Is It Possible to Replace Elon Musk as CEO of Tesla?

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In summary, Tesla is facing some major financial challenges, and some people are concerned about the company's future.
  • #71
cronxeh said:
Currently there are 9 members, adding 2 more would make it a very ineffective board.

That is different than whagt you said before:

cronxeh said:
dding 2 more would make it the most useless, divergent board in history of corporations.

You do know that the average number of board members in the S&P 500 is 10.8?
 
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  • #73
He's not the messiah, he's just a naughty boy.
 
  • #74
Greg Bernhardt said:
Musk out as chairman but stays on as CEO.

That's probably the best outcome he could have hoped for.
 
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  • #75
In the September 28th issue of The Atlantic, Ian Bogost wrote an article, Elon Musk Is His Own Worst Enemy.

It includes this gem:

According to documents described in the complaint, Tesla’s board and investor-relations team knew nothing about the matter before Musk had announced it. (The marijuana joke, however, was apparently real: Musk rounded up a 20 percent price-per-share premium to $420 because his girlfriend, the singer Grimes, “would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price.”)
 
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  • #76
He needs to get his act together, maybe being fired from Tesla would the best thing that could happen to him.
 
  • #78
nsaspook said:
Let it go guy.
Not his style to let things go...
 
  • #79
This was phenomenally stupid. Part of the consent agreement was "no more unvetted tweets" - and a couple of days later, we not only have an unvetted tweet, but one where Musk largely admits that the original motivation was to punish short sellers. Not only is he risking five years in the big house for this, he has a billion-dollar investor lawsuit on his hands where he pretty much said "Yup. That's what I did."
 
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  • #80
Well... This whole story more and more sounds like a rage quit.
 
  • #81
Vanadium 50 said:
This was phenomenally stupid. Part of the consent agreement was "no more unvetted tweets" - and a couple of days later, we not only have an unvetted tweet, but one where Musk largely admits that the original motivation was to punish short sellers. Not only is he risking five years in the big house for this, he has a billion-dollar investor lawsuit on his hands where he pretty much said "Yup. That's what I did."
Where did he say that?

The vetting of tweets has 90 days to be implemented:
The proposed settlement, should it be approved, would require Tesla to "establish a new committee of independent directors and put in place additional controls and procedures to oversee Musk's communications." That oversight would only take effect 90 days after the settlement takes effect.
 
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  • #82
mfb said:
The vetting of tweets has 90 days to be implemented

You got me. That moves it from "phenomenally stupid" to merely "extremely stupid".
 
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  • #83
mfb said:
Where did he say that?
He didn't come right out and say it, he just implied that the SEC was successfully defending short sellers from his attacks.

I'd call this merely an unmodified "stupid" because I think the issue is officially closed...but then Musk is forcing us to re-calibrate our grades of "stupid" with respect to CEO conduct.
 
  • #84
So I have followed Musk's current actions and I have read his biography.
I really like and admire that man. He is a genius, great at engineering and product design. And he is a visionary that aims to build a better future (most important point).
However, he is bad with social stuff and not a good CEO. From an economic perspective, maybe he should step down as Tesla's CEO. On the other hand, without Musk, nobody would know Tesla today. He is still the driving power behind that company (aside from the money of the investors, ofc^^ ).

Still, a man who helps driving the digitalisation (Paypal), who helps revolutionizing the space industry (SpaceX), who improves the world's ecology (Tesla, Solar City), who aims to decrease the cost and time for traveling large distances (Hyperloop), who works on projects that would lead to cities with less traffic and pollution (Boring Company)... a guy who invests his millons of dollars he had just earned via selling his Paypal parts into funding a freaking space company. You got to love that guy!
 
  • #85
SchroedingersLion said:
I really like and admire that man. He is a genius, great at engineering and product design. And he is a visionary that aims to build a better future (most important point).
Besides visionary and scientist, I hate to point out the obvious that he's also a businessman*. In a sense, perhaps, it's good that he got a little landed ... . But, hey, life[business&science] goes on! ...

* despite
 
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  • #86
You guys need to stop calling Musk an engineer or a scientist. He is neither. He is the introverted, slightly autistic version of Bill Nye, with ability to sell the idea to the right people at the right time. Some of the engineering ideas he has like digging tunnels are absolutely ridiculous. I would still rather hang out with him than 99.99999% of people in the world.
 
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  • #87
cronxeh said:
I would still rather hang out with him than 99.99999% of people in the world.

So there are roughly 7000 people you'd rather hang out with than Elon? This might hurt his feelings... o0)
 
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  • #90
cronxeh said:
Some of the engineering ideas he has like digging tunnels are absolutely ridiculous.
Some of the engineering ideas he has like privately developing an orbital rocket are absolutely ridiculous.
Some of the engineering ideas he has like reusing rockets are absolutely ridiculous.
- many aerospace experts, before SpaceX did it
 
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  • #91
Digging tunnels under urban landscape has been proven to be an expensive, complex proposition.

Space is easy - its empty. And while we are on the subject of space, both NASA and SpaceX are still using chemical rockets to go places, so we are back to amateur hour. Just because Musk is applying common sense to achieve something that should've been done 50+ years ago, does not make him an exceptional human being. His team of engineers merely meets the standard.

Name at least 1 major scientific breakthrough that happened as a result of work done on the international space station, which cost 150 Billion so far?
 
  • #92
Starting a profitable car company is easy too. Not illegally manipulating stock market valuations is hard though. He'll get it one day though if he keeps practicing. I have faith.
 
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  • #93
cronxeh said:
You guys need to stop calling Musk an engineer or a scientist. He is neither. He is the introverted, slightly autistic version of Bill Nye, with ability to sell the idea to the right people at the right time. Some of the engineering ideas he has like digging tunnels are absolutely ridiculous.
I think you are being too generous. He seems like more a Steve Jobs to me: Brilliant visionary*, terrible person, barely clinging to his sanity, who died in part due to his rejection of modern technology. This is the type of guy we should follow to an enlightened future?

I just don't get the whole digital messiah thing.

*Not all visions are good.
 
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  • #94
cronxeh said:
Digging tunnels under urban landscape has been proven to be an expensive, complex proposition.
Launching rockets to space has been proven to be an expensive, complex proposition. Until someone made it much cheaper.
cronxeh said:
Space is easy - its empty.
I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an argument.
cronxeh said:
And while we are on the subject of space, both NASA and SpaceX are still using chemical rockets to go places, so we are back to amateur hour.
In other words: The old technology could be improved a lot. That's what the Boring Company plans to do as well.
cronxeh said:
Name at least 1 major scientific breakthrough that happened as a result of work done on the international space station, which cost 150 Billion so far?
Can we stay on topic here? The huge ROI of NASA's investments has been discussed in various other threads.
 
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  • #95
He is the main character in that company so it is not such a good idea to fire him.
 
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  • #96
russ_watters said:
I think you are being too generous. He seems like more a Steve Jobs to me: Brilliant visionary*, terrible person, barely clinging to his sanity, who died in part due to his rejection of modern technology. This is the type of guy we should follow to an enlightened future?

I just don't get the whole digital messiah thing.

*Not all visions are good.

I see where that post is coming from, but even if he has a lot of fans and people who exagerate about his personal qualities and inventions, that certainly doesn't make him a terrible man "barely clinging to his sanity". I don't have any tendency to follow celebrities, and I'm not an Elon Musk fan, but even I can see that his huge following doesn't come out of nowhere: he built several mega-cap companies, bringing many innovations in each, in part due to his tremendous amount of knowledge in each one of those fields. Is he a messiah? No, but let's not go to the other extreme and ignore what he has done just because of the attention he's drawn to himself.
 
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  • #97
Anyone know whose idea it was to build "the tent"?

3 weeks to build, and it upped productivity by 50%.


60 Minutes / Published on Dec 9, 2018​
 
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  • #98
Vanadium 50 said:
There's one relevant atypicality here. (Is that a word?) The SEC could find that Musk's recent tweets were an attempt at market manipulation and hold that he's ineligible to serve as an officer or director of a publicly traded corporation.
And actions like his recent " Joint Venture" make him look even more atypical. He needs to show he can produce so he can convince people he is an eccentric and not a nut.
 
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  • #99
Looks like Tesla does produce. 53,000 Model 3 is 4100 per week on average, a bit short of the goal of 5000, but https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-production-125000/ - possible that they reached that goal by now.
And SpaceX delivers stuff to orbit routinely already.
 
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  • #101
SpaceX and Tesla were called the wacky side 10 years ago.

The first Falcon 1 flight to reach orbit was September 2008, quite close to 10 years. Musk became CEO of Tesla in October 2008, at a time where Tesla had delivered fewer than 150 cars.
 
  • #102
mfb said:
Looks like Tesla does produce. 53,000 Model 3 is 4100 per week on average, a bit short of the goal of 5000, but https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-production-125000/ - possible that they reached that goal by now.

mfb said:
... Tesla [was] called the wacky side 10 years ago...

Musk became CEO of Tesla in October 2008, at a time where Tesla had delivered fewer than 150 cars.
Producing cars is relatively easy when people give you $15 billion. A lot of what produced some of Musk's recent wacky behavior was him running himself into the ground to meet that production target because of the need to produce the primary output of any company: profit. According to him, Tesla was weeks away from bankruptcy.

SpaceX is privately held, so all that applies, but we know less about where they stand: we know very little about their finances except that they need more money from investors. So beyond that it is hard to know how healthy they are

Guys like him are a necessary* double-edged sword: you need to be bold and take big risks to get a big payoffs, but that makes the failures more spectacular as well. Some succeed at business, some fail, some go insane, some go to jail and some die (or a combination thereof).

*This can be debated. Most business people don't have such "quirks" and some beat the "quirky" ones at the same game. E.G., Apple/Jobs were inherently "quirkier" and thus more ambitious than MS, but MS "won" the PC industry (if not the expansion into cell phones).
 
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  • #103
mfb said:
Looks like Tesla does produce. 53,000 Model 3 is 4100 per week on average, a bit short of the goal of 5000, but https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-production-125000/ - possible that they reached that goal by now.
And SpaceX delivers stuff to orbit routinely already.
Undeniable facts, ... writting history, even as we speak! ... (And, no matter what, Elon Musk is beyond doubt part of it!)
 
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  • #104
I concur with N.D.T's opinion:


Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elon Musk Is The Most Important Person Alive Today​
 
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  • #105
OmCheeto said:
I concur with N.D.T's opinion:


Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elon Musk Is The Most Important Person Alive Today​

Good point, however Software and Advanced Computers are equally as important, otherwise he/we wouldn't be able to achieve it! ...
 
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