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We Need a Tesla Forum!


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Awhile back there were calls for forums dedicated to RV types – Class A, Travel Trailer, etc. Let’s start a movement -- a groundswell of grass roots support -- for a forum dedicated to........... TESLA! In one week, Derek could post more to it than has been posted to all of the RV-type forums since their inception.

 

But wait – an even bigger idea. We should have an Elon Musk Section of the Forums. Then we could have forums dedicated to all things Musk:

 

Tesla Motors Forum (and we could sub forum it into Model S, Model X, Stock Price, etc)

 

Solar City Forum

 

Space X Forum

 

Giga Factory Forum (but that could cause confusion with the Tesla Motors Forum; we wouldn't want to have members torn about whether to make their battery posts in the Telsa Motors Forum or the Giga Factory Forum)

 

Hpyerloop Forum

 

The Next Big Thing Forum

 

Rumors About Elon Musk’s Personal Life Forum (after all the National Enquirer reported on Melanie Griffith’s alleged desire to woo Elon)

 

Elon Musk Sightings Forum (there could be more reported than for Elvis)

 

Elon Musk Worship Forum (no cults now, just effusive praise and tribute)

 

Elon Musk For President Forum (Oops, he was born in South Africa, but we could use our Musk Forums to call for an amendment to the Constitution to enable his candidacy). Contributions to the campaign, of course, would have to be made through PayPal.

 

So lend your support to this movement. Let’s make this call for Musk Forums so loud and overwhelming that the Forum Moderators have no choice but to adopt it.

 

And if anyone did not realize it, my tongue was thoroughly planted in my cheek throughout the writing this post. :D The devil made me do it, Derek.

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Whew, I was just moderating the Musk Forums. I had to delete a bunch of threads. Topics such as those below simply cannot be tolerated:

 

“I Could Land A Spent Rocket On A Postage Stamp, Why Can’t Musk Land One On A Barge The Size Of A Football Field” (Musk will land a spent rocket on the head of a pin, so take that.)

 

“DB Cooper Was Actually Elon Musk And He Funded His Early Ventures With The Skyjacked Funds” (Well, he was born 6 months prior to the skyjacking.)

 

“We Are Borrowing From The Chinese To Give Subsidies To Musk’s Companies and Customers” (There will be no anarchy on these forums.)

 

“Musk Is Going To Fly Himself To Mars” (Please, we already have plowed this ground. No double postings.)

 

“Ten Reasons To Short The Stock Of Tesla Motors” (Dude, you are on double secret probation for that one.)

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Hi!

Sure!

 

Hey, since it is on topic as an investment source, and Technology set of data points, I'll just have to post new investment opportunities in Tesla and related supplier fields.

 

I gave seen maybe one or two posts a month here besides mine, which I find disappointing. Maybe you, in addition to your posts naysaying everything Tesla, predicting doom and gloom about a lot of the posts then being disjointed with his success every time, you can start posting topics here you are interested in that other might be too.

 

Otherwise you can just skip my posts or continue to slam every new thing he does.

 

Between the initial posts here in 2003 until they débuted the roadster in 2008, their selection of the factory, pre and post production of the first world class EV, then his SpaceX success even to getting exclusive contract with the US military when the ULA was found to have been buying rockets from the Russians and now can't get them because we objected to his Ukraine actions, then his Solar City radical new leasing system since copied by many, and then the Tesla Supercharger 20 minute free everywhere charging system, and then the Model S changes to a single speed and motor changes, then the SUV with gull wing doors which is on schedule, as is it seems the Model 3 for The under $30k consumer model in 2017, then his announcement of a Gigafactory for batteries that will also run on solar and wind since they have backup batteries, and his billion dollars that Google gave him to help and get involved in a cell/data LEO orbit system of satellites, and then his secret resting of both enterprise grade and consumer backup battery systems for use with solar and grid or both with WalMart and hundreds of consumer homes being outfitted with the first alpha battery backup prototypes and then hi announcement of a $3k price for home batteries. And I left out a lot in that run on sentence. :)

 

Other than that, there has been absolutely nothing worth telling other investors about! ;)

 

I hear ya!

 

But I believe, like TV, you don't have to watch. But from a reader standpoint most excellent sarcasm and wit! :D:P

 

The was tongue in cheek here too. I think folks are seeing a lot about Musk everywhere. Don't let it bug you, just watch it all happen.

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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Derek,

 

Never mind, you know what I was gonna say..

Dave & Tish
Beagle Bagles & Snoopy

RIP Snoopy we lost you 5-11-14 but you'll always travel with us
On the road somewhere.
AF retired, 70-90
A truck and a trailer

“He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion” -unknown

HoD vay' wej qoH SoH je nep! ngebmo' vIt neH 'ach SoHbe' loD Hem, wa' ngebmo'. nuqneH...

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I have great respect and admiration for the entrepreneurs in our country, historical and current; they are the people who have and continue to improve and advance our economy.. Elon Musk ranks right up there with the best of them. Those who have great ideas that people want and need and take the risks to bring them to market should be rewarded along with their MOST ardent supporters. :D

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I've heard all the arguments why solar won't work for the past 40 years. "What can you run on solar?" "What will you do at night?" "What happens if it rains?" "There isn't enough ground available to cover with solar panels to do any good!" "It will never pencil out!"

 

Nice to see the country (ok, at least NPR and PBS) talking about it in a positive way. :D

 

WDR

1993 Foretravel U225 with Pacbrake and 5.9 Cummins with Banks

1999 Jeep Wrangler, 4" lift and 33" tires

Raspberry Pi Coach Computer

Ham Radio

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Thanks BoonDocks!

I have been amply rewarded. They took my excess leftover from my business account and increased it by a factor of ten as of today, and I expect to double that again by 2017.

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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This would have been a great thread to start on 4/1....

 

And yes, Sir Musk can keep lots of threads going. Respect what he does, and also enjoy his 'Dash of showmanship.' too.

 

And I also always enjoy RV's threads. Figure he is one of those people that get by on one hour of sleep per day:)! Well researched, and loads of links to let others read and go look at on their own...

 

Best,

Smitty

Be safe, have fun,

Smitty

04 CC Allure "RooII" - Our "E" ride for life!

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Thanks Smitty!

I enjoy writing them too as I read 50 articles for every one I think might be of interest to some of my friends here. :lol:

 

BoonDocks is a bit sensitive because he retired from the auto industry. But what most folks don't see and the oil industry and Dealers do, is that the auto industry does not need the oil companies with EVs, nor do they need the franchised dealers they have now. The Auto industry as well as the oil industry have fought hard to stop him but the simple fact of the matter is that with EVs, the bread and butter of the stealerships is the service. And the EVs will prove out to be low in the kinds of high margin "service" Items like $150.00 engine cleaner additives they inject and are no better than a $4.99 bottle of Lucas injector cleaner. Yes it is not fair to not let the factories compete with franchised dealers who have invested much into their businesses. But that should not be a justification to try to shut out new business models who do no damage to existing dealers like Teslas and Elios will be doing. They have no franchise dealers, no one gets hurt and the franchised dealers have no right to try to stifle a new model. If they are so much better then they will have no competition from an upstart. However citizens will get a bit tired if they are the only one or five states that puts artificial obstacles between them and getting the car they want.

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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Yes,

And I don't like the "manufactured" new sound it makes. But I love the body mods - slick.

http://www.topspeed.com/cars/tesla/2014-saleen-tesla-model-s-foursixteen-ar163153.html

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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I've heard all the arguments why solar won't work for the past 40 years. "What can you run on solar?" "What will you do at night?" "What happens if it rains?" "There isn't enough ground available to cover with solar panels to do any good!" "It will never pencil out!"

 

Nice to see the country (ok, at least NPR and PBS) talking about it in a positive way. :D

 

WDR

I heard the same arguments. I run everything on solar including my car. At night I use the grid. When it rains, the panels still make power, just not as much. My panels take up 400 sq.ft.. It penciled out in 5 years and now generates positive cash flow. Last year over $1500.
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Since Boondocks so kindly gave us a Tesla thread here is from today's Washington post - Awesome!

 

The 22 most memorable quotes from the new Elon Musk book, ranked

 

Some Excerpts:

 

"1. “I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over.” — Justine Musk, Elon’s ex-wife

 

4. “Elon said ‘I will spend my last dollar on these companies. If we have to move into Justine’s parents’ basement, we’ll do it.’ ” — Antonio Gracias recalling a dinner with Musk during the 2008 financial crisis.

 

16. “One night he told me, ‘If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.’ ” — Nicholson

 

18. “We all worked 20 hours a day, and he worked 23 hours.” — Julie Ankenbrandt on working with Musk at the start-up X.com, which would later merge with Confinity and lead to what we know as PayPal.

 

20. “I remember thinking it was a lot of drama, and that if I was going to put up with it, we might as well be married. I told him he should just propose to me.” — Justine Musk recalling an argument with Elon while walking near the X.com offices. After calming down he proposed on the sidewalk."

 

I can't wait to get the book in an analog reader with over the shoulder lighting. I have iWoz by "The Woz." one of my early heroes, along with Gates in hardcover. Liking them both is not mutually exclusive.

 

I left the other 17 quotes in the article to be discovered in the original article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/05/11/the-22-most-memorable-quotes-from-the-new-elon-musk-book-ranked/?wpisrc=nl_innov&wpmm=1

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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I don't know what you were thinking! Have we had a BooneDocks Boondoggle? :o;)

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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Did you catch Bill gates on Fareed Zakaria GPS today? He is still working on the traveling wave reactor among other things. He only mentioned nukes but that is his take on them. Pretty neat analysis of the water and energy relationship too.

RV/Derek
http://www.rvroadie.com Email on the bottom of my website page.
Retired AF 1971-1998


When you see a worthy man, endeavor to emulate him. When you see an unworthy man, look inside yourself. - Confucius

 

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ... Voltaire

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And I didn't propose an Elon Musk book review forum either, but here is its first entry taken from the Wall Street Journal........

 

 

In Praise of Moonshots
When Robert Downey Jr. was looking for inspiration for the playboy inventor Tony Stark, Musk provided it.
By
PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON
May 15, 2015 4:45 p.m. ET
BN-IL373_bkrvte_JV_20150515164239.jpg
CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk. PHOTO: LILY LAWRENCE/GETTY IMAGES

Predictions of the fate of America’s economy in the coming decades fall into two broad categories: first, that we are winding up a century of technological innovation and heading toward a world of greater automation, fewer jobs and slower growth; second, in the words of the Carpenters, that we’ve only just begun, that technology is on the cusp of a new golden age of ever faster progress toward innumerable economic and social benefits, from cures for cancer to making the oceans drinkable.

As with any long-term predictions, you can go either way without too much risk. Where you stand is usually a question of culture and geography. Bureaucrats and academics tend to the hair-on-fire view to justify big plans to reform society. Entrepreneurs, and especially technology entrepreneurs say shoulders to the plow, boys and girls. The future is ours to discover, not others’ to determine. Government, fall in.

And then there’s Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car maker Tesla and the rocket builder SpaceX and chairman of the solar-power company SolarCity. With his sci-fi name, smooth, blond features, rat-a-tat mid-Atlantic mumble and $12 billion fortune, the 43-year-old seems to present himself as a man arrived from the future to generously bestow on us, the people of Earth, his vision and gifts. Electric cars! Rockets! An end to fossil fuels! A “hyperloop” to whoosh travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just half an hour! When Robert Downey Jr. was looking for inspiration for Tony Stark, the playboy inventor of Iron Man, Mr. Musk provided it. “My mind is not easily blown,” Mr. Downey said after visiting Mr. Musk’s rocket factory outside Los Angeles. “But this place and this guy were amazing.”

ELON MUSK

By Ashlee Vance
Ecco, 392 pages, $28.99

Even Mr. Musk’s fellow technology billionaires can seem in awe of his entrepreneurial ambition. His achievements so far make the Apple Watch look about as innovative and socially useful as the Pet Rock. He meets regularly with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, at a secret Google apartment in downtown Palo Alto to spitball about the future. Mr. Page, who is not known to suffer fools, speaks admiringly of his friend: “He said, ‘Well, what should I really do in this world? Solve cars, global warming and make humans multiplanetary.’ I mean those are pretty compelling goals, and now he has businesses to do that.”

The speed and scale at which Mr. Musk has chosen to operate have stirred critics. He has received hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies for his companies; investors worry that Tesla can never turn a profit without the subsidies afforded to electric cars. And he has behaved atrociously at times in pursuit of his corporate goals. When an employee skipped work to see the birth of his child, Mr. Musk emailed: “I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.” (Mr. Musk has denied this on Twitter.) He has never hesitated to fire even the most loyal employees.

Yet for all the madness, Ashlee Vance writes in his spirited and riveting biography, Mr. Musk’s employees are equally quick to praise him for providing an experience they could never have received elsewhere. Mr. Vance, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, secured Mr. Musk’s cooperation for “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”—and access to one of the most compelling stories in contemporary business. He gives us a man capable of great brilliance and low-down deviance, an engineer able to envisage and implement grand ideas but notorious for hogging credit and for acts of astounding insensitivity: an American hero of Whitmanesque vigor, as bad as the worst but as good as the best.

Mr. Musk was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. His parents divorced when he was young, and he eventually chose to leave his mother and two siblings to live with his father, a cold, demanding engineer. “He is an odd duck,” says Mr. Musk. The young Elon, slight and studious, was violently beaten by schoolyard thugs. “For a number of years, there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the s— out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well. It was just like nonstop horrible.”

Mr. Musk found solace in reading every book at the school library and playing Dungeons and Dragons. He did well at school when he cared to but was not an outstanding student. He enrolled at the University of Pretoria, but as soon his mother was allowed to pass her inherited Canadian citizenship onto her children, he was gone, never to return home.

For all those parents scrambling to provide their children with elite social networks, it is worth nothing that Mr. Musk arrived in North America in 1988 at 17 years old with none. He and his brother would comb through the Yellow Pages in Ontario and cold-call people they wanted to meet. Mr. Musk studied at Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He paid his way through college by organizing parties, and he wrote two well-received papers on solar power and ultracapacitor batteries, subjects he would return to later in his career.

He went west to start a Ph.D. in applied physics in Stanford but was lured away by the startup scene of Silicon Valley. His first startup, Zip2, provided media companies online publishing services. Mr. Musk managed to grow and sell the company by 1999, pocketing $22 million. Next came PayPal, which emerged from a scrum of entrepreneurs trying to reinvent banking for the Internet age and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Mr. Musk, PayPal’s largest shareholder, received $165 million. But this was mere throat-clearing. The final frontier beckoned.

It is hard to grasp the sheer range of difficulties in launching a rocket into space. The people, the money, the darned physics of the thing. Mr. Musk’s goal with SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, was to travel to space more quickly, more cheaply and more often than anyone had before. His efforts took him from Russia, where he tried to find an out-of-service intercontinental ballistic missile to serve as a launch rocket, to giants like Lockheed Martin, whose employees either laughed at him or quit their jobs to join him. Rocket scientists frustrated by their bureaucratic employers lined up to bring his fantasy to life. They bought parts online and cobbled together machines that would have taken years to be approved at larger firms. “There was an almost addictive quality to the experience,” one of the engineers told Mr. Vance. “You’re twenty-four or twenty-five and they’re trusting you with so much. It was very empowering.”

When it came time to launch the Falcon 1 rockets, Mr. Musk’s team traveled to Kwajalein Island, part of the Marshall Islands, way out in the Pacific Ocean. For months they hunkered down in sweltering conditions preparing the machines. It was, said one engineer, “like Gilligan’s Island except with rockets.” When one of those early launches failed, Mr. Musk wrote in an email to his team that even the great American and Russian rocket programs had experienced repeated failures before achieving success: “SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.”

Mr. Musk hauled his team along with a drive that was compulsive, heady and at times borderline criminal. When he needed faster networking at his factory, he did not get permission from his landlord or wait for the phone company to install it. He hired a team with a cherry picker to come at night to string cables along the existing telephones poles.

But a single rocket company was not enough. In 2004 he seed-funded a startup called Tesla, which was building electric cars, and adopted the same low-cost, high-smarts approach that he had applied to rockets. Mr. Vance writes that, in the spring of 2004, “had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors . . . they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive experience was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous.”

But within a few months a team of 18 people, mostly culled from Silicon Valley rather than Detroit, had built a prototype. When they needed to see how their car would perform in cold weather, they did not bother with one of the expensive, purpose-built cooling chambers used by major car companies. They bought an old ice-cream delivery truck. When a new finance director arrived at Tesla and asked the head of manufacturing how he planned to get the car made, he was told: “Well, we will decide we’re going into production and then a miracle is going to happen.”

In late 2008, SpaceX’s rockets were not launching into orbit, and Tesla was suffering crippling delays and cost overruns. Mr. Musk was close to bankruptcy, having invested most of the $200 million he made as the co-founder of PayPal into the two companies. The mental strain had turned to physical pain, and, according to his then-girlfriend (now ex-wife), the entrepreneur would scream through his sleep. But as another friend told Mr. Vance, “most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyper rational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets.” By the end of the year, Mr. Musk had raised a new round of financing, seen off a weaselly venture capitalist who was trying to seize control of Tesla by bankrupting it, and secured a $1.6 billion deal from NASA for a series of SpaceX missions. As the turnaround came together, Mr. Musk broke down in tears of relief.

By 2012, those who had stuck with him saw SpaceX launch a successful mission to the International Space Station and Tesla launch the widely praised Model S. Now SolarCity, his third major company, started in 2006, is trying to expand the market for solar power.

At a personal level Mr. Musk is, like his father, an odd duck. Edward Jung, a former chief software architect at Microsoft, tells Mr. Vance: “You almost wish that Bill [Gates] and Steve [Jobs] had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that’s happened.” When he married his first wife, he pulled her close to him on the dance floor at their wedding and, according to her, said: “I am the alpha in this relationship.” When their first child died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome, Mr. Musk refused to talk about it and called his wife’s grieving “emotionally manipulative,” saying he preferred to focus on the present and future than on the sadness of the past. He has since married and divorced his second wife, Talulah Riley, an English actress, twice.

It is often easier to admire than to like the personalities of the high-tech firmament. They can behave with an unjustified swagger, as if to have built some software and made some money is all the justification you need to be an appalling human being. Mr. Musk is a more interesting case. His companies employ around 15,000 people and want to employ more in advanced manufacturing in America. He is achieving precisely what we should crave out of Silicon Valley: provocative, useful innovation and jobs as well as monetary value. And he has earned the ultimate accolade of brutal opposition from the industrial giants he threatens.

Controversially, Mr. Musk has received hundreds of millions of dollars in government loans and contracts to build his businesses. But to those who make the reasonable case that the government should not be trying to pick industrial winners, one can only say that it has frequently spent a lot more for a lot less in return. He is hardly alone in corporate America in working tax credits and subsidies to his advantage. If America does not consider Mr. Musk a bargain, Mr. Vance’s book makes clear, any other country in the world would take him at many times the price.

—Mr. Delves Broughton is the author, most recently, of “The Art of the Sale: Learning From the Masters About the Business of Life.”

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