Tesla CEO Elon Musk & $TSLA Shareholders' Wild Ride (video)

Tesla’s Wild Ride

L2inc.com video above re-published Jun 15, 2018: Scott Galloway's take on Elon Musk's $3.5B tantrum and what it means for Tesla’s shareholders, plus Recode.net's Kara Swisher weighs in.

Tesla, Inc. is a US-based multinational corporation that specializes in electric vehicles, energy storage and solar panel manufacturing, headquarters are in Palo Alto, California.

• Principal domain: tesla.com 
• Stock price: NASDAQ: TSLA $357.72 +12.94 (+3.75%) close June 14, 2018
• Founded: July 2003, San Carlos, CA
• CEO: Elon Musk

Sources referenced in the video:
(00:18) Source: “Tesla’s Elon Musk Mocks Analysts During Conference Call,” Fox Business, May 2018. https://bit.ly/2ybgQGr     
(01:03) Source: Clip from “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” 2005. https://imdb.to/2JCAxMS
(01:19) Source: Yahoo Finance.
(01:46) Source: Courtesy of Jim Chanos. https://bit.ly/2yaySZr
(03:08) Source: Yahoo Finance.
(03:30) Source: Yahoo Finance.

Auto-generated transcript from June 14 edition (unedited):
00:00 [Music]
00:01 what's a signal that a company may
00:03 struggle over the next year look at the
00:05 behavior of the CEO case in point
00:08 Tesla you can hear an Elon Musk voice
00:10 and in his recent behavior that he's
00:13 under a great deal of pressure and that
00:15 is about to get real and so where
00:18 specifically will you be in terms of
00:21 your next boring bonehead questions are
00:27 not cool
00:27 next what how what percentage have
00:30 actually taken steps to configure we're
00:36 gonna go to YouTube
00:38 sorry these questions are so dry they're
00:44 killing me when you're CEO it's your job
00:47 to answer stupid questions especially
00:49 questions from the investors who've
00:51 allowed you to raise money at four times
00:53 revenues versus less than 0.45 times
00:56 revenues for peers including General
00:59 Motors this is reminiscent of the days
01:01 of Enron you're the only financial
01:04 institution that can't produce a balance
01:06 sheet or a cash flow State know what
01:07 their earnings thank you very much we
01:14 appreciate mr. must high rate took the
01:19 company down seven percent translating
01:21 and doing in maturity tax that cost
01:23 shareholders three and a half billion
01:25 dollars there's no doubt mr. musk has
01:27 clearly under tremendous stress and the
01:29 board is not doing their job that
01:31 rejected two proposals to change board
01:33 leadership including one that would have
01:35 removed must from the chairmen position
01:37 and split it into two positions CEO and
01:39 chairman what they need to do is tell
01:41 them that it sucks to be a grown up must
01:44 behavior coupled with 40 significant
01:46 departures from the company recently are
01:48 all negative for looking indicators
01:51 however we could be wrong as Kara
01:52 Swisher highlighted in our interview
01:54 yesterday it's not that he's coming off
01:57 the rails it's just that he's sick of
01:59 doing very ambitious things and getting
02:00 70 or 80 percent of the way there and
02:02 then getting heckling from the cheap
02:04 seats he's landing a rocket on like a
02:08 platform in the middle of the ocean this
02:09 is not easy stuff he's making a car like
02:12 he's trying to change
02:13 rotation and whatever you think of him
02:16 these are big things big things and so
02:19 if you get 70% of the way there
02:21 yeah what some of the press does and me
02:23 too is say what happened to that 30%
02:26 ignoring the fact that he got 70% of the
02:28 way there I think even if he doesn't
02:29 succeed at it what he's doing is
02:31 important no he's gonna change the world
02:33 that's what we're moving to is the only
02:35 reason I give him just a little more
02:37 like over some dumb stupid photo app
02:39 that people argue over Tesla has an
02:42 amazing product I actually own a Tesla
02:45 not because I'm environmentally
02:46 conscious when you drive at us on the
02:47 East Coast you're spewing more carbon
02:49 into the air because it's not powered by
02:50 electricity it's powered by the coal
02:52 that produces electricity I bought it
02:54 because I want to signal to the world
02:55 that I am hippy granola and rich ie have
02:58 sex with me anyways the company lacks
03:01 the frictionless networking effects of a
03:03 Google or Facebook and doesn't have the
03:05 Hermes like margins of an Apple yet it's
03:07 trading at evaluation reflective of a
03:09 firm that can scale like a Facebook or
03:11 generate the profits of an apple by the
03:14 end of the year Tesla analysts will
03:16 begin wringing their hands over
03:17 liquidity concerns in dilution we
03:20 predicted the stock would fall for these
03:21 reasons however the stock rallied after
03:24 the board meeting on Wednesday as the
03:25 shareholder resolution to separate the
03:27 CEO and chairman roles was voted down
03:29 this was taken as an endorsement of
03:31 Musk's leadership and the stock
03:34 skyrocketed so so far we're wrong so far
03:39 we'll see you next week
03:41 [Music]

Song: Talking Heads - Wild Wild Life
https://youtu.be/616-QGQyx-I

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DISCLAIMER

A Bad Domain Name and Branding, Poor Web Design, Doomed Re/Code

"Starting January 2, [2014] we’ll have an all-new site and suite of conferences, with a different name and Web address, run as an independent company with great investors and partners. It’s likely that you’ll hear a lot about it."--Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher - AllThingsD (Dec 31, 2013)

Last week, big shot tech journalists, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, threw in the towel:

"ReCode, the news website led by the veteran journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, is being acquired by Vox Media ... The all-stock deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed."--NYTimes.com

In other words, Kara and Walt saved face by succumbing to a no-cash deal, terms undisclosed. Vox Media got what it wanted--the "Code Conferences" and talent--for little or nothing. What happened?

Domain Mondo, alone, called this one early, on January 1, 2014--

@waltmossberg @allthingsd @Recode @waltmossberg You got some terrible branding and domain name advice.
— Domain Mondo (@DomainMondo) January 1, 2014

 And Domain Mondo posted Dumb and Dumber, Recode dot Net? on January 2, 2014.

And later on March 11, 2014, Domain Mondo, ironically, contrasted the poor branding and domain name strategy of Re/Code with Ezra Klein's (then) new site, in a post titled: Ezra Klein, Vox, Vox.com, great brand and domain name strategy. Vox.com is owned by the one and same Vox Media that just bought Re/Code.

So how could two experienced, well-financed, well-connected tech journalists fail so quickly after leaving the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD?

Domain Mondo was going to explain and post further on the Re/Code saga, but blogger Bob Lefsetz got to this first (excerpt below). Also note that Bob is not in the domain name industry, but is very much in the music and media sectors--

"It had a lousy name, a dot net address and a terrible website. Sure, Mossberg and Swisher were starting all over, but they could have given themselves a fighting chance! “AllThingsD” was a brand, never underestimate the difficulty in building one and the power in an established one ... Let’s start with the number one deal-killer, ReCode’s site. It’s like they never surfed the net before. It wasn’t only me, everybody hated it. It was unfathomable. Didn’t Steve Jobs say design was paramount? That usability was key? Didn’t Walt and Kara interview him? Did none of his message penetrate?... As for the name… What does it mean? Either your moniker has to indicate what you’re about, like Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram, or it must relate to nothing, like Shazam or Corolla. ReCode, what is that? ... And dot net? Is it Amazon.net? Google.net? Type recode into Safari and you’ll get Google results, you won’t automatically go to the site, as you will with Amazon and the rest of the .coms ..." --Bob Lefsetz, read more at the Lefsetz Letter 

Walt and Kara: you should have listened to Domain Mondo.

See also: ReCode To Vox and Newsonomics: The Vox/Recode deal - Nieman Journalism Lab and A Series of Wholly Unrelated Observations About Vox Media's Acquisition of Recode - The Awl

Caveat Emptor!


Follow @DomainMondo