N.B. Tiveni is InEVit, backwards.

Good catch

Wll there's the "twist"... pretty sneaky, sis!

If I was SF motors I’d be suing... assuming they had a good non-compete clause in their buyout agreement. Starting an identical company to the one you just sold them with a very similar name is pretty shady either way...

So good well done

Yup says that right in the article... Or didn't you notice

I don't think it was there when Dave posted his comment. I learned that fact from this comment, even though I read the article twice, searching for the twist.

^This.

So if I buy over a company for it's engineering talents, then the engineers in that company left together with the founder of the company I bought, what am I paying/buying for my investment?

Presumably whatever they developed while they worked for the startup, and whatever they developed while they worked for you. It does say in the article they got their battery technology too. I still agree they got a raw deal though, and it really wouldn't surprise me to hear about a lawsuit when Tiveni "develops" the same battery technology again and tries to sell it to someone else.

IP

Usually company acquisitions come along with contracts which require the original owners and key people to stay at least a certain period and meet certain targets before they cam cash their money and leave, or they have to pay several fines.
I'm not sure what leverage small buyers have over high valued companies when it comes to negotiating contracts but I'd be prettu d umb not doing so.
A classic example of an acquision contract gone wrong and the deal reversed was brazilian Eike Batista, which had 5 years of oil extraction targets to meet after Saudi Aramco initiate the purchase but failed to do so. The billionaire would have become almost richer than Bill Gates at the time at almost $50 billion, but the failure to meet the goals caused him to not only lose those $50 billion on a deal reversal, but also face a $2 billion fine which basically took him out of the billionaires list he belonged. (Well, later corruption scandals didn't make it any better afterwards).

Sound like the bloke can't commit to anything and grow anything. No wonder Musk had to move him out of tesla.

totally agree with you .

The name thing is shady too.

Where is the twist?

Take the name of the first company, twist it backwards. Gotcha.

This.

"a solid battery pack"?

Here is a quote from Business Insider 25 Feb 2019:

"We take the manufacturing time for making a battery system to one-twentieth of the time it takes now,” Eberhard revealed in an exclusive interview with Business Insider.

The BI article says nothing about solid.

Perhaps he meant solid as in good or sturdy, rather than "solid state".

Yes, solid as in a great sturdy battery system. Solid state battery technology is another thing entirely. Maybe another fracing of words could have been used in this specific case.

I advise startups for a living. Startups can be disruptive when few others realize the value of the technology. But it is likely too late for a battery startup to successfully emerge. All of the big players see the future potential and have much more funding than a startup could likely obtain. They can afford to grab the talent which is in short supply. And universities all over the world are working on the problem. Some of their research will get funded by car companies and battery makers. Or the intellectual property will get sold or licensed to them if it develops into something real.

Also, AI is being used more extensively in research. Over the next decade, more progress will come from AI than individual researchers. Whoever invests in the AI models will win.

Except, Eberhard's startups are not battery cell startups, they are battery PACK startups. They are about assembling quality packs quickly and cheaply. This area is wide open. The most advanced pack is the Tesla Model 3 pack, and Tesla openly talks about the shortcomings and difficult manufacturing process for that pack.

The problem of battery cost and energy density. Adoption will not be widespread until these are improved.

can't for the life of me recall who is invested in AI development? hardware and software ????

AI for autonomous driving and AI for research automation are totally different fields. I do not know if Tesla is working on research automation, but I doubt it. It is a longer term investment. Also, the hardware and software required for research is not anything like what would exist in a car. The hardware would be a supercomputer orders of magnitude more powerful than a Tesla computer. The software would model chemistry and physics, not object detection.

Tesla needs to put everything in the here and now to prepare for the coming recession and the heavy competition that will emerge as we come out of the recession.

Over the next 5-10 years, batteries will become commodities. Tesla has an advantage now with its factories, but that will be short lived. They will have to compete on pricing, product differentiation, and branding. It will be interesting to watch.

The autonomous software isn't trained in the cars computer, it's in a server at Tesla HQ or on a cloud server they rent from Google, and no one knows what they run there, who can say they only run object detection AI training? What is measurable is that Tesla batteries lead in weight/capacity ratio, and in Cobalt usage, and that progress come from somewhere, human or AI what matters is leadership.

That is a fair point. But Sean mentioned hardware development and I assume he is talking about in the car. But you are right, we do not know the design of the cloud computing system. I doubt they are custom designing that.

My point still stands. I think Tesla is focusing their AI on FSD, which is a completely different science than battery chemistry research automation. Tesla will not maintain their lead forever in battery technology. Or any perceived lead in FSD.

Of course he was talking about the car, AI development and AI deployment are two different things and they did the hardware to run their software and neural network AI implementation. As for the training they don't need to do the hardware, there are enough options and the training doesn't require custom hardware just pure compute power and good data sets.

As for your conclusion about Tesla losing their advantages in battery and FSD, i never saw data that points to that and i guess, neither did you, but someway you end up with that conclusion. I say, OK then...

My conclusion is based on living in the world. Nobody maintains a permanent lead in anything. A lead can last a long time. Just making the point that yes Tesla is a pioneering company, but whenever there is money to be made, no technology exists that cannot be replicated.

That being said, Tesla has many years of experience in battery research (as well as studying and evaluating closely what other battery research and companies are doing). I would be surprised if other car companies have departments coming even close to what they have; if anything groundbreaking comes up, odds are they'll be the first ones to get their hands on it.

Coming recession... Nice crystal ball. 'cuz there will always be a coming recession as long as there is present growth.

Which is my point. We are in the longest period without a recession in history. I don't pretend to know when, but it will happen. Probably sooner than later. And Tesla is in a much more precarious position in the moment than the ICE manufacturers. They have always weathered periods of reduced sales. Tesla will need a large infusion of capital to make it through. This time will give the other players a chance to catch up and be ready for when the economy comes back.

While you make some great points, I think Tesla being in a "much more precarious position" than ICE manufacturers ignores some important facts. Let's take VAG: double the industry in debt-to-equity (D/E), narrow net margins (3.7%) compunded my continual NEW lawsuits from deisel emissions which brings their total liabilities to nearly a quarter TRILLLION dollars, cities and countries proposing FF bans - some as soon as 5 years from now... Not a lot of wiggle room to scrap their whole core competency in favor of the investments needed to make batteries at scale. Their "assets" amount to wearing a lead life jacket thinking it will save you. Who will buy said assets when they aren't legally able to sell cars made in those plants in the near future?

Other ICE manufacturers are not far better off. Ford shot themselves in the foot by going only with the Mustang and pickups, seeing as the US is the only country that buys these in bulk and we're less than 20% of the global market for autos. Announcing the recent layoff of 7000 employees underscores that. Their silver lining is working with Rivian, but details are scant on that relationship.

I'm not sure how to do links here, but if you do a Google search for businessinsider tiveni, you'll get a link to an article in an Indian Business Insider site back in February where Eberhard talks about Tiveni, and the article says the company is seven months old.

So that means Tiveni has been around since July 2018.

SFMotors bought InEVit in October 2017, so about 10 months later Tiveni was formed.

Who knows, maybe they had a contract to stay at SFMotors for at least 10 months.

This is a strange move. It's OK for founder and part of the team to leave the buying company after 1-2 years and get into a DIFFERENT project. Going back to do same thing doesn't seem right and may have some legal problems. Hope this is just lack of information on what really happened.

Or, the Chinese did not acquire a 'no-compete' clause.

Non compete clauses are illegal, or more correctly not enforceable in California. You can't stop someone from working at another company in the same capacity just because she might have knowledge beneficial to the new company. Instead the previous employer "must legally prove that a former employee misused or abused confidential information in any way." It's pro-worker, you have a tight to get paid for your skills at a new company.

It does seem a little extreme that multiple employees formed a new company working in the same field. But Chinese companies steal intellectual property all the time, it's sweet to see someone doing it to one of them.

'It does look like Eberhard sold his battery startup to SF Motors, which most likely primarily bought it for the engineering talent considering it was a relatively young company, and then only stayed a few months before leaving with other top executives and engineers to start another similar startup.'
Lots of speculation in that paragraph, as opposed to news...you pick winners and losers despite knowing jack about the deal. Not usually your style....

I know. I read that paragraph as "I don't know what happened and I don't know what their agreement was, but If I was the buyer, I'd be angry." If SF Motors wanted him to stay as a condition of the deal, it would have been part of the deal terms. My guess is that he stayed at least as long as he agreed to.

There’s never an excuse for dishonesty. Eberhard is a fox and I hope a lawsuit shuts him down. There’s other ways to go about the EV Revolution.

SF should have spent more money on lawyers writing those employment contracts...

Non-compete clauses aren't enforceable in California. Particularly when you join a company via acquisition.

What about when you own the company?

Sure, I was not only thinking about them joining the competition but leaving at all. They should have structured the contracts to include bonus payments only when staying.

It's not quite that simple, If you sell a company, the buyer can make some of the payment conditional on your continued employment with the acquirer for some time. If you leave before you agreed, some payment may not be made or you may need to reimburse a payment already made.

It could b ok if hes realy good n had different patents for each battery company n trained the engineer's n set's up the new company to do well in get into production,.. but if not its very fishy,...