.com )
Squatters take over Gordon Ramsay hotel and pub in London ( www.theguardian.com )