Elon Musk resume

SolarCity (now part of Tesla Energy) also now makes commercial solar panels. Not sure they're selling them retail yet, but I see Tesla is advertising them on their website:

https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels

Industry watchers think those are what Tesla is now installing on the roof of Gigafactory 1.

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Well, Thank you for your gentle reply. Please let me know briefly about it. Can you reply with some useful refernce links if any?

 

Tesla's website for its solar roof tiles is here:

https://www.tesla.com/solarroof

Be advised that those are pretty pricey, aimed at upscale buyers who want a solar roof that looks like a normal slate, composite shingle, or tile roof, and are willing to pay for it. If you're looking for a cost-effective way to put solar panels on the roof of your home, look elsewhere.

You can also access the site for Tesla's home energy storage battery pack, PowerWall, at the same link.

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Well, Thanks for the above information. Do you think the websites who are selling solar equipment like Amazon, Magesolar worth to buy those stuff? Or would you prefer any other?

 

Shade trees are nice.

I always thought it made more sense to put solar panels in a frame in your yard, rather than on the roof of your house. Put them on the roof, and you can have trees shading the roof, or solar panels on it... but not both! So why not shade your roof to reduce the energy used for air conditioning, and put the solar panels nearer the ground, where you can easily brush the snow off them if necessary? A ground mounting also allows you to angle them for best insolation, rather than having to follow the angle of the roof.

But this is all armchair engineering for me; unfortunately our home has no solar panels, and I don't know what disadvantages there might be to putting them in a wooden frame on the ground.

 

"bowprecession"

You have me curious about your screen name. Is that anything like torque steer?

 

You may or may not like Elon Musk. You may or may not like his in your face, "you are fool if you do not agree with me" attitude. You may not like the way he gets things done. He may not be the person you would like to have a beer with. That said, he created the first car company in the 21st century, that has produced almost 200,000 cars, starting from scratch. He is the only one to take on Orbital Sciences and United Launch Alliance and create a space ship company that could break the duopoly that has over charged the tax payer. Yes Richard Branson and others are testing their own rockets etc etc but Musk has already been able to do it while the others are still experimenting. In other words he has a success story that has to be appreciated. It is a fools game to determine if he is better or worse than others, as everyone had a different set of challenges and a different approach. Suffice to say he ventured into unknown territories and came back with something to show for it.

 

The common theme is alternative energy and saving the environment!!!. Unifying technology is the battery technology. Other than that these are two separate companies. The battery technology used in the car can be used to improve the effectiveness of the solar panels by storing excess energy generated. The power-wall is a good concept but has not been sold in high volumes, possibly due to lack of battery capacity. Every battery that goes into the power wall means one less battery for Tesla. So is there synergy between the two operations? It depends upon how you look at it. Also Solar city is in many ways a leasing company that sells and installs Solar panels and gets a cut out of the sales back to the grid. One of these days, Tesla may spin off of Solar City and the only persons who made money are the former owners of Solar City (as the company may have gone bankrupt) and the lawyers.

 

Actually he didn't create Tesla Motors, despite his claim to be the "founder" of the company. Musk executed a hostile takeover after its founders, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright, invited him on board to run investor relations and funding for the startup. Arguably that was best for Tesla; without Musk's involvement, it very likely would at best be just a small auto maker today, not a rapidly growing one. And maybe not even that; without Musk raising funding, it might well have gone out of business years ago.

But I don't give him a pass on claiming to be "the founder" when he's not even one of the founders. He's taking credit for what others created, and that reflects very badly on his reputation. Elon Musk is one of my heroes, but I'm not blind to his faults.

* * * * *

A deep dive into Tesla's early years: "Tesla's Wild Ride"

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From what I have read about Elon Musk, he is not a nice guy. The story of his first wife is appalling. He has great intellect, he had done significant things, he is a showman, but not necessarily a ethical or "good" person in the conventional sense. So he is not my hero but I do not want to belittle his achievements.

 

Well obviously Musk is a brilliant inventor and a very capable engineer; look at the way he educated and trained himself to be a highly capable rocket engineer for SpaceX!

But if you look at the history of Tesla, we see time and time again that Musk has over-reached in major ways, has demanded changes and put needlessly complex things into the cars; things which, in at least some cases, the cars would be better off without, or at least would sell better if there were more familiar options available to buyers. I'm not talking just about the front and rear power doors on the Model X. I'm not just talking about Elon getting this idea in to his head that he could completely eliminate human labor from Tesla's automotive assembly line, and speed up production to eye-blurring speed; a speed at which wind resistance would actually be a limiting factor!

No, I'm also talking about, for example, Musk demanding changes to the basic body design of the 2008 Roadster after the basic design was supposedly locked down; changes that gave Tesla cost overruns and forced Tesla to announce delays in the car going on sale no less than three times. Changes like lowering the door sills by two inches. (Not to say that Tesla shouldn't have done so; it's said that getting into and out of the Roadster is so restricted and tricky that you have to follow an exact procedure to do it without straining yourself. Lowering the door sills was definitely an improvement over the Elise. But of course, that change should have come early, when they were stretching the body shape/design of the Lotus Elise into the Roadster.)

And I don't think there is any doubt that those delays should be laid at Elon's door, and nobody else's. Martin Eberhard said in a blog post (and when I say "blog", I really mean blog and not forum or news site) that he would have been perfectly happy to use a fiberglass body for the 2008 Roadster, rather than develop the more complex and costly carbon fiber body, if that would have gotten it into production on time.

As I've said before, Musk is a great half of a brilliant invention and design team. But he needs a practical, pragmatic partner with his feet on the ground, to anchor the team and keep Musk from flying off to the castles in the sky he loves to build. Sadly, one of Elon's greatest flaws is his inability to share power and responsibility with others. So it looks to me like he's never going to get that partner that he really needs to anchor him in reality, a partner who would pay attention to costs and practical limitations and prevent Elon from repeatedly and seriously over-reaching.

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I think Elon just added few more skills:
- Market manipulation
- Former SEC law violator
- Tweeting market manipulating stuff while driving (which itself is another traffic law violation)
- Following that up with another false tweet that "only thing pending si the shareholder vote".
- Master of over promises (what some call lies) and under deliveries.
- Doing drugs
- Having to work 120 hour weeks to just meet goals set out months ago. Quality target "factory gated".