Comment by djyaz1200 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djyaz1200 | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge opportunity for shareholders to get paid $56B to fire Musk and turn around the company.

Huge swaths of ideal Tesla buyers are turned off by his behavior. He has polarized the brand.

I can't deny his genius or all he has achieved. I own a Tesla I bought after the X purchase. It's the best car I've ever owned by a wide margin, and notably, the Model Y is the best-selling car on earth.

That said, I am the CEO of a company, and I have no personal social media presence; I am a registered independent, and I work to be the reason clients choose us, or at least not be the reason they don't. That's why so many CEOs are bland.

When you run any company the goal is to let the products and the people behind it shine. This is fundamentally opposed to Musk's rockstar me me me approach. Granted, his approach was great initially, but to cross the chasm, Tesla needs to appeal to everyone.

His personality aside, Tesla shareholders might come to the conclusion that he has made a number of bad decisions that hurt the company’s prospects.

To name a few: the Cybertruck (not being in the pickup truck market per se, but the product decisions that Musk made), axing the Model 2 and leaving the small car market to the competition, the Tesla Semi which is vapourware while competitors actually sell electric commercial trucks, the failure to bring self-driving cars to market (but selling them anyway, killing people in the process), the failure to develop batteries that are competitive with what BYD and CATL have, the failure to renew its small lineup of aging models, stupid side shows like these Tesla robots etc.

Thus far, Tesla’s rapid growth and its great profit margin were reason enough to ignore all of the aforementioned. That’s no longer the case. Tesla shareholders should oust Musk, giving him more time to be a full-time Twitter troll.

When all is said and done I predict that Cybertruck will be seen as more expensive in the form of opportunity cost than of direct cost. Not updating a mainstream EV to further dominate that market and not building out the charging network to make Tesla synonymous with convenient reliable charging will end up costing more than if all Cybertrucks end up being scrapped.

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