Photo by The New York Times
Our top story last week concerned Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet about taking the company private and my assessment was that it would solve all the company’s problems. I should have qualified that a little bit in that it would solve all the problems except the one sitting in the company’s fanciest chair - Elon himself. While it’s a great move for him to continue to exert more control over the company he founded, his control is pretty much the last thing the company needs to be successful. Which makes it all the more strange that he gave a long, winding interview to the New York Times this week where he was described as both laughing and crying and where he invited anyone to take over the company if they thought they were better suited to do the job. Let’s review the qualifications for how some other CEO might do something different then.
First, another CEO probably wouldn’t work 120 hours a week, neglecting his kids and setting an unhealthy and unreasonable example for the working environment for his colleagues. They probably shouldn’t take Ambien in order to fall asleep or go on drug-induced social media rants as some investors suspect he’s doing instead of sleeping.
Second, a replacement CEO might consider consulting board members, attorneys, accountants or any other department before casually tweeting out a threat to buy out the company, which Musk did to the shock of his Board of Directors and to the displeasure of shareholders and the SEC. Not only has the company been subpoenaed for information related to the claims made in the tweet, there have also now been four lawsuits seeking class action status against Musk and Tesla because of the instability rocking the company’s stock price in the wake of the tweet. As it turns out, when you tweet out financially relevant information saying “funding secured,” you actually really must have your funding secured instead of only having some vague interest from a shady Saudi fund that, according to multiple reports, is not capable of financing the funding that you are meant to have secured.
Finally, another CEO might focus less on investors short selling stock and more on the actual vehicles being produced to ensure that company is succeeding and fulfilling the promises the CEO sets for it. CNBC reports that Model 3 production is humming along at more than 5,000 units a week, which is the benchmark Musk set for the company, but Carscoops also reported that a $78,000 Model 3 was sent to a buyer kitted with three white door trim panels and one brown one. It seems unlikely that the buyer would’ve specified something like that and for nearly $80,000, you might hope that a company could look at its finished product to ensure that all the boxes were ticked before shipping it off to a buyer. There were multiple occasions during the production and shipment process where this problem might’ve been spotted but wasn’t, and a CEO should make it a priority to ensure that quality control on luxury vehicles is a little tighter than that.
So the invitation stands, if you think you can do a better job than Elon Musk, he’ll hand you the keys himself. Unless, of course, it turns out this is another one of those promises he come up just a bit short on.
Authored by
Devlin Riggs