Tesla doesn’t need Musk right now.
They need a serious executive from a former car company who has experience in quiet, deliberate execution. Lots of companies are making cars without anywhere near the same levels of fanfare.
They need a serious executive from a former car company who has experience in quiet, deliberate execution. Lots of companies are making cars without anywhere near the same levels of fanfare.
Not really.
They need that as a COO.
Tesla has no real magic sauce. They are what they are because of the Musk Hype Machine and his ability to 'inspire' people to move to electric.
If Tesla was based on some magic ingredients that were a real competitive advantage, I'd say let a 'quiet' CEO take over with a hot dog CMO.
But they are still in 'founders mode' wherein the founder is a big factor in inspiring and motivating and that gives him a lot of power.
You might be surprised to know that regular CEO's don't necessarily have all the power you think. They have to convince, fight internal battles, motivate. It's hard for them to do 'big things'.
Musk is becoming a problem but not so much that he needs to go.
He needs a really powerful COO who can go toe-to-toe with him - and he needs to get some f*ing sleep and go back to the 'old' Musk from 2010.
And you can be an enterprise CEO and still innovate as a company eg. Apple, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz.
I guess that’s the new meme about Musk now, but I see no reason to believe it. Plenty of startup CEOs have done well after their companies became enterprises. Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are obvious examples. So is Steve Jobs, who came back to Apple after a decade of absence and rebuilt the company.
I get what you're saying, but choosing from "business as usual" automotive industry leaders has a spotty track record.
Particularly where innovation is concerned.
Especially since Tesla is not just a car company. They are making headway into utility scale energy markets, planning to get into roofing, and have a relationship which will likely help them in the disrupting-the-use-of-roads-as-primary-means-of-transport-by-the-elimination-of-traffic industry that Elon Musk is trying to get set up. It's very safe to say that the status-quo certified executives could still need to continue playing a game of following-the-leader.
While Elon Musk is saying that the only thing that matters is pace of innovation, legacy automaker executives are advocated for on the basis of their relationship with status quo. Tesla doesn't exist in a world with status quo. In a world with status quo, regulators force the automakers to acknowledge the impact of their work on climate change and they grudgingly change course. This has been happening over time. We've seen them faking emission test results. We've seen them producing compliance vehicles so that they have access to markets that are trying to convince them to actually do the right thing.
So yeah, I'm in total agreement with you.
Which is to say that if Tesla hadn’t produced great cars nobody would give a shit about what the guy that started PayPal had to say. He’s famous because Tesla delivered, his so called celebrity status didn’t make the cars popular.
Or did he jump in as CEO after Tesla became popular?
Could that be because almost all of those other cars are utterly unremarkable?
People like Musk aren't just replaceable, they should be replaced so soon as possible to lookout the damage they do.
I don't know much about the auto industry, and don't really follow Tesla, but I do know that Tesla stock is worth almost an order of magnitude more than General Motors.
TSLA ~$45.5B
GM ~$47B