Found — Arts — Then Do Better

Verbatim theatre uses ‘found’ or real life words, interviews or reports to re-craft work. I’ve been interested in found art, found sound and found poetry for a long time now. (You can find a blog on found sound and drag art here; on a piece of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton phone conversations; and a blog on one of the greatest pieces of verbatim poetry ever written)

This is a highly edited transcript of a recent 2018 public conference call with Elon Musk and investment analysts. It highlights (1) The difference between Musk’s vision and others in places (2) What questions Musk finds boring (3) A Musk view on autonomous driving and media reporting and (4) A maxim on long term and short term investing and a difference on stock vs business.

It’s humorous in parts for an investment analyst call and takes me back to my verbatim work which I’m interesting in digging into again. Consider it a short writing exercise.

“These questions are killing me”

Musk: I think we're going to spend extra time on Q&A and try to answer as many questions as possible. We're going to go as long as there are good questions to answer.

Rod Lache (Analyst): … Your comments on the advances in batteries were interesting.

Ahuja (Telsa): Every data point, Rod, that we look at internally suggests that we are best-in-class / -

<Musk>: We're best, which is not a class.

<Ahuja> : Yes. We're the best. Sorry.

<Musk> : The best-in-class of one.

<Antonio Sacconaghi (analyst) >: Where specifically will you be in terms of capital requirements?

<Musk>: Excuse me. Next. Boring bonehead questions are not cool. Next?

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Joseph Spak

Spak: The first question is related to the Model 3 reservations. I was wondering if you gave us a gauge of the impact that the news has had. … the reservations that opened and what percentage have taken the step to configure?

<Musk>: We're going to go to YouTube. Sorry. These questions are so dry. They're killing me.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Galileo Russell with HyperChange.

<Galileo Russell>: Hey. Great quarter. Thanks for having me on the call to represent retail investors. I was wondering with Waymo's plans to launch an autonomous taxi service in limited markets this year, if you could give us an update on the Tesla Network? And any details surrounding the launch date or geographic rollout? Thanks.

<Musk>: Sure. Thank you for an interesting question. The way things are obviously rolling towards is a shared electrical autonomy model. So, in order for the whole sort of system to work, you need all the pieces in place. You need to have full autonomy, level four or five, whatever you want to call it and, obviously, a lot of cars on the road, and then build the software infrastructure behind that to enable shared autonomy, to enable people to share their cars and be able to offer their cars as effectively kind of a robo-Lyft or robo-Uber, sort of like a combination of like, I guess, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb type of thing, where you can own your car and have 100% usage of an autonomous electric car. You can say it's available generally to anyone who wants to use it. When you're not using it, you can recall it, at will.

You can restrict usage to only friends and family, or only users who are five-star. This is like the obvious thing that's going to happen.

In order for that to be in place, we have to obviously sell full autonomy and we're making really good progress on that front. I believe that the current production of – vehicles that we are currently producing are capable of full autonomy with the only thing that would really be, like, might be needed – maybe is probably needed is a computer upgrade to have more processing power for the vision neural net. That's a plug-in replacement, a thing that can be done quite easily. I think we're really well-positioned and are building the right – the foundation for having millions, ultimately tens of millions of shared autonomous electric vehicles

[Russell]: Do you have any details about or when we could even expect to learn more about the timing of this service?

<Musk>: Well, the hardest thing to break about the timing is regulatory approval. The thing that's tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn't reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero. It improves it substantially, but the reality is that even though we think our – we think autonomy, even car autonomy reduces the probability of a death by 30%, which would be incredible because there's like – broadly there's over a 1 million, I think 1.2 million automotive deaths per year. And how many do you read about? Basically, none of them. However but, if it's an autonomous situation, it's headline news, and the media fails to mention that –actually they shouldn't really be writing the story, they should be writing the story about how autonomous cars are really safe, but that's not the story that people want to click on.

So they write inflammatory headlines that are fundamentally misleading to the readers. It's really outrageous. And this will be true, even if electric cars were – sorry, if autonomous cars were 10 times safer, if instead of a 1 million deaths you had 100,000 deaths. There is still going to be people who will still sue and say, hey, you're responsible for the death here. And it's like, well, the 90% of people who didn't die are not suing. They're still alive, they just don't know it.

So, we've got to deal with that and then obviously regulators respond to public pressure and the press. So, if the press is hounding the regulators, and the public is laboring on misapprehension that autonomy is less safe because of misleading press, then this is where I find the challenge of predicting it to be very difficult.

It's really incredibly irresponsible of any journalists with integrity to write an article that would lead people to believe that autonomy is less safe. Because people might actually turn it off, and then die. So anyway, I'm really upset by this.

<Q - Galileo Russell>: I'm not an expert in battery pack technology, but it seems that a lot of people are speculating that the specs for the Semi truck, even I believe the CEO of Daimler said it breaks the laws of physics. / - So, I'm wondering is this a linear...

<Musk> : He doesn't know much about physics. I know him. I'd be happy to engage in a physics discussion with him. I actually studied physics in college.

Operator: One last question

<Kallo> : I completely understand your frustration and I'm frustrated too on how myopic we are right now. They also say that great years were made out of quarters, and great decades are made out of years, so everyone's short-term focus in some ways, and volatility has a way of shaking people out even they are strong and want to be there things. Anything you can do to help in the near-term on that, I think is helpful for the stock. That;s it.

Musk: This is an old maxim of investing, you should not be focused on short-term. You should be focused on long-term things. We have no interest in satisfying the desires of day traders. I couldn't care less. Please sell our stock and don't buy it.

I think that if people are concerned about volatility, they should definitely not buy our stock.

I'm not here to convince you to buy our stock. Do not buy it if volatility is scary. There you go.

Musk: All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks, everyone. Appreciate the good questions.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may all disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

The current Arts blog, cross-over, the current Investing blog. Cross fertilise, some thoughts on autism. Discover what the last arts/business mingle was all about (sign up for invites to the next event in the list below).

My Op-Ed in the Financial Times (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.

Some popular posts: the commencement address; by Nassim Taleb (Black Swan author, risk management philosopher), Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. Charlie Munger on always inverting; Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.