What often happens is a rewrite that keeps the same mistakes as the original product (either organizational, specification wise or technical).
I have no idea about management, I just constantly see restructurings of departments going wrong.
Just firing everyone and starting over from scratch is never going to result in an improvement. Even if the problems were because the original team was just incompetent (which it rarely is), you aren't going to get a better team the next time because if you knew how to hire a competent team you wouldn't have hired an incompetent team the first time.
So I think it may not be as crazy as you make out. On the other hand were they really underperforming? Isn't Tesla's charging network still world leading?
I suspect that just replacing the individual people would result in more or less the same unhealthy culture unless you also took steps to change the rest of the organizational context.
He did this with Starlink. One day he wasn't happy with how fast Starlink was progressing and so he went up to Seattle, fired the entire team and started over. That led to the Starlink we have now. I have spoken directly with employees there and they totally believe in the mission more than anything and they want to only work with other A players. Again, I am amazed that Musk manages to keep attracting top tier people to kill themselves over his vision but i'm not an A player so what do I know.
It's like the difference between between reproducing a proof from a math textbook and actually proving a new theorem yourself. The latter takes a lot more time and effort, even though the amount of work in both cases looks the same from the outside.
I think it’s hard to see what has happened to Twitter as anything but utterly breaking the business.
But seriously, how can you not go to Twitter and see that it has become totally enshittified. The real lesson learned there is that large tech infrastructures are actually stable enough to survive a lot of BS without collapsing. Doesn't make the products pleasant to use, though.
Supercharger rollout wasn't slow. They have been averaging more than one new station opened per day in the US alone. If a new gas station brand were opening 30+ new gas stations per month in the US I think we'd find that impressive.
Well at least there’s that silver lining: a lot less noise in the EV space on YouTube.
1 super charger station per day is pitiful, you don’t need to be Elon to realize that is nowhere near fast enough to transition to electric vehicles.
About 2/3s of Americans live in single-family homes. Some of those won't be conducive to home charging, but most will be. If even 50% of households can charge at home, that eliminates the need for huge numbers of gas stations supplying cars for the normal daily commute.
We can also build these cheaper slow-chargers at offices, in parking garages, along urban street parking to cover many of those who can't set up their own home charging.
What you're left with is covering long-range travel along highways, as well as those who don't have the ability to charge at home or work. This is what Tesla has always been targeting with their charging network.
Most people who buy a Tesla do not go to a Supercharger once or twice a week. I use one about 4 times per year.
For the chargers that we do need, we also shouldn't be counting on one company to build all of them for us.
Oh, yes, that 1M strong self-driving taxi network promised to be delivered in 2019 is rolling out really well.
As is the Cybertruck, robots, and AI.
The supercharger network is arguably the most successful Tesla product.
It's mostly a problem with getting permits and connections to the power grid, but still it's not a great performance. I don't know if they could do better.
I wonder where they'll find people at this point that haven't heard the news that the entire organization can be fired on a whim?
What experienced capable person would want to go to that new team? Unless the pay is far far above market, it's not attractive.
Once you have experience and maturity you also have more obligations (family) so taking a job where entire teams can be wiped out whenever a late-night twitter rage goes bad, becomes ever less interesting.
At the same time the thinking of experienced engineers has calcified in a way that prevents the attempt of risky behavior that could lead to long term success. For example, the mega castings were something proposed to automakers since the 90s but no one wanted to take the risk to try it because of politics. You risk shutting down your entire tool and die factory and dealing with the fall out of that and if it didn't work out you were hosed.
The result of plowing through the top engineering students every year is that they repeat these mistakes on speed run but they also seem to extract nuggets of gold that the "experienced" engineers don't see or have been beaten down into not seeing.
Since there seems to be an infinite amount of top students that still want to work at his companies I don't know if he will have trouble with personnel any time soon.
That, or he erratically makes decisions on a whim. Depends on how charitable your reading is.
> Elon generally does not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Did you see the news a few years ago when he bought a media company for $44 B and drove its profits into the ground?
What amazes me the most is that absolutely loyal cult following this guy has built. For decades Apple fans were mocked relentlessly for the adoration of Jobs. Now that cult has moved on over to Musk. Different people but same worship.
Maybe he meant in the short term, but I would expect a different kind of bluster if what you said was true.