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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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