It mentions Billy Durant, the exciting, visionary entrepreneur who raised goads of money and built GM from a disruptive startup in 1906 into a company with $10 billion (in today's dollars) in annual car sales by the early 1920's... but who was nonetheless fired by GM's board because, despite the company's rapid growth, it was burning cash and remained dependent on continued capital-raising. The board concluded GM needed someone who could execute a business model, not someone with grand visions who would perpetually need fresh capital to turn them into reality.
The parallels to Tesla's current situation are obvious.
The person who replaced Durant, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., ran GM for three decades with incredible success, turning it into the world's largest automaker.[a] This is the same Sloan as in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, MIT's Sloan School of Management, Stanford's Sloan program, and Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center. (Durant died poor, managing a bowling alley in Flint, Michigan.)
PS. The most interesting aspect of this article, for me, is the fact that it was written and published in the first place. It makes me wonder if the mindset of investors with regards to Tesla is changing from "show me an exciting vision" to "show me profitable execution of a business model."