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>> Who knows what's actually happening.

What's actually happening is executives are leaving. Many more of them than is normal in such a short time. That's what's actually happening.

Why that's happening is certainly open for debate, but there are no answers to "why" that are good. The only reason that wouldn't suck is that it's just a coincidence that they don't want to be there. But keep in mind, one of the finance people was new to the company and quit. To me that says they walked in, saw what was happening and said "yeah, sorry, no." But that's speculation on my part. We should stick to the facts - an unusual number of executives have been leaving the company in a short time.

> Many more of them than is normal in such a short time.

They have 37,000 employees. If 1% of them are "executives" and the average executive stays for five years, the mean time between executive departures would be five days. Are they actually averaging significantly more than one departure every five days?

But, how many of the "executive" 1% are at the level of Chief Accounting Officer or Director of Manufacturing Engineering? Probably less than 370?

Probably less than 74 people a year "at that level" have left.

Look at the 8k filings, they are easy to find on Yahoo finance and show corporate officer departures/arrivals.

There are a lot of them for a company like Tesla. People join for the big payout — when corporate big shots suddenly find reward in spending time with family, you need to ask questions.

> Look at the 8k filings, they are easy to find on Yahoo finance and show corporate officer departures/arrivals.

Since the beginning of the year I see this business everyone was talking about last week with the Chief Accounting Officer, and then one for the Director of Manufacturing and Engineering and one for the President of Global Sales and Service. Is this supposed to be an unusually large number? The other 8-K filings do not appear to be related to departures/arrivals.

By comparison, in the same time period GM replaced their CAO, their CFO and a member of the board.

The numbers in both cases would obviously be higher if you broaden the category to include lower positions that don't make the 8-K filings like the Tesla VP in the current story, but people are saying "look how many" without specifying the breadth of the pool or how many should be expected.

The GM CFO retired after 40 years with the company. The GM CAO left for another job and gave 90 days notice. It’s a little different.

None of this takes away from the amazing achievements of the company. But the company is probably on life support and it’s time to sell.

> The GM CFO retired after 40 years with the company. The GM CAO left for another job and gave 90 days notice. It’s a little different.

The original claim was that the number of departures was high. Comparing the number of departures, there does not appear to be a large disparity.

You raise the question of the context. The first Tesla CAO left citing personal reasons. The conspiracy theory is that this is a dog whistle for some kind of accounting irregularities, but as far as I know neither he nor anyone else with actual knowledge has even suggested that as a motive. What actual evidence is there that he didn't honestly leave for personal reasons?

The second CAO actually described his reasons:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/tesla-cao-dave-morton-quit-a...

The whole "funding secured" drama literally happened on his second day and he didn't like it.

Nothing about that episode is super inspiring and his reaction is entirely understandable, but how is this supposed to spell doom for the company?

Meanwhile the other departures seem to be for the normal reasons with people in a low unemployment job market finding another job somewhere else and that sort of thing.

But given the drama, now people are looking under every rock for something to gossip about.

Wait, what?

If someone takes a "leave of absence" that ends up lasting several months, and that becomes a permanent leave of absence (read: they quit), that does indicate problems. Not in a one-off scenario, but in Tesla's case where they've lost dozens of executives once they realized that [possible bias here] Tesla is clearly engaging in fraud, it's not just a one-off thing. The smart executives are jumping ship, leaving behind either a) the not so smart executives or b) the smart people like Straubel who are close enough to Elon that they wouldn't leave.

see: bogus solarcity acquisition to avoid the dominos falling in Musk's highly coupled empire, clear intent to cause a short squeeze with the bullshit going private tweet [if you look at musk's actions/statements leading up to that, it's clear the shorts have been stressing him out], Musk having borrowed money to purchase even more Tesla shares, worker injury rate [this isn't fraud but I decided to throw it in there], etc etc etc

Having the new Chief Accounting Officer, quit after a month is rather unusual.[0] I don't know why he left, but that raised serious red flags for me.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/7/17831204/tesla-accounting-...

The Tesla fans are oblivious to all of this sort of news. It's all "minor" and they can't seem to see how problematic it is in aggregate.

There is a huge gap between what these people think is happening (Tesla is taking over the world!) and reality. This company could go under and they wouldn't believe it. I've never seen anything like it.

Almost every executive tasked with showing you the financial numbers is leaving or has left what should be one of the hottest/sexiest startups of our time. Many of them have left with stock options still on the table.

That should say more than the numbers do by themselves.

>Just SHOW ME THE NUMBERS

Tesla is:

- Missing weekly production targets (currently at ~15%)

- Burning through cash reserves (-34% YTD)

- Increasing liabilities (+20% YTD)

This is all while there are Model 3 quality issues, and refusing a cash injection from VW. The solarcity acquisition was questionable as well, considering Musk founded solarcity, and now there is a lawsuit by Tesla investors against him.

Some investors are still cutting the CEO slack because of his previous success with Paypal, but automobile manufacturing is a different beast.

I believe he asked for numbers :)

Added.

Numbers, not FUD. Give me links to reputable publications that include sources and not some random nonsense.

What I said is not FUD, please do not accuse me of spreading it unless I said something that wasn't factual.

Production Tracker: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

Tesla Financials: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/financials

Model 3 Quality Issues: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2018/09/02/tesla...

Refusing VW Cash: https://www.wsj.com/articles/public-bravado-private-doubts-h...

Shareholders suing over Solarcity Acquisition: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-shareholders/tesla-...

> Some investors are still cutting the CEO slack because of his previous success with Paypal, but automobile manufacturing is a different beast.

There's a lot more to it than that though. Telsa is a huge achievement already. They've not only created cars that a lot of people love, they disrupted and accelerated an entire industry.

Not to mention SpaceX.

Oh I agree, but Tesla's value seems to be in the IP at the moment, not automobile production. That's why VW would have been such an ideal partner, because VW knows mass automobile production (but Musk nixed it).

SpaceX is great too but I would say it's still a little too early to say it's as successful as Paypal was.

Elon has always marketed Tesla and himself with Hollywood like publicity. It's not surprising some of the headlines read like tabloids. Whether they're true or not who knows? As long as Elon is in the limelight they'll be around.

Didn’t Dave Morton leave in under a month? That feels pretty “jumping ship” to me at least. It’s also worth remembering that “Musk smokes weed” was the tail end of something that really began with “Musk calls hero pedophile online, then doubles down on it,” and “Musk brings down SEC with bullshit ‘funding secured’ line.”

There’s some hysterical headlines because they get clicks, but Musk has been doing the hard work of tanking his image and hurting Tesla without a bit of help.

This kind of thing is one of my worst pet peeves.

> So the executive was on LOA for multiple months beforehand?

Without the benefit of the internal memo, I would have assumed maternity leave and deciding not to come back. It's common. With the memo though, it sounds like she may have been caring for another family member, or some similar situation, and just decided it isn't worth it to come back.

While I agree that the first two titles are clickbait, every single executive leaves to spend "time with their family". It's such a trope that you cannot take that sentence at face value.

They've shown the numbers for 15 years,and it's nothing but losses.

Tesla is the most shorted stock in history and "News" has nothing to do with facts or events, it's purely entertainment and perception management. When someone wants you to believe a certain point of view, the "news" will make it so.

Ah, yes the famous "news" conspiracy consisting of thousands of anonymous people who don't coordinate their activities with each other but are all somehow trying to bring down Tesla by independently reporting actual things that Musk or Tesla have said or done.

Or, Occam's Razor: the news is reporting this stuff because Musk made it newsworthy by constantly hyping and over-promising in the past. As a consequence of this self-initiated publicity, negative events concerning Musk and Tesla are now considered newsworthy, even if they wouldn't be for other executives/companies.

That being said, no matter what company you are, losing 5 C-suite executives in less than a year is extremely disturbing news and in almost all cases is usually followed by the company declaring bankruptcy in some form within a few months.

My comment wasn't even about Tesla or Musk, it's about the "news" in general. There is very little factual about it.

> it's about the "news" in general. There is very little factual about it

Ah yes, the new 'fake news' spiel being thrown around for any media outlet.