[bro1999]

VP of business development leaves after 11 years. Revolving door at Tesla HQ is getting a workout!
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/teslas-vice-president-of-business-development-leaves.html

 

[Upper5Percent]

O’Connell’s exit follows a spate of high-level management departures from the carmaker. Among the executives who have left the company this year are Kurt Kelty, director of battery technology; Chief Financial Officer Jason Wheeler and Chris Lattner, vice president of Autopilot software.

One wonders if O'Connell has exercised his stock options and did he keep or sell the stock??

 

[bro1999]

Here's the hit list so far this year in addition to O'Connell. Still 3+ months to go before the year is out!

• In March, Tesla’s Mark Lipscomb, vice president of human resources, left the company to take a job at Netflix, while Tesla’s director of hardware engineering, Satish Jeyachandran, left to take a job at Alphabet's self-driving car unit, Waymo.

• In April, Tesla lost both Klauss Grohmann less than five months after buying his company and Chief Financial Officer Jason Wheeler, who had previously spent more than 13 years at Google. Wheeler worked just 18 months at Tesla.

• In May, Tesla’s vice president of human resources, Arnnon Geshuri, quit after nearly eight years at the company. His departure came as allegations of long hours, preventable injuries and harassment mounted at Tesla's Fremont factory, where the headcount has swelled to about 10,000 workers. Globally, Tesla has some 30,000 employees.

• Also in May, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive announced he would quit Tesla less than a year after the acquisition.

• In June Chris Lattner, vice president in charge of Tesla’s Autopilot project, quit after just six months on the job. He had previously spent 11 years at Apple.

• In July, the other SolarCity cofounder, Peter Rive, announced he would join his brother Lyndon in leaving Tesla. (The Rive brothers are Musk's cousins.)

• Last month the company lost its senior director of battery technology, Kurt Kelty.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose...muid-o-connell-executive-departures-tsla.html

 

[llninja]

Every company has turnover. The real question is whether these people are getting pushed because they aren't cutting it, pushed because of ego and politics, or are they leaving for greener pastures?

I've been in companies with toxic environments where people step over each other making their cohorts look bad for promotions while I've been with other companies that truly foster cooperation and respect. Knock down, drag out fights could be the norm in one company's culture where it might not be tolerated in another. People will always have differences in opinion, especially when it comes to engineering in a cutting edge company.

I was surprised to see Chris Lattner left Apple for Tesla and is now a free agent. This guy is the creator of LLVM from his graduate school work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the creator of the Swift programming language that allows nearly anybody with a brain to develop for Mac, iOS, WatchOS, tvOS. Being able to compile on a Mac running an Intel processor yet optimize the build for an ARM processor was a key thing that Apple did to bring the iPhone and the developer ecosystem and App Store to the forefront. Not only was LLVM used at Apple, but it has had a ripple effect on the entire industry. Compiler teams around the world who used to build their own compilers are now converting to LLVM and Clang-based compiler designs. To computer science graduates from UIUC, Chris is a CS god! It will be interesting to see what Chris does next.

 

[Loboc]

Some companies also throw their top guys around into totally different responsibilities. Some top guys don't like that if they have a specialty. Making techs into C-Level/VP types sometimes works, sometimes not.

/guys=guys&gals

 

[llninja]

Some companies also throw their top guys around into totally different responsibilities. Some top guys don't like that if they have a specialty. Making techs into C-Level/VP types sometimes works, sometimes not.

/guys=guys&gals

In other words, the best engineers are often not the best managers.

To follow up on Lattner, Wikipedia shows he is now with Google Brain, a division of Alphabet Soup working on deep learning artificial intelligence. Funny, all the tech companies are jumping onto that bandwagon: Intel, Google, Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Twitter.

 

[Upper5Percent]

In other words, the best engineers are often not the best managers.

To follow up on Lattner, Wikipedia shows he is now with Google Brain, a division of Alphabet Soup working on deep learning artificial intelligence. Funny, all the tech companies are jumping onto that bandwagon: Intel, Google, Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Twitter.

https://www.valuewalk.com/2017/08/swift-chris-lattner-joining-google-ai/

Interestingly, his replacement...Tesla sent us the following statement about Karpathy:

“Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision and deep learning, is joining Tesla as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to Elon Musk. Andrej has worked to give computers vision through his work on ImageNet, as well as imagination through the development of generative models, and the ability to navigate the internet with reinforcement learning. He was most recently a Research Scientist at OpenAI.(Note...the artificial intelligence nonprofit backed by Elon Musk.)

Andrej completed his computer vision PhD at Stanford University, where he demonstrated the ability to derive complex descriptions of images using a deep neural net. For example, identifying not simply that there is a cat in a given picture, but that it is an orange, spotted cat, riding on a skateboard with red wheels on brown hardwood flooring (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf). He also created and taught “Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition,” the first and still leading deep learning course at Stanford.”

Also, Tesla quietly hired legendary chip architect Jim Keller from AMD as new “Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering” last year and several more chip architects have since joined the company – leading us to believe that Tesla is looking to more closely develop hardware and software when it comes to its Autopilot program.

It’s now interesting to see Keller’s role expand within the Autopilot program....proprietary autopilot chip anyone...

 

[sosmerc]

Lot's of emphasis on AI these days which is pretty worrisome, but I guess it is a future we can't stop. I know Elon worries about how AI will be used in warfare. I wonder if wars in the future will be fought without loss of human life? (the winner of a war being the one with the most robots left standing?)

 

[llninja]

Lot's of emphasis on AI these days which is pretty worrisome, but I guess it is a future we can't stop. I know Elon worries about how AI will be used in warfare. I wonder if wars in the future will be fought without loss of human life? (the winner of a war being the one with the most robots left standing?)

The war is already being fought. There are armies of folks in China, US, and Russia armed with computers and networking equipment battling in the digital battleground of cyber warfare. There just aren't any on-the-ground reporters on the scene to report what's happening and who's winning each battle. Every time a cyber attack is thwarted, there's no news. Every time our side wins or loses, there's no news. Any time there is some sort of press release, it's probably a cover story for something else that really happened. Or, at the minimum it would make a great premise to the next Tom Clancy book.

There are similar wars going on with mining for digital currency. Groups of people are snapping up the latest hardware for obscene amounts of money on the premise that if they can gain a computational advantage, they can get a big chunk of the blockchain before the value of the digital currency climbs to an obscene level to make them rich.

 

[llninja]

https://www.valuewalk.com/2017/08/swift-chris-lattner-joining-google-ai/

Interestingly, his replacement...Tesla sent us the following statement about Karpathy:

“Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision and deep learning, is joining Tesla as Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, reporting directly to Elon Musk. Andrej has worked to give computers vision through his work on ImageNet, as well as imagination through the development of generative models, and the ability to navigate the internet with reinforcement learning. He was most recently a Research Scientist at OpenAI.(Note...the artificial intelligence nonprofit backed by Elon Musk.)

Andrej completed his computer vision PhD at Stanford University, where he demonstrated the ability to derive complex descriptions of images using a deep neural net. For example, identifying not simply that there is a cat in a given picture, but that it is an orange, spotted cat, riding on a skateboard with red wheels on brown hardwood flooring (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf). He also created and taught “Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition,” the first and still leading deep learning course at Stanford.”

Also, Tesla quietly hired legendary chip architect Jim Keller from AMD as new “Vice-President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering” last year and several more chip architects have since joined the company – leading us to believe that Tesla is looking to more closely develop hardware and software when it comes to its Autopilot program.

It’s now interesting to see Keller’s role expand within the Autopilot program....proprietary autopilot chip anyone...

We are seeing the beginnings of humans making Cylons.... It has happened before, it will happen again. So say we all!!!

 

[DAC17]

I still don't get the Tesla stock pricing. Up another $14 today. Anyone ever heard of the tulip bulb bubble??

 

[Sly Bob]

Wonder how far this can go before it all implodes...

 

[llninja]

I still don't get the Tesla stock pricing. Up another $14 today. Anyone ever heard of the tulip bulb bubble??

The stock price can be driven upor down from products announcements, news, quarterly reports, or analysts going bullish or bearish. Don't try to find a correlation on a day to day basis, it can drive you crazy. And don't try ti time the market to buy on the lowest lows and sell on the highest high. I buy companies I believe in, jump in when it drops a bit, and only sell when I need the money for something, or when I no longer think it is a good investment, and even then I sometimes hold until the bitter end (bankrupcy).

That said, I don't hold any Tesla stock because it's already overvalued and the next few quarters of manufacturing hell is too scary for my blood. I ish I had a bunch of cash when Tesla trooped to the mid $140s a few years back, but hindsight is always 20/20

 

[Upper5Percent]

I still don't get the Tesla stock pricing. Up another $14 today. Anyone ever heard of the tulip bulb bubble??

Cult stocks do NOT follow any of the standard rules of stock pricing...

Market Crashes: The Tulip and Bulb Craze
http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes2.asp

DEFINITION of 'Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble'
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp

Tulip Mania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Mackay's Madness of Crowds...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
If he were alive today...he have had the dotcom craze, the housing craze, etc, to write up in his book...

 

[hellsop]

Funny, all the tech companies are jumping onto that bandwagon: Intel, Google, Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Twitter.

And you've been able to buy Watson for almost a half a decade...