When Tesla was on the brink of insolvency years ago, he had a handshake deal with Larry Page (they jetpooled together) for Google to acquire Tesla and for Musk to continue to run day to day operations. Wasn’t necessary, but there are options.
Elon will be fine.
The other lesson could be "maybe we shouldn't rely on one person's charisma to drive us to do new and interesting things," but that's not likely to be the lesson learned.
Musk has been on the verge of failure for years, and cracks are showing now more than ever before.
I'd hate for everyone to stop dreaming for tomorrow just because one guy couldn't pull off everything imaginable.
For all the good things Musk does, he also does a lot of bad things. Including but not limited to dreaming up absurd fantasies to "reinvent" industries he has literally zero experience in (aviation comes to mind, drilling tunnels, underwater rescue, etc) - and everyone fixates on that imaginary solution because he said it.
Not to mention taking credit for all the hard work the actual aerospace, mechanical and other engineers are doing under Musk. Very seldom do you hear Musk talk about how incredible the team is and how lucky he is to have them working on these problems. No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.
Look at Hyperloop. People are still wasting money, energy and resources on it, regardless that what we have in testing today are just Maglev trains in tubes... a far cry from what Musk originally dreamt up. Nevermind how impractical or prohibitively expensive and uneconomical it would be to build trains across the US, oceans, across the world all connected.
People want to dream. Fine. But trusting all of the future to just one guy... I'm not so sure.
There is for sure a cult of personality like there was for Steve Jobs.
He constantly praise or give credit to his teams, even full credit where it is due.
No, instead he has the gall to call himself Lead Designer this, or Chief Architect that. We all know he's not sitting down and crunching math to design rockets and cars and more.
Yes? All the bucks stop with him. He makes engineering decisions, bad or good. It doesn't matter if he doesn't have the relevant degree or did the calculation on a particular project.
Part of the problem is not trusting the future to one guy, but rather that there is hardly more than one guy to trust it to. Where are the other Elon Musks? We need more people like him, not less.
I'm not sure I agree.
I like Elon Musk (a whole lot more than most people) - but every Elon Musk consumes a lot of societies resources. He's spending 10s or 100s of billions of dollars worth of resource on (literal) moonshots. A hundred of him would raise that to trillions to 10s of trillions of dollars.
I think we can afford the former as a society (and that it benefits us). I'm not sure we an afford the latter. Worse, we become less efficient at is when there are more of him because we start running out of talented and driven engineers.
Maybe 10s would be a good order of magnitude.
It helps to compare the harsh treatment of the average worker to the soft humanized treatment reserved for the bosses and war criminals.
He gets away with all his shenanigans because he's a rain maker.
If his incredible run of success dries up, the narrative is going to shift hard.
I remember how Apple kicked out Jobs.
Any chance Tesla will suddenly find a competing company in EV market which it can buy with certain conditions?..
Look at Microsoft under Ballmer, or Google after Page/Brin. All seem(ed) to be hollow shells of what once was.
If it's because he did something entirely insane you're probably right. If it's because market conditions shifted post Covid-19 I think he's been enough of a rainmaker that people would likely still leave him in charge.
If a friend of his who is willing to put up with his antics (e.g. Larry Page) managed to acquire it, it's probably more likely than if risk adverse/sensational personality adverse institutional investors acquired it.
Admittedly at this point I doubt Larry Page would be able to easily front the money any more... Tesla's assets have grown substantially in value since back then.
Besides, he just had a child! What a wonderful gift to the world. I hope his child grows up to be as wise and down-to-earth as his father. :)
The value would have to decline a LOT before he got a margin call.
He's had controversy with the virus and his factories. By tweeting that out, he gave off a "billionaire doesn't care about money" vibe.
What got more coverage? His payout or his rambling tweets. He would have got more flak if the press covered his payout while he has been pushing his workers to get back into the factories.
This is overly cynical. A fair bit of what he does is about PR - but not all of it. He's still human and it's pretty clear that he uses twitter as a stress relief mechanism (for better or worse).
Whether that was for PR or not is pretty unclear. It was basically simultaneous with him (according to him) having a fight with his girlfriend a few days before his child was born, and in the middle of him tweeting a bunch of nonsense that definitely wasn't for pr.