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Musk Says Excessive Automation Was ‘My Mistake’
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ut-model-3
“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake,” the CEO wrote in a tweet Friday, hours after CBS aired an interview in which he acknowledged putting too many robots in Tesla’s lone auto factory. “Humans are underrated.”
It was a significant concession by Musk, 46, who boasted less than a year ago that Tesla was building a competitive advantage over established automakers by programming robots to quickly produce vehicles. Instead, Tesla has struggled to hit targets for the Model 3, the first sedan the company has tried to mass-manufacture and eventually sell for as little as $35,000.
Excessive use of robots has been one of the factors holding Tesla back from making more Model 3s at its factory in Fremont, California, the chief executive officer said in an interview with CBS This Morning.
“We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts, and it wasn’t working, so we got rid of that whole thing,” said Musk, wearing a black Tesla cap and safety glasses.
Analyst Max Warburton saw this mea culpa coming. He was the lead author of a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. report last month that called Tesla’s belief it could automate most aspects of making the Model 3 a “fallacy.”
“Automation in final assembly doesn’t work,” according to Warburton. “Many have tried it in the past,” including Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co., and failed, he wrote.
Tesla automobili
Re: Tesla automobili
Experts say Tesla has repeated car industry mistakes from the 1980s
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/ex ... the-1980s/
GM spent billions on a mostly fruitless attempt to automate carmaking.
Production had been halted for much of last week in Tesla's car factory in Fremont, California, and its battery factory near Clark, Nevada. In a Tuesday note to employees, CEO Elon Musk said that the pause was necessary to lay the groundwork for higher production levels in the coming weeks. Musk said he wants all parts of the company ready to prepare 6,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June, triple the rate Tesla has achieved in the recent weeks.
The announcement caps a nine-month period of turmoil that Musk has described as "production hell" as Tesla has struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3.
Tesla had high hopes for its Model 3 production efforts. In 2016, Musk hired Audi executive Peter Hochholdinger to plan the manufacturing process, and Business Insider described his plans in late 2016: "Hochholdinger's view is that robots could be a much bigger factor in auto production than they are currently, largely because many components are designed to be assembled by humans, not machines."
A year later, Musk himself was touting Tesla's advanced robotics expertise. "We are pushing robots to the limit in terms of the speed that they can operate at, and asking our suppliers to make robots go way faster, and they are shocked because nobody has ever asked them that question," Musk said on a conference call last November. "It’s like if you can see the robot move, it’s too slow.”
Musk now admits he was wrong about this. "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake," Musk tweeted recently. "To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated."
"We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts," Musk told CBS News. "And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing."
Musk is discovering that large-scale car manufacturing is really hard, and it's not easy to improve on the methods of conventional automakers. And while automation obviously plays an important role in car manufacturing, it's not the magic bullet Musk imagined a couple of years ago. Far from leapfrogging the techniques of conventional automakers, Tesla is now struggling just to match the efficiency of its more established rivals.
And most of the auto industry experts we talked to thought Musk still had a lot to learn.
"A lot of the mistakes we're hearing about are mistakes that were made in the rest of the industry in the 1980s and the 1990s," says Sam Abuelsamid, an industry analyst at Navigant Research. He points to the experience of General Motors, which wasted billions of dollars in a largely fruitless effort to automate car production in the 1980s.
At the same time, it's rarely a good idea to underestimate Musk. Musk has a long history of setting optimistic deadlines for his companies and then failing to meet them. But Musk is persistent and a quick learner. He has made a lot of mistakes so far, but he may still have time to learn from those mistakes and turn Tesla into a competitive carmaker.
The same mistake
In reporting this story, we talked to two different experts who drew the same parallel to GM's automation efforts in the 1980s. At the time, GM was being led by chairman and CEO Roger Smith and faced rising competition from Toyota and other foreign carmakers. Smith had a vision for a "lights out" car factory where robots would do the bulk of the work, allowing GM to produce cars more efficiently than anyone else.
In their 1994 book Comeback, Paul Ingrassia and Joseph White (Author) described the results of Smith's automation project at GM's plant in Hamtramck, Michigan:
As Hamtramck's assembly line tried to gain speed, the computer-guided dolly wandered off course. The spray-painting robots began spraying each other instead of the cars, causing GM to truck the cars across town to a fifty-seven-year-old Cadillac plant for repainting. When a massive computer-controlled 'robogate' welding machine smashed a car body, or a welding machine stopped dead, the entire Hamtramck line would stop. Workers could do nothing but stand around and wait while managers called in the robot contractor's technicians.
Over the course of the 1980s, GM spent billions of dollars on advanced robotics, but it never saw a return on that investment.
"Instead of easing robots onto the line a few at a time, providing for inevitable debugging problems with redundant equipment, GM bet the entire Hamtramck production system on the proposition that leading-edge automation would work instantaneously."
Three decades later, robots are more sophisticated. But the same basic insight applies: automation works best when it's added incrementally to a production process that's already working smoothly. And Musk seems to have made the same mistake Smith did: bringing in way too many robots, way too quickly, leaving little time for testing and refining the process.
Robots are supposed to allow production of more cars with fewer workers, but one ironic consequence of over-automation is that it can actually require more workers. Ingrassia and White report that GM's Hamtramck plant had around 5,000 workers on its payroll in the mid-1980s, compared to 3,700 workers at a nearby Ford plant with many fewer robots. Yet the Ford plant was "outproducing Hamtramck by a wide margin."
Today, Tesla is having the same frustrating experience. Tesla is manufacturing its cars at a plant in Fremont, California, that was formerly a famous GM/Toyota joint factory called NUMMI. According to Automotive News, NUMMI had 2,470 employees in 1985, its first year in operation, and produced 64,764 cars. By 1997, it had 4,844 workers and produced 357,809 vehicles.
By contrast, Automotive news estimates that Tesla has somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 workers in 2016 (the San Jose Mercury News said it was "about 10,000" last year) and manufactured just 83,922 vehicles. That means Tesla's plant in 2016 was less than half as productive, on a per-worker basis, as it was during the first year of GM management—and less than one fifth as productive as it was during NUMMI's heyday in the 1990s.
"The number of people Musk's got in there has a great deal to do with why he doesn't make money building vehicles," automotive manufacturing consultant Michael Tracy told Automotive News last year.
To be fair, Tesla is known for being more vertically integrated than competitors. So some of those extra workers may be doing work that would have been performed by suppliers in the NUMMI plant.
And Tesla says it's making progress. "The number of labor hours needed to complete a vehicle has decreased 33 percent since early 2016," Tesla's Laurie Shelby wrote in a February blog post.
Applying Silicon Valley culture to carmaking didn't work
Building cars at scale is one of the most complex and capital-intensive manufacturing tasks in the world. To cope with these challenges, carmakers tend to have a highly regimented process for designing and building cars.
Car designs are worked out years in advance, and companies do extensive testing—both of car prototypes and of manufacturing equipment—before launching the main assembly line for a new car model. Employees are expected to scrupulously follow policies and procedures to avoid disrupting the plans of their colleagues.
This runs directly counter to the ethos of Silicon Valley. Because software is so easy to modify and distribute to customers, the software industry tends to value creativity and rapid iteration. Musk, who earned his early millions in the software industry, naturally tried to bring this same agile approach to the car business.
"Everything about Tesla is supposed to be fast, the car, the development process, the launch process," said John Shook, an auto industry veteran who got his start at NUMMI, in a recent podcast. Shook summarized Tesla's approach as "let's start to build the thing before we've actually finished designing it. Because what we're building even for cash-paying customers is actually betas."
"The idea is we can go fast by leaving out steps, and we'll just iterate our way to something really good. But what we can see is that actually creates a lot of problems."
This kind of rapid iteration works well in the software industry because a programmer can change one line of code and then re-build the entire project with the click of a button. But physical manufacturing isn't like that. Car design decisions have to be translated into physical tooling that takes months to build and fine-tune.
And rapid iteration is a nightmare for suppliers, Shook added.
"I talked to a supplier and asked 'who's your worst customer'" Shook said. "The answer was Tesla. How can you be a good supplier when you don't know when you're supposed to deliver?"
"I was giving a talk at a tooling group," said David Cole, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research. Veteran toolmakers there told Cole that most automakers do prototype tooling when they're designing a vehicle. "They make some vehicles so they can test them and find out if the tooling is good. They said that that was standard procedure at every auto company except for Tesla."
At Tesla, he said, "they take their prototype into production."
"I think what we're seeing is a lack of basic manufacturing experience," Cole added.
Don't count tesla out yet
Of course, the obvious response to this is that if Musk had listened to the experts, he probably wouldn't have started Tesla in the first place. Conventional wisdom in the mid-2000s was not very bullish about the prospects for battery electric cars. And there was widespread skepticism that it was even possible to start a new, independent automaker. After all, no American company had managed to break into the car business in many decades.
Musk ignored the conventional wisdom, and he has gotten much further than anyone expected. He has sold hundreds of thousands of cars and has hundreds of thousands more people eager to buy the Model 3 as soon as it's available. Moreover, Tesla has had a huge influence on the broader car industry, forcing every major carmaker to take battery electric vehicles seriously.
It's clearly true that Tesla's frenetic pace of experimentation is not the most efficient way to produce cars in the short run. However, it might be the best way to learn the lessons Tesla needs to learn to produce cars more efficiently in the long run. Tesla hasn't produced very many Model 3 cars over the last nine months, but Musk and his team have learned a lot about how to produce cars efficiently—lessons they'll be able to carry with them in future manufacturing projects.
Musk likely could have spared himself a lot of short-term headaches if he had relied more heavily on auto industry veterans to warn him against repeating mistakes made by other car companies in previous decades. But if he had done that, he would also be less likely to discover ways to optimize the manufacturing process—particularly optimizations that work particularly well for a company specializing entirely in electric vehicles.
The big question, however, is whether Musk will be able to apply the lessons of the last nine months in a disciplined way in the future. Whatever the value of experimentation in the early months of Model 3 production, Tesla is going to have to run its manufacturing efforts more like a conventional automaker in the long run if it wants to produce cars with competitive prices and quality. That won't be easy.
At the same time, Tesla has unique strengths. It has unrivaled expertise in batteries and software. It has an intensely loyal fan base. And it has Musk himself, one of the world's most talented marketers. All of which means that—like Apple—Tesla may be insulated from the intense margin pressures most other carmakers face. A lot of people may be willing to pay a premium to say they drive a Tesla, which means that the company may be able to turn a profit even if its manufacturing process isn't quite as efficient as its more established rivals.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/ex ... the-1980s/
GM spent billions on a mostly fruitless attempt to automate carmaking.
Production had been halted for much of last week in Tesla's car factory in Fremont, California, and its battery factory near Clark, Nevada. In a Tuesday note to employees, CEO Elon Musk said that the pause was necessary to lay the groundwork for higher production levels in the coming weeks. Musk said he wants all parts of the company ready to prepare 6,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June, triple the rate Tesla has achieved in the recent weeks.
The announcement caps a nine-month period of turmoil that Musk has described as "production hell" as Tesla has struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3.
Tesla had high hopes for its Model 3 production efforts. In 2016, Musk hired Audi executive Peter Hochholdinger to plan the manufacturing process, and Business Insider described his plans in late 2016: "Hochholdinger's view is that robots could be a much bigger factor in auto production than they are currently, largely because many components are designed to be assembled by humans, not machines."
A year later, Musk himself was touting Tesla's advanced robotics expertise. "We are pushing robots to the limit in terms of the speed that they can operate at, and asking our suppliers to make robots go way faster, and they are shocked because nobody has ever asked them that question," Musk said on a conference call last November. "It’s like if you can see the robot move, it’s too slow.”
Musk now admits he was wrong about this. "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake," Musk tweeted recently. "To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated."
"We had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts," Musk told CBS News. "And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing."
Musk is discovering that large-scale car manufacturing is really hard, and it's not easy to improve on the methods of conventional automakers. And while automation obviously plays an important role in car manufacturing, it's not the magic bullet Musk imagined a couple of years ago. Far from leapfrogging the techniques of conventional automakers, Tesla is now struggling just to match the efficiency of its more established rivals.
And most of the auto industry experts we talked to thought Musk still had a lot to learn.
"A lot of the mistakes we're hearing about are mistakes that were made in the rest of the industry in the 1980s and the 1990s," says Sam Abuelsamid, an industry analyst at Navigant Research. He points to the experience of General Motors, which wasted billions of dollars in a largely fruitless effort to automate car production in the 1980s.
At the same time, it's rarely a good idea to underestimate Musk. Musk has a long history of setting optimistic deadlines for his companies and then failing to meet them. But Musk is persistent and a quick learner. He has made a lot of mistakes so far, but he may still have time to learn from those mistakes and turn Tesla into a competitive carmaker.
The same mistake
In reporting this story, we talked to two different experts who drew the same parallel to GM's automation efforts in the 1980s. At the time, GM was being led by chairman and CEO Roger Smith and faced rising competition from Toyota and other foreign carmakers. Smith had a vision for a "lights out" car factory where robots would do the bulk of the work, allowing GM to produce cars more efficiently than anyone else.
In their 1994 book Comeback, Paul Ingrassia and Joseph White (Author) described the results of Smith's automation project at GM's plant in Hamtramck, Michigan:
As Hamtramck's assembly line tried to gain speed, the computer-guided dolly wandered off course. The spray-painting robots began spraying each other instead of the cars, causing GM to truck the cars across town to a fifty-seven-year-old Cadillac plant for repainting. When a massive computer-controlled 'robogate' welding machine smashed a car body, or a welding machine stopped dead, the entire Hamtramck line would stop. Workers could do nothing but stand around and wait while managers called in the robot contractor's technicians.
Over the course of the 1980s, GM spent billions of dollars on advanced robotics, but it never saw a return on that investment.
"Instead of easing robots onto the line a few at a time, providing for inevitable debugging problems with redundant equipment, GM bet the entire Hamtramck production system on the proposition that leading-edge automation would work instantaneously."
Three decades later, robots are more sophisticated. But the same basic insight applies: automation works best when it's added incrementally to a production process that's already working smoothly. And Musk seems to have made the same mistake Smith did: bringing in way too many robots, way too quickly, leaving little time for testing and refining the process.
Robots are supposed to allow production of more cars with fewer workers, but one ironic consequence of over-automation is that it can actually require more workers. Ingrassia and White report that GM's Hamtramck plant had around 5,000 workers on its payroll in the mid-1980s, compared to 3,700 workers at a nearby Ford plant with many fewer robots. Yet the Ford plant was "outproducing Hamtramck by a wide margin."
Today, Tesla is having the same frustrating experience. Tesla is manufacturing its cars at a plant in Fremont, California, that was formerly a famous GM/Toyota joint factory called NUMMI. According to Automotive News, NUMMI had 2,470 employees in 1985, its first year in operation, and produced 64,764 cars. By 1997, it had 4,844 workers and produced 357,809 vehicles.
By contrast, Automotive news estimates that Tesla has somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 workers in 2016 (the San Jose Mercury News said it was "about 10,000" last year) and manufactured just 83,922 vehicles. That means Tesla's plant in 2016 was less than half as productive, on a per-worker basis, as it was during the first year of GM management—and less than one fifth as productive as it was during NUMMI's heyday in the 1990s.
"The number of people Musk's got in there has a great deal to do with why he doesn't make money building vehicles," automotive manufacturing consultant Michael Tracy told Automotive News last year.
To be fair, Tesla is known for being more vertically integrated than competitors. So some of those extra workers may be doing work that would have been performed by suppliers in the NUMMI plant.
And Tesla says it's making progress. "The number of labor hours needed to complete a vehicle has decreased 33 percent since early 2016," Tesla's Laurie Shelby wrote in a February blog post.
Applying Silicon Valley culture to carmaking didn't work
Building cars at scale is one of the most complex and capital-intensive manufacturing tasks in the world. To cope with these challenges, carmakers tend to have a highly regimented process for designing and building cars.
Car designs are worked out years in advance, and companies do extensive testing—both of car prototypes and of manufacturing equipment—before launching the main assembly line for a new car model. Employees are expected to scrupulously follow policies and procedures to avoid disrupting the plans of their colleagues.
This runs directly counter to the ethos of Silicon Valley. Because software is so easy to modify and distribute to customers, the software industry tends to value creativity and rapid iteration. Musk, who earned his early millions in the software industry, naturally tried to bring this same agile approach to the car business.
"Everything about Tesla is supposed to be fast, the car, the development process, the launch process," said John Shook, an auto industry veteran who got his start at NUMMI, in a recent podcast. Shook summarized Tesla's approach as "let's start to build the thing before we've actually finished designing it. Because what we're building even for cash-paying customers is actually betas."
"The idea is we can go fast by leaving out steps, and we'll just iterate our way to something really good. But what we can see is that actually creates a lot of problems."
This kind of rapid iteration works well in the software industry because a programmer can change one line of code and then re-build the entire project with the click of a button. But physical manufacturing isn't like that. Car design decisions have to be translated into physical tooling that takes months to build and fine-tune.
And rapid iteration is a nightmare for suppliers, Shook added.
"I talked to a supplier and asked 'who's your worst customer'" Shook said. "The answer was Tesla. How can you be a good supplier when you don't know when you're supposed to deliver?"
"I was giving a talk at a tooling group," said David Cole, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research. Veteran toolmakers there told Cole that most automakers do prototype tooling when they're designing a vehicle. "They make some vehicles so they can test them and find out if the tooling is good. They said that that was standard procedure at every auto company except for Tesla."
At Tesla, he said, "they take their prototype into production."
"I think what we're seeing is a lack of basic manufacturing experience," Cole added.
Don't count tesla out yet
Of course, the obvious response to this is that if Musk had listened to the experts, he probably wouldn't have started Tesla in the first place. Conventional wisdom in the mid-2000s was not very bullish about the prospects for battery electric cars. And there was widespread skepticism that it was even possible to start a new, independent automaker. After all, no American company had managed to break into the car business in many decades.
Musk ignored the conventional wisdom, and he has gotten much further than anyone expected. He has sold hundreds of thousands of cars and has hundreds of thousands more people eager to buy the Model 3 as soon as it's available. Moreover, Tesla has had a huge influence on the broader car industry, forcing every major carmaker to take battery electric vehicles seriously.
It's clearly true that Tesla's frenetic pace of experimentation is not the most efficient way to produce cars in the short run. However, it might be the best way to learn the lessons Tesla needs to learn to produce cars more efficiently in the long run. Tesla hasn't produced very many Model 3 cars over the last nine months, but Musk and his team have learned a lot about how to produce cars efficiently—lessons they'll be able to carry with them in future manufacturing projects.
Musk likely could have spared himself a lot of short-term headaches if he had relied more heavily on auto industry veterans to warn him against repeating mistakes made by other car companies in previous decades. But if he had done that, he would also be less likely to discover ways to optimize the manufacturing process—particularly optimizations that work particularly well for a company specializing entirely in electric vehicles.
The big question, however, is whether Musk will be able to apply the lessons of the last nine months in a disciplined way in the future. Whatever the value of experimentation in the early months of Model 3 production, Tesla is going to have to run its manufacturing efforts more like a conventional automaker in the long run if it wants to produce cars with competitive prices and quality. That won't be easy.
At the same time, Tesla has unique strengths. It has unrivaled expertise in batteries and software. It has an intensely loyal fan base. And it has Musk himself, one of the world's most talented marketers. All of which means that—like Apple—Tesla may be insulated from the intense margin pressures most other carmakers face. A lot of people may be willing to pay a premium to say they drive a Tesla, which means that the company may be able to turn a profit even if its manufacturing process isn't quite as efficient as its more established rivals.
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Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
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Re: Tesla automobili
Mauro Forghieri:"Power comes from speed, torque without speed is nothing"
Life is funny, skies are sunny, Bees make honey, who needs money
Re: Tesla automobili
Tesla shareholders to vote on proposal to remove Elon Musk as Chairman
https://electrek.co/2018/04/27/tesla-sh ... -chairman/
This week, Tesla announced its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held in June and with it, the company confirmed that shareholders will vote on a few proposals.
Surprisingly, one of those proposals involves replacing Elon Musk as Chairman of the board with an independent director.
Tesla’s shareholder’s meeting generally starts with the official items, which this year includes voting to reelecting 3 board members, ratifying Tesla’s independent registered public accounting firm, and voting on two shareholder proposals.
After that, Musk generally comes on stage for a quick presentation and then he answers questions from shareholders.
But this year, one of the shareholder proposals is to remove Musk from his role as chairman, which he has held since 2004 at Tesla – virtually since the company’s inception.
An owner of 12 Tesla shares named Mr. Jing Zhao from Concord, CA put the proposal together. He is a well-known shareholder activist who has previously pushed other proposals at companies, like Apple and IBM.
He made the argument that combining the role of chairman and CEO might have been beneficial at an early stage at Tesla, but not now that the company is maturing. He specifically brought up Musk’s involvement with SolarCity and SpaceX as examples why he can’t be considered as an independent chairman.
The shareholder added in his proposal:
“An independent chairman of the board of directors is the prevailing practice in the international market, such as in the United Kingdom. In the United States too, many big companies already have or began to have an independent Board Chairman. Tesla should not be exception.”
Tesla was already under pressure last year to add independent board members, which it eventually did, but it never got to the point of asking Musk to give up his position as Chairman.
Unsurprisingly, the board is asking shareholders to vote against the proposal.
Here’s their argument against it published in a proxy statement sent to shareholders:
“The Board believes that the Company’s success to date would not have been possible if the Board was led by another director lacking Elon Musk’s day-to-day exposure to the Company’s business. In light of the significant future opportunities for growth and the careful execution needed in order for the Company to achieve it, the Board believes that the Company is still best served by Mr. Musk continuing to serve as Chairman.
Moreover, the role of the Lead Independent Director protects the Company against any potential governance issues arising from a non-independent director serving as Chairman. This position is vested with broad authority to lead the actions of the independent directors and communicate regularly with the Chief Executive Officer. Additionally, the Company now has seven independent directors following the addition of two additional independent directors in July 2017. The Board believes that the broad authority of the Lead Independen t Director and the presence of six other independent directors ensures that the Board acts independently. This current Board structure also is consistent with majority practice at large public companies: according to the 2017 Spencer Stuart Board Index, 72 % of companies in the S&P 500 do not have an independent board chairman.
The proponent acknowledges that a combined Chief Executive Officer and Chairman is an effective form of leadership for an early-stage company, until it faces increased competition and rapid technological changes. The Board believes that it is precisely during times when a company must quickly adapt to constant change and outside pressures that Board leadership needs to be lockstep with the Company’s operations. Our achievements to date notwithstanding, the Company is still at a point in its development where we must execute well in order to realize our long-term goals, and separating the roles of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman at this time would not serve the best interests of the Company or its stockholders.”
Shareholders will vote on the matter at the meeting, which will be held on June 5, 2018, at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time, at the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, CA.
https://electrek.co/2018/04/27/tesla-sh ... -chairman/
This week, Tesla announced its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held in June and with it, the company confirmed that shareholders will vote on a few proposals.
Surprisingly, one of those proposals involves replacing Elon Musk as Chairman of the board with an independent director.
Tesla’s shareholder’s meeting generally starts with the official items, which this year includes voting to reelecting 3 board members, ratifying Tesla’s independent registered public accounting firm, and voting on two shareholder proposals.
After that, Musk generally comes on stage for a quick presentation and then he answers questions from shareholders.
But this year, one of the shareholder proposals is to remove Musk from his role as chairman, which he has held since 2004 at Tesla – virtually since the company’s inception.
An owner of 12 Tesla shares named Mr. Jing Zhao from Concord, CA put the proposal together. He is a well-known shareholder activist who has previously pushed other proposals at companies, like Apple and IBM.
He made the argument that combining the role of chairman and CEO might have been beneficial at an early stage at Tesla, but not now that the company is maturing. He specifically brought up Musk’s involvement with SolarCity and SpaceX as examples why he can’t be considered as an independent chairman.
The shareholder added in his proposal:
“An independent chairman of the board of directors is the prevailing practice in the international market, such as in the United Kingdom. In the United States too, many big companies already have or began to have an independent Board Chairman. Tesla should not be exception.”
Tesla was already under pressure last year to add independent board members, which it eventually did, but it never got to the point of asking Musk to give up his position as Chairman.
Unsurprisingly, the board is asking shareholders to vote against the proposal.
Here’s their argument against it published in a proxy statement sent to shareholders:
“The Board believes that the Company’s success to date would not have been possible if the Board was led by another director lacking Elon Musk’s day-to-day exposure to the Company’s business. In light of the significant future opportunities for growth and the careful execution needed in order for the Company to achieve it, the Board believes that the Company is still best served by Mr. Musk continuing to serve as Chairman.
Moreover, the role of the Lead Independent Director protects the Company against any potential governance issues arising from a non-independent director serving as Chairman. This position is vested with broad authority to lead the actions of the independent directors and communicate regularly with the Chief Executive Officer. Additionally, the Company now has seven independent directors following the addition of two additional independent directors in July 2017. The Board believes that the broad authority of the Lead Independen t Director and the presence of six other independent directors ensures that the Board acts independently. This current Board structure also is consistent with majority practice at large public companies: according to the 2017 Spencer Stuart Board Index, 72 % of companies in the S&P 500 do not have an independent board chairman.
The proponent acknowledges that a combined Chief Executive Officer and Chairman is an effective form of leadership for an early-stage company, until it faces increased competition and rapid technological changes. The Board believes that it is precisely during times when a company must quickly adapt to constant change and outside pressures that Board leadership needs to be lockstep with the Company’s operations. Our achievements to date notwithstanding, the Company is still at a point in its development where we must execute well in order to realize our long-term goals, and separating the roles of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman at this time would not serve the best interests of the Company or its stockholders.”
Shareholders will vote on the matter at the meeting, which will be held on June 5, 2018, at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time, at the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, CA.
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Tesla Is Burning $6,500 Every Minute. It's Probably Going to Need to Raise a Lot More
https://www.thewealthadvisor.com/articl ... e-lot-more
At the beginning of April, Elon Musk joked about the company going bankrupt, but it appears that such a seemingly unlikely outcome is no laughing matter.
There is now a “genuine risk” that the electric car company won’t have enough money to make it out of this calendar year, Bloomberg reports.
The company spends more than $6,500 every minute and it has had negative free cash flow for five quarters, according to Bloomberg.
It has also tripled its workforce between 2014 and 2017 and its revenue per employee is lower than its competitors in the auto industry.
Tesla has teetered on the edge before.
Since it was founded in 2003, the company has had a creative approach to financing.
Musk has personally contributed millions of dollars to the company, and has helped get it out of sticky situations in other ways.
In 2008, for example, Musk put together a $40M debt deal that closed on Christmas Eve, just hours before the company would have run out of money.
Even taking into account the company’s ability to survive near-misses, market watchers have expressed concern about the company’s short-term future.
Moody’s says the company needs another $2 billion to make it through the year, while Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates sees the company heading for a “brick wall.”
https://www.thewealthadvisor.com/articl ... e-lot-more
At the beginning of April, Elon Musk joked about the company going bankrupt, but it appears that such a seemingly unlikely outcome is no laughing matter.
There is now a “genuine risk” that the electric car company won’t have enough money to make it out of this calendar year, Bloomberg reports.
The company spends more than $6,500 every minute and it has had negative free cash flow for five quarters, according to Bloomberg.
It has also tripled its workforce between 2014 and 2017 and its revenue per employee is lower than its competitors in the auto industry.
Tesla has teetered on the edge before.
Since it was founded in 2003, the company has had a creative approach to financing.
Musk has personally contributed millions of dollars to the company, and has helped get it out of sticky situations in other ways.
In 2008, for example, Musk put together a $40M debt deal that closed on Christmas Eve, just hours before the company would have run out of money.
Even taking into account the company’s ability to survive near-misses, market watchers have expressed concern about the company’s short-term future.
Moody’s says the company needs another $2 billion to make it through the year, while Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates sees the company heading for a “brick wall.”
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Tesla postavila jos jedan tromesecni rekord!
U prva tri meseca ove godine izgubili 710 miliona dolara uz negativan obrt novca od cele milijarde!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-cont ... 1525293204
U prva tri meseca ove godine izgubili 710 miliona dolara uz negativan obrt novca od cele milijarde!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-cont ... 1525293204
Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Restruktuiranje u Tesli, Musk postaje sultan!
Musk Says He’s ‘Flattening’ Tesla Structure With Defections Mountinghttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05 ... rt-sellers
Musk Says He’s ‘Flattening’ Tesla Structure With Defections Mountinghttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05 ... rt-sellers
Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Meet Tesla's new bondholder: Billionaire George Soros
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-inve ... SKCN1IH017
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The investment firm founded and chaired by billionaire George Soros took a stake in Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) bonds during the first three months of the year, giving the electric carmaker run by Elon Musk a prominent supporter.
Soros Fund Management LLC took a $35 million stake in the convertible bonds of Tesla, which are due in March 2019 88160RAB7=, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A spokesman for Soros did not respond to a request for comment.
Convertibles are hybrid securities, either bonds or preferred stock, that can be exchanged for a predetermined number of common shares. That effectively lets an investor participate in stock-price changes, but with the yield and greater security of a fixed-income instrument.
Musk, who like Soros is also a billionaire, has been under pressure from investors to prove the company can solve production problems, stem senior staff departures and resolve questions about crashes involving its electric cars.
At the end of March, the Tesla bonds came under severe selling pressure as the luxury automaker faced concerns about its ability to produce its cheaper Model 3 sedan. A crash involving Tesla’s autopilot technology and concerns about the company’s ability to raise new capital also took a toll.
On Monday, Musk told employees the company was undergoing a “thorough reorganization.”
In 2016, SolarCity Corp, a debt-laden solar panel firm backed by Musk and now owned by Tesla raised $305 million by selling future cash flows for a portfolio of solar projects to a fund advised by Soros Fund Management LLC.
Soros also previously held some Tesla stock, but he sold off his stake last year.
Quarterly disclosures of hedge fund managers’ stock holdings in 13F filings are one of the few public ways of tracking what managers are selling and buying.
The disclosures come 45 days after the end of each quarter and may not reflect current positions.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-inve ... SKCN1IH017
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The investment firm founded and chaired by billionaire George Soros took a stake in Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) bonds during the first three months of the year, giving the electric carmaker run by Elon Musk a prominent supporter.
Soros Fund Management LLC took a $35 million stake in the convertible bonds of Tesla, which are due in March 2019 88160RAB7=, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A spokesman for Soros did not respond to a request for comment.
Convertibles are hybrid securities, either bonds or preferred stock, that can be exchanged for a predetermined number of common shares. That effectively lets an investor participate in stock-price changes, but with the yield and greater security of a fixed-income instrument.
Musk, who like Soros is also a billionaire, has been under pressure from investors to prove the company can solve production problems, stem senior staff departures and resolve questions about crashes involving its electric cars.
At the end of March, the Tesla bonds came under severe selling pressure as the luxury automaker faced concerns about its ability to produce its cheaper Model 3 sedan. A crash involving Tesla’s autopilot technology and concerns about the company’s ability to raise new capital also took a toll.
On Monday, Musk told employees the company was undergoing a “thorough reorganization.”
In 2016, SolarCity Corp, a debt-laden solar panel firm backed by Musk and now owned by Tesla raised $305 million by selling future cash flows for a portfolio of solar projects to a fund advised by Soros Fund Management LLC.
Soros also previously held some Tesla stock, but he sold off his stake last year.
Quarterly disclosures of hedge fund managers’ stock holdings in 13F filings are one of the few public ways of tracking what managers are selling and buying.
The disclosures come 45 days after the end of each quarter and may not reflect current positions.
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
Re: Tesla automobili
Najgore je svađati se sa budalom. Prvo te spusti na svoj nivo, a onda te dotuče iskustvom...
