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Yeah and in the very next paragraph, he gets intimidated by a truck driver being annoyed that they are driving 63 mph, so decide.... to slam on the accelerator and go so fast they no longer see the truck's headlights on the flat desert highway. Much better alternative then just letting him pass you.

It's almost like they wanted the trip to fail to write this article.

It's patently false the claim that individual investors generally don't beat the market, or that the ones that do only do so by chance.

Warren Buffet, a very famous investor you may have heard of, even mentions that he knows plenty of small individual investors who follow many tenets of the philosophy of value investing and they have consistently beat the market.

I, personally, have been individually investing, following the principals of value investing, knowing the companies I invest in, and asset allocation, diversification across industries, and I have slaughtered the market for over 20 years.

All the points he raised in the article are valid, but they read like pop culture one liners. If you are serious about investing I recommend reading Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, and follow along with Buffet's letter to shareholders.

Understanding the stock market takes time, and you won't find the answers in a 1000 word blog post.

Sure, it's something the CFO thinks about, but it isn't really something that plays a factor into decisions about how to run the business for other C-level executives.

I would say his industrial design experience at Segway (and Deka) was more relevant to Apple.

Let's not forget history here. Musk had a very hard time releasing the Roadster, and it was one of the most painfully delayed automotive launches in history. They were close to running out of money numerous times in the launch, and needed key loans and cash at key times (including a huge cash infusion from Musk himself) otherwise they would have failed. At least some of that based on the public information at the time can be attributed to Musk's inexperience in the car world.

They made it, but it wasn't without a lot of luck. I worry about decisions like this because if there's one thing Tesla really needs to execute on, it's getting new car models out the door in a very timely fashion.

Another example - Nardelli was also a brilliant leader at Home Depot, but he couldn't do enough to save Chrysler.

The car industry is a very different beast then building wheel chairs and segways. Personally I would prefer someone in the new car development driver's seat with a bit more experience. Putting someone without that experience is such a leadership role seems like a reckless move by Tesla.

This is all just my opinion. I'd be happy to discuss further and share opinions.

I missed it the first time through, although I'm not surprised as in the article his previous automobile engineering experience seems downplayed.

Equating his segway experience to all of transportation seems a stretch.

According to his linked in profile he was a development engineer at Ford for 6 years and hasn't worked in the car industry for 20 years. Certainly he does not seem to possess any executive experience in the car industry or related to car development.

As a TSLA investor, it makes more sense to me to have someone in that role who actually has experience getting cars to market (ie. someone like Bob Lutz).

It seems like the trend lately is to float a tiny amount of shares to the public. From my perspective this creates an artificial supply problem for the stock and makes higher valuations easier as you need less institutional buy in to maintain the price, and a few good quarters can result in disproportionate gains in the market.

Can anyone comment on that or shed some light? As a potential investor, those factors make me shy away from these investments as it makes the stock more volatile to changes and puts the fate of the stock in a few large holders hands.

Interesting move. While I can see some overlap in experience leading large technical projects where industrial design and battery life are of paramount importance, I wonder how much of that experience will translate into actual car development.

From the outside looking in I'd rather fill that role with someone with car industry experience bringing actual cars to market, because battery life and industrial design are somewhat fungible, but if Tesla is late on bringing car models to market that has a serious effect on their timelines.

I agree but it's inevitable. The creators are busy creating, and the fact that there is no shortage of "non-creators defined by their taste" (who also have an abundance of free time) - means it is a bit of a hopeless battle maintaining the integrity of the comments.

Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)

Tesla Roadster's have been on the roads now for 6 years, and I think you'll find it is pretty hard to find one at any significant discount off it's MSRP.

Tesla also offered a $12000 replacement plan for the Tesla Roadsters, so you could get a fresh set of batteries if there was a failure.

Sounds like you just had a bad manager. At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers. I'm sure your opinion would be different if you actually made it to the AWS group like you wanted.

You're turning a bad experience with a single manager into a personal vendetta against the company as a whole. I have friends who work there who work normal hours (and have for years) and they even said they feel like they are more respected employees as engineers then the business owners.

CEOs in general tend to be hard to work with. There are also anecdotes about Gates being rude.

Further, I would say the people who want to judge a character by a few anecdotes are being lazy, small minded, and short sighted. Jobs, Gates, and Mayer are all different people with their own styles. I'm not sure if Mayer's style will be what Yahoo needs, but I wish her the best of luck.

No one's lunch was eaten by Wii. I think by now it's pretty much been concluded that Wii was an alternative to the PS3/XBOX demographic (that is, people interested in PS3/XBOX also bought Wii), and that Wii itself brought a lot of new players into the console gaming world. Not much if any actual cannibalization of sales occured.

Also besides ignoring game sales, it also ignores the fact that Wii sold the most during the early part of it's release. This year Xbox 360 and PS3 are on pace to massively outsell Wii and have been doing so for a while. This is the part in the cycle where hardware sales are most profitable, so who really has the last laugh?

Besides, with the PS3 it was mission accomplished for Sony as they used it as a large bargaining chip to win the blu-ray format war.

Looking at 10 year stock trends, you can see the real story. Nintendo had a massive stock surge after the release of the Wii, but now they have fallen to pre-Wii levels. Sony has been steady throughout.

It's good to hear from YC founders that they don't see the negative impacts.

I can certainly understand why the hype machine is, at least in the short term, valuable to both Sequoia and YC. It helps raise the profile of YC and causes valuations to rise for all involved companies. Both Sequoia and YC are in the business of making money after all.

But when you have a situation of "frenzied investors" and these "exclusive limited events" designed somewhat to cause a situation of artificial scarcity, the waters get a bit muddy regarding the motivation of connecting companies with investors. It's the difference between having genuinely valuable partnerships, and those quick liquidity events designed to make a quick buck.

The original mission of YC involved developing companies that build things that people want. I hope the Sequoia influence doesn't change that.