Posts by SJA 97 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2016
He can chose not to buy the stock options. And it was not just about hyping up the stock price:
"In addition to that, there are 16 operational milestones: eight focused on increasing revenue from $20 billion up to $175 billion, and another eight targeting adjusted EBITDA milestones ranging from $1.5 billion to $14 billion.
Each of the 12 tranches vests when Tesla hits a market cap milestone and one of the two kinds of operational milestones."
So in addition to hype up stock price, either revenue or EBITDA had to be increased as well. As you can see those goals, they're both "roughly" increased 10x to get all stock options.
Why do people here assume he just gets money sent into his bank accounts because of that compensation agreement?
Musk was given 10 years of performance targets to hit, targets that when reached would result in a payout of stock options. Musk could earn 303 million options—the number has been adjusted for stock splits—equivalent to about 12% of Tesla stock outstanding in 2018.
Those options would be delivered in 12 separate tranches, with the board awarding Musk 1% of the stock outstanding for each set of goals completed. To reach those tranches, Musk had 28 targets he needed to hit. Of those, 12 were tied to market capitalization measured in $50 billion increments up to $650 million, eight were tied to earnings, and eight to revenue.
As a result, according to the 2023 proxy statement, Musk has earned all but 25 million of the options available to him.
The entire package is worth $56 billion at current prices. Each option has a strike price of about $23 a share—adjusted for stock splits—and Tesla stock is worth about $650 billion at just over $200 a share. Hitting $650 billion means the value of Musk’s options is worth about $180 each. That’s the difference between the stock price, at $650 billion, and the option strike price. The $180 per option figure multiplied by the 303 million options equals roughly $56 billion.
So in order to get all of the options, Musk still needs to shelf out roughly $6.4 billion that will go into Tesla accounts and he's prohibited to sell those shares for another 5 years.
Looking back in time at 2017, Tesla had huge problems ramping up the model 3. At that time it was hardly imagineable that those set goals could be reached. Pro memoria:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/what-elon-musks-pay-deal-says-about-the-tech-industry
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/21/tesla-shareholders-approve-elon-musks-multibilion-dollar-compensation-plan.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/business/dealbook/tesla-elon-musk-pay.html
https://hbr.org/2018/05/elon-musks-unusual-compensation-plan-isnt-really-about-compensation-at-all
"When it comes to vehicles with driver assist technology, Tesla is the leader in fatal accidents by far, accounting for more than 70 percent of the automated driver assist technology accidents logged by the NHTSA."
Do you really mean that? There's so much wrong with it two sentences that I don't really know where to start.
1) Driver assist technology --> The car "supports" or rather "assists" the driver. The driver is still in control and has the responsibility. So the car can't be blamed when the driver does not pay attention.
2) Tesla is the only car manufacturer that knows when and for how long its systems were activated. Hence Tesla is the only one that can provide information as to whether assist technology was run when the accident happened or shortly prior to. Since other manufacturers don't konw, they can't report any of this to NHTSA. But the framing done here is obvious.
One would think so there is more behind it. I couldn't find an article that lists all the prerquisites but here's one that lists a few of them:
https://www.next-mobility.de/drive-pilot-von-mercedes-paradigmenwechsel-wie-die-mondlandung-a-1104283/
"Nur auf Autobahnen und nur bis 60 km/h.
Es werden keine Spurwechsel getätigt, die Temperatur muss über vier Grad liegen, die Sicht muss gut sein. Also Tageslicht, keine Dämmerung, keine Tunnel, kein Regen oder Schneefall."
Translate:
"Only on the highway and only up to 60 km/h
No lange changes, temperature must be above 4°C, sight must be good. Also required is day light, no twilight, no tunnel, no rain or snow".
Some other lists also there must be a car in front of you, the lane marking must be clearly visible. It must not be on a construction area (because different lane markings are used then).... The real achievement of Mercedes is not the ability of their DrivePilot but getting the legal approval of it.
In Germany the Mercedes L3 is a traffic jam autopilot. Only during the day, on high resolution mapped streets, with a car in front of you that the Mercedes can follow, up to 40mph and only on the highway. It does not make sense for Tesla to go for L3 certification. They want L5 directly - and looking at the latest FSD Beta videos by Tesla drivers it's not that far off. But the last 5% are the hardest to achieve.
Just a few notes myself - I have beenusing Nixos for several years now.
(1) It's a pain to get it first running as you want it - but once you have it, it's very nice to work with it and redeploy it elsewhere
(2) Excellent ZFS support
(3) Software that isn't already packaged (available nix-expression) is a pain to package yourself.
I run Nixos on my main notebook and on several servers. On the servers and also my notebook I do have a setup similar to this blog post: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings
My wife is Filipina and my inlaws live - as you might have guessed - in the Philippines. Since communication is very important (happy wife, happy life) I was pondering to get Starlink for them, as they only had crappy 4G (well, mostly 3G) internet that often had outages and cost only little less than monthly starlink. So after I discovered Starlink in 2019 I think, I did also apply for it in the Philippines. However in mid-2020 they finally got fiber connection. It's also costly but they share a 600/600mbit connection among 5 families. So it's affordable.
There's 1 million Teslas sold. How many "bucketloads of YouTube videos and EV forum posts with Tesla owners" are there? From how many different owners?
Also, plenty of drivers from other brands do stupid things: https://www.slashgear.com/mercedes-active-lane-assist-fooled-with-soda-can-02339580/
Please provide proof for that "significatn proportion of their customers" claim? Also, as Tesla stats show: Accidents happen far less often with activated AP than without.
Btw, every day, human drivers cause thousands of accidents and crashes. I'm sure you're also vigorously fighting that no humans are allowed to drive cars anymore, right?
When was the last time you boarded a plane? Didn't you wonder why there's a flight captain and co-captain? I mean the autopilot has been in planes for decades. Sure they don't need pilots anymore if you think it's autonomous.
So, why did you never wonder why there's still a captain and co-captain despite the plane having autopilot?
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