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Comment by rhema | Hacker News Reader

He may deserve that, but I believe that public perception is that Elon Musk is Tesla. In the same way that Bill Gates was Microsoft and Steve Jobs was Apple, Musk commands a huge moral force (in a Clausewitz sense... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz). Fire Musk and you need to hire a press team, rebrand, and basically become seen as a stuffy company instead of the hip trendy up-and-comer. How much perceived valuation does Musk create? 20%, 50% of the company? Hard to say, but I bet it's a big number.

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2029: Elon Musk is hired back to lead Tesla after the board decides the brand, having been diluted over the past 10 years and the stock down to pennies, is in serious danger. Musk meanwhile had been focusing on SpaceX and laying the foundation for the first Mars colonization.

2031: Shortly after his return to Tesla, Musk introduces the first hovercar.

2035: SpaceX and Tesla merge

2042: TeslaX solarshuttles frequently take multi-year tourist visits to Mars and Europa

2047: TeslaX undergoes a hostile takeover by Amazon for 8.7T in stock (hey, who doesn't love a twist ending?)

>Musk meanwhile had been focusing on SpaceX and laying the foundation for the first Mars colonization.

I'll bet SpaceX management is dreading the idea of Musk showing up there every day to work.

And yet Gates is gone, and Microsoft is still here. And Jobs is gone, but Apple is still here.

As the saying goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Is Apple still there? Let's be realistic, it's a fraction of what it used to be. From a creative standpoint, it's catatonic.

If Jobs hadn't of gone back to Apple in '97 after being fired in '85, they wouldn't be here today. Jobs was their last hope after Sculley made them mediocre. Apple was down to relying on a 150m investment from Microsoft in the late 90s (Aug 1997), that they probably only got because of Jobs [1]. I'd also argue everything that Jobs had created at NeXTSTEP became Apple and saved them [2]. The technology made it all the way into iPhone, you can see it in their libs still in Objective-C with the NS prefix [2]. Interestingly Jobs built successes in NeXTSTEP and Pixar while he was away from Apple for a decade, just like Musk has other companies.

It could be argued Ballmer almost killed Microsoft, but Bill Gates has had influence in the company all along on the board up until February 4, 2014 as the chairman of Microsoft. Microsoft returned to developer/engineering focused with Satya Nadella was made CEO in February 2014 after the marketing/bizdev focused Ballmer era that nearly made them irrelevant, and Nadella has turned it around entirely back to developer roots.

Tesla is an engineer first, I see that as way more beneficial than some operations or lifetime MBA / C-level executive running it, it will take the life right out of Tesla just like Baller at Microsoft or Sculley at Apple.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

> Tesla is an engineer first

Nah, Tesla is a Twitter-first. Engineers seem to hate working there and are constantly leaving because of the PR obsessions.

Tesla is a marketing-driven company.

Tesla is a product company, they do little, if any, marketing.

Find me a Tesla owner that doesn't love their car.

Tesla is an engineering led product company first, both for the good of the environment and for making products that people love.

Not many could have built what Elon Musk built, if any others today at the time and survive the Great Recession or get people excited about the product.

Tesla has that excitement that nostalgic leaders like Disney, Ford, Jobs, 'World's Fair' type of innovative excitement had in the past.

Yes, but is it in the national interests of China for the United States to be the leader in the electrification of transport?

He is very likely to persist in claiming both that Elon Musk is not at all an capable of engineering and that Tesla is a marketing company. There is a technique called firehosing where you just keep spewing lies as an influence strategy.

You can look at his other post in this thread to see the degree to which he is willing to have faithful discourse.

I would argue that it is in the interest of China. Everyone is going to have flooding coast lines. The short term solution to curbing that issue and others is fast electrification. China will find a market for its own vehicles, because every electric vehicle is going to find a market. So the United States pulling its own weight in this matter is just helping to get the task done more quickly. Meanwhile, in the long-term, present day technology is going to be eclipsed. It will be easy enough to figure out how the better batteries are made and produce them. Economies of scale can then allow winning on price. Meanwhile, the digital record will preserve the manipulation attempts, making them more obvious in retrospect. This isn't good for diplomatic relations with the many nations who will be damaged by floods. So taking actions which could slow electrification could lead to unanticipated consequences. Meanwhile, advocating for more rapid acceleration won't even harm diplomatic relations with the oil producing countries: many of them are leading the charge in adopting green technology, they understand the dangers. There is good will to be gained in helping the world to electrify its transportation.

The only difference is, Gates and Jobs both left when their respective companies were already in a good place and very financially successful.

Definitely not Jobs’ first departure

Yes, but Jobs' return brought with him everything from NeXT and he blew life back into a company that surely would have disappeared without that.

True, and his first departure almost killed Apple.

The difference with Gates and Jobs is Tesla has not delivered, i.e. it has not become profitable enough to guarantee success in the future. At this point he's indispensable. (There is also the thought that without him Tesla does not have an advantage vs cheaper competitors from all around the world)

I understand I think why you say Tesla has not delivered. But I feel like Tesla kicked off the entire electric car market finally. Not to mention the space stuff. Amazing work even if he is ousted I think. Plenty of awesome stuff.

This is key, I think. Microsoft had enough runway to figure it out. Apple has a multiple of that. What does Tesla have to keep it alive while they figure out the next step?

Your comment made me think of Tim Cook. He could run Tesla the rest of the way.

That's a weird definition of "delivered". The car industry requires scale, and Tesla needs to be much bigger before it could possibly meet that definition of "delivered". That's why the last US mass-market car startup was Tucker.

do you believe the early adopters who are buying Teslas today are buying Tesla or Musk?

"At this point he's indispensable. "

If that's the case then there is a real management failure. It would be irresponsible to rely on one person.

Also look at MS and Apple. So far they have been doing fine without Gates and Jobs.

Windows has lost on Mobile OS space totally to Apple and Google. And Apple is already showing signs of not being able to think beyond the iPhone and Macbook.

That's not called doing fine.

Once the product inertia is gone, the effects of absence will show.

> Tesla has not delivered, i.e. it has not become profitable enough to guarantee success in the future

And based on that track record, in addition to violating security laws, you conclude that Musk is essential to the business? Strange.

I think his point is that when you strip away the personality cult, Tesla is just an unprofitable car maker with crushing debts and trouble meeting goals.

Yeah, this whole “Tesla will fail if they fire Musk” strikes me as kind of pointless, because Tesla will likely fail either way. Best case scenario is M&A, which Musk is essentially too proud to do, which means not firing him means committing to the company utterly failing.

There's an argument that that makes him more essential, because (so the argument goes) one thing he has been demonstrably good at is fundraising.

Not sure if I buy it or not - I've not looked into it in enough detail really - but for a Company in that kind of position it's an important attribute for the senior executive team to have.

It's big, but is it irrecoverable? Because the current situation might be.

Fire Musk and the board could also risk a situation similar to Apple's board firing Steve Jobs.

Musk is taking too many chances with too many things, often unnecessarily, but without him Tesla could be trampled by the big carmakers in the coming years in the EV market.

Who at Tesla will still want to add rocket alloy to their cars to make them the safest ever cars? Chances are whatever new CEO they hire will see that as a huge cost-cutting opportunity to be "more in line with the rest of the industry."

The big car makers will be flooding the EV market, irrelevant of Musk presence.

Also, the big car manufacturers have a huge head start in terms of actually producing a very large volume of cars across the globe.

If toyota decides they can make a yaris or aygo as a purely electric vehicle, tesla will be nearly unable to catch that large, low end market segment.

Also, you need low-end, mass volume cars to be able to push eletric infrastructure and replace the current gas infrastructure. (although i think using hydrogen and reusing the gas infrastructure might even be a better solution personally).

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