Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts Another week, another round of layoffs at Tesla to report, and this time engineers are caught up in the mix. It's not immediately clear how many people have been laid off at Tesla in this latest purge, which appears to have begun Sunday night. Nonetheless, a look at LinkedIn for posts about Tesla layoffs returns an extensive …
Sandy Munro went on an unhinged Youtube rant yesterday. Going full conspiracy nut railing against Wall Street, the FED, and the fake news media. He's done this numerous times in the past, probably when his wife asked how his Tesla stock is doing. I think he bought a large amount just before the Twitter thing cut the stock in half.
Remember, this is the same man that, whilst laying off workers in rounds of cuts, [re]petitioned his shareholders to get his $47 BILLION pay package, refused by those same shareholders on the first attempt.
He can't get his $47 billion unless he cuts his slave's peon's jobs, now can he??
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I can hope, but certainly not hold my breath in America the Stupid, that this all comes back to haunt him. That, in his next round of hiring for a project, anyone with both talent and a brain attached to it says, "No, thank you!" to working for him. I can really hope.
But Americans have become so accustomed to being treated as disposal wage slaves, I seriously doubt it will come to pass.
Yes, but there seems to be more organized resistance this time. Tesla's largest individual shareholder (outside of Musk) is against it and working to rally support to vote no. It is a lot harder to justify now given Tesla's more recent performance, and the optics of the layoffs certainly don't help.
Good. In no rational universe should a CEO get such an exorbitant pay package when they're having to lay off swathes of people for four weeks running, demand is slowing, you are coming off a massively embarrassing recall on your new flagship product which only has about 4K units sold, and you're forced to cut prices. All those things signal a massive failure on the part of upper management and, at the very least, they should be looking at their compensation remaining static, if not taking a haircut, or even joining those you laid off on the unemployment line. The one upside for Tesla investors is probably that things would have been a lot worse if Xitler weren't spending all his time over at Xitter. His being distracted lets the adults manage the day to day, though it seems like he's fired a lot of them, so he seems intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of whatever small victory there might have been in all this.
Even $46Million is an obscene amount for a bonus, so how do they justify it? And 1000 times that? Has he really earned it?
As Musk allegedly knows more about manufacturing then anyone else alive on Earth right now, unless he can prove conclusively that Tesla's are now the best engineered vehicles with peerless build quality, absolutely perfect fit and finish, unbeatable reliability and superior customer support, he should be lucky to keep his job.
"Technically, only a single shareholder filed suit against the pay package last time"
It's a class action suit and that requires a lead plaintiff which is Mr Tornetta. It's doesn't mean that just one shareholder took exception to being lied to so they'd vote for Elon's bonus plan. Unless the herd of lawyers were qualified to bring the case themselves (they had held voting stock in 2018 and relied on the information provided by the company to vote for Elon's compensation) they couldn't have brought the case as they'd have no standing. They are also asking for 5 shittons in fees for that case too so their motivation is really easy to see.
It's also why most people only stick around at any given company 1-2 years, because these days it's the only way you can get a promotion and/or raise. Then all that institutional knowledge walks out the door and everyone else is left scrambling trying to relearn everything that was lost.
"It's also why most people only stick around at any given company 1-2 years, because these days it's the only way you can get a promotion and/or raise. Then all that institutional knowledge walks out the door and everyone else is left scrambling trying to relearn everything that was lost."
This doesn't get taught in B-school. They also don't teach that the time it takes to train and get a new hire up to speed can take more than a year to amortize over the cost of somebody already in that same post.
One thing I've noticed is that things that wind up working get documented, but mistakes don't. If nobody has been around for more than a couple of years, mistakes that were made 3 years ago will likely be repeated creating a loss once again by going up the same blind alley. Keeping the old guy around just for those times when they can point out past mistakes can make them very good value for money.
One thing I've noticed is that things that wind up working get documented, but mistakes don't. If nobody has been around for more than a couple of years, mistakes that were made 3 years ago will likely be repeated creating a loss once again by going up the same blind alley.
If I only had more upvotes.. This should be in every MBA book ever, printed in fat, bold letters, and should be repeated every day before MBA class.
You wouldn’t. In this field you’d go to Honda, Toyota , Subaru, BMW, Volkswagen Group, Hyundai-KIA, Renault-Nissan, JLR, Mercedes, Stellantis and the Chinese etc and flog your domain knowledge and skills for a more secure life.
And not working for a twat who had given you a 5 year usefulness label, and that’s if you pass muster (who evaluated him ?).
"Surely the "entire Supercharger team" included at least one electrical engineer and maybe a few civil engineers? "
That's not even the tip of the iceberg. There must have been people that knew how to navigate all of the different local regulations for getting approvals, permits and inspections to build and expand stations. Somebody must have had the job of routing service technicians to locations with reported faults and making sure parts get to those techs not to mention supporting the field personnel that will often need to have overnight accommodations and access to money/payment cards for supplies. There would have been remote techs that could diagnose some issues remotely and have the ability to reboot chargers. Given Elon's complete aversion to planning, it wouldn't be surprising that many operations are being hamstrung because everybody that knew passcodes and were on the purchasing approved list to buy things from industrial suppliers had been sacked just like the Twitter office in SF that was left without anybody that knew how to work the card access system. I'd hate to be a tech in the field with a diesel van trying to fill up and finding out that the fuel card won't work since the bill hadn't been paid and there's nobody in the office assigned to keep on top of that anymore. At that point, I might spend my own money for just enough to get me home or to transportation I could take home and send a note in saying where the van is parked. Tesla service vans are often diesel Sprinters.
"Oh come on, it's not Elon who's demanding that amount, it's the independent board of directors' compensation committee whose careful analysis determined the value that would properly compensate his muskiness for all his xitting while at Tesla's helm."
Elon wrote the compensation plan himself, not the board and the board is in no way independent. It's made up of family, friends and people that owe their wealth to Elon for which they have become his puppets. Elon has said this in interviews. Robyn Denholm was supposed to have been brought in as an independent board chairman to ride herd on Elon. Elon quashed that story when asked about it directly in an interview. Now she's begging/telling shareholders to vote for Elon's compensation again and to move the company from Delaware to Austin, TX to keep in line with Elon's "Management by Tantrum" approach to running a large business. So much for neutrality. Her video appeal might even be contrary to US law on these sorts of things. It would also be dead simple to show up her lie about Elon not receiving any compensation for the last 6 years.
I think you missed the irony. We all know that US boards are not independent in the way they are, at least supposed to be in other countries, and normally rubber stamp whatever the CEO wants. Stock options are supposed to ensure such decisions align the incentives both of the management and the shareholders. However, since they can sell at any time, the incentive to take the money and run is usually too great to resist.
"Stock options are supposed to ensure such decisions align the incentives both of the management and the shareholders."
At one point Elon held around 22% of Tesla stock. He should have been hella incentivized just on that. Why would anyone think that to keep his attention should need another big pile of shares and that it would be good for a single person to have that big of a stick to swing?
The fans like to point out that the company has billions in cash (not that it appears to be cash really). If that were true, the need to scythe through the ranks over the course of a couple of weeks isn't necessary. Elon could show up for work (without a phone to be constantly xitting on) and have meetings with department heads to get a better feel for what is and isn't proper staffing levels. One might think that the position of CEO would be all about that sort of thing. It's not like they do any real work and it's better if they aren't anywhere near the people that do the real work (health and safety (Elon's)). I'm sure that in plenty of cases that regular attrition would take care of some over-staffing and telling people that their position is moving to XXX office will get many of them to decide to leave voluntarily if the new office is not a good place to be.
The comments I've seen have people believing that a staff of 500 in the Supercharger department is massive. If it's just the US, it would be 10 people per state. If some of those people oversee repairs, that can be a 24/7 task so the desk is manned all of the time which will be a bunch of people. If the department is coordinating things worldwide with offices in other countries doing the repair/maint things locally, 500 might be very thin. I've only worked with one multi-national and they need lots of people to make them go. Way more than anybody might think if they've only worked in smaller companies. Not only are there people doing the regular things, it takes even more people to connect all of those offices up and correlate the accounting. The maximum limit on the size of a large company has been expanded greatly via computers and modern communications and cheap travel.
Recently back from Scotland where I hired a very excellent Polestar 2 (a car I've hired multiple times before)
Also recently discovered that I could use the Tesla Superchargers.
1. They are quick! Up to 80KW for my car
2. They are cheaper than pretty much everywhere else
3. Sign up with the app was a doddle
What makes this stand out even further was the pish experience I had with every other charging provider:
Shell: Bin bags over the chargers
BP: Painted lines for the chargers but no chargers
Some other provider: CCS error
So I ended up charging at the airport for more than double what Tesla were charging
And yet, the petulant clown throws his toys and best engineers out of the (electric) pram
I hate to point out, but if something is being flogged at substantially less than the more established competitors are charging, then it likely means they are loss leading (i.e. pricing at below cost in order to get customers).
Musky whose not had his eye on the Tesla ball for a while now, has probably come back, seen the negative dollar sign next to the Superchargers budget item and decided to bin it without talking to anyone about WHY it's negative.
Get people used to using your chargers, get other auto makers using your connectors, and then you can slowly raise the price and be the dominant player. But patience (and some might argue sanity) have never been Musky's strong points...
"I hate to point out, but if something is being flogged at substantially less than the more established competitors are charging, then it likely means they are loss leading (i.e. pricing at below cost in order to get customers)."
While that is a possibility and I know nothing of Tesla specifically, that situation can also arise when the established competitors have a nice margin and don't want to give it up. There have been many companies who charge less than their competition either because they can provide it cheaper than their competition can or just that they are willing to take less profit than their competition currently does. Charging less does not mean they're inherently doing anything wrong, not that having a loss leader is automatically wrong either.
Prices went up massively in the energy crisis, and only Teslas have come back down substantially (Ionity kind of have second place). Others have actually continued to rise (Gridserve).
There is an element of cost to service debt having gone up, and the CPOs are making huge investments. But charging more than the equivalent for petrol and forming a little cartel where nobody drops their prices... It's not overall going to help EV adoption
This played out with CNG here in the '80s.
Govt incentives for CNG conversion. Private filling stations are built. CNG is less than 1/2 petrol price. A group starts buying up the stations in patches so there isn't competition locally
They raise prices until they are "somewhat" cheaper than petrol. High users are still saving money, but low users find it's not worth the trouble.
Eventually they killed it and there were only a few fleets than owned an on site filling station, and no public CNG at all.
EV charging looks similar - especially with one group getting the lions share of public charging subsidies.
""I hate to point out, but if something is being flogged at substantially less than the more established competitors are charging, then it likely means they are loss leading (i.e. pricing at below cost in order to get customers)."
If the big draw to a Tesla Supercharger is that it's more likely to find them working, why would they also charge less? You'd think they could charge the mean or even a bit more since that's still less expensive than going round the other charger site that always has faults.
Down the road from me petrol is $.06 less expensive and I'll stop there if I'm under a 1/4 tank, but it's not worth the time if I only need 5 gallons to top up since that's only a $.30 savings over the station near my home. When there isn't a compelling reason otherwise, I fill up when the tank is getting empty to amortize the time it takes to stop at the petrol station. The time to pay and get a receipt is the same regardless of how much petrol I get. If I have to queue for a pump, that's more non-dispensing time spent.
Ok, but as I’ve pointed out before, people are misunderstanding Musk. He’s not a capitalist, profit is *not* his motive. He’s somebody who wants to be a God, and remembered forever in history. That’s certainly not better, but it is different, you need to understand the consequences. In this particular case, the long-term goal of being the guy who owns a charger network is not going to get you remembered down the ages. Hence, it was always just a means to an end - supporting “the inventor and owner of the most amazingest electric self-driving car ever and saving the planet”. The second it starts to lose money, somebody else can do the boring bit. And by the way, he can see as well as everyone else: once Supercharger becomes dominant, regulatory are going to move in, all profit is going to be regulated away, and it’s double whammy because it’s also a utility. Musk plus regulatory requirements = he runs away screaming.
There’s an inherent contradiction here: Musk is *not running the company in the interests of the shareholders*, let alone the workforce. By the time this is all done in a decades time, Tesla shareholders will have lost every cent of their trillion dollars. Musk doesn’t care, never did, as long as he is remembered as “the inventor and owner of the most amazingest electric self-driving car ever and saving the planet”. Even if he in fact did not invent it.
And even, in fact, Tesla is no longer a thing at all, and the whole thing has just served to prod all the other car manufacturers into making electric cars which otherwise they would never have done. Remember, they’ve had six decades to make them, but they failed to make any serious attempt to do so, until they saw that they simply wouldn’t have a business unless they followed. The reason why they didn’t try previously is simple: legacy car manufacturers probably will not survive the transition. Tesla won’t win either, but who cares. Probably BYD or Geely or SAIC will win. Or someone else. But both VW and GM almost certainly will not survive past 2040’ish. And entirely possibly will need massive state rescue packages as soon as 2030, which will still be ineffective. Toyota and Mazda will also probably fail as car manufacturers, but are probably flexible enough, and sufficiently unencumbered by government “help”, that they can pivot into other manufacturing.
"And by the way, he can see as well as everyone else: once Supercharger becomes dominant, regulatory are going to move in, all profit is going to be regulated away,"
That's certainly a possibility and not too far fetched as there may still be locations where companies can't sell electricity by the kWh without registering and be regulated as a public utility. The counter argument is that petrol isn't handled that way and it would kill off a lot a petrol stations if they had to apply to raise prices, hold public hearings and get an approval from a government agency. If the wholesale price shot up suddenly, those stations would do better to stop selling fuel until the financials were right side up again. The cost to operate a charging station is also going to vary quite a lot. Maintenance near a moderately sized city won't be that bad, but needing to send technicians an service vehicles to small villages and remote motorway services facilities is much more. The prices charged will reflect that or it will mean that charging in a lower cost location needs to be artificially higher to compensate.
Charging is boring. Elon has promised exciting locations to charge, but they aren't materializing and if cars continue to charge faster, people won't have the time to spend more money on the amenities before the car is ready to go. Charging is still not a bad business to be in since Tesla has a sizeable footprint, name recognition and not too bad of a reputation for uptime. A large portion of what I do is "bread and butter" work. It pays the bills and keeps me going so I can take those much better jobs from time to time. Without the boring day to day stuff, I'd have to do something else since the big jobs are too uncertain to show up when bills are due.
"he whole thing has just served to prod all the other car manufacturers into making electric cars which otherwise they would never have done. Remember, they’ve had six decades to make them, but they failed to make any serious attempt to do so,"
You can't railroad until it's time to railroad. The battery technology is just barely there for EV's to have enough range for more than just an enthusiast. There were lots of DIY EV's being built before the Model S. They were home brew, had very limited range and could be rather rough-edged. GM never published what the EV-1 cost them, but it's assumed to have been substantial. It was done so they had something to show when California passed a law to require an maker selling cars in the state to sell a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles. Those EV's were not sold so they could get them back so they couldn't be sold, torn down and reveal how GM went about them. The law was repealed as it became obvious that even with pressure being applied, EV's were not viable at that time. And we are again seeing the same thing being tried. With continuing government subsidies, the market is being skewed and that's a problem.
The Ora R1 in China was selling for ~$10k (ish) and it was a very basic EV with enough cred to go on the motorway and had DC fast charging, a back up camera and not much else. That car may not meet standards in other parts of the world, but it does show that getting cost down can be done if that's the alternative to selling cars at all. Ora now has much more loaded cars that I'd never consider with price tags close to what everybody else is doing.
On top of everything else, the number of people with engineering knowledge is vanishingly small. The masses have grown up with petrol so they have a feel for mpg/kph and pretty much ignore range since the media doesn't prominently mention it in articles. Now people have to come to grips with kW vs. kWh and how mpg/kph is now miles or km per watt hour. Range is important, but those figures are overblown. A typical EV fully charged is about the range of my ICEV with half a tank of petrol. When I'm at 1/2 tank, I'm not even thinking about filling up the vast majority of the time. Having that every morning without going to a smelly petrol station works for me.
>And yet, the petulant clown throws his toys and best engineers out of the (electric) pram
There were warning signs of this years ago, when they were trying to bring the Model 3 into production. Musk was hell bent on having the entire assembly process robotised, but they couldn't do it. Tesla went to a leading German factory automation company and asked them to do it; they were told, "Nein, not possible". Musk bought that company for €6billion (if memory serves), so that he could tell them to do it; the answer remained "Nein, not possible". Eventually, with the situation reaching a desparate point, he caved in and they started manual assembly (with a large workforce).
And when people started doing teardown analyses of the first Model 3; oh boy, an object lesson in production inefficiency with the vast number of different fasteners used, the sheer number of panels used to make up (for example) the wheel well, and so on. That the company survived such a ruininously expensive launch cost and launch delay with an inefficient design speaks volumes of the lead they had, and just how vulnerable they would be if someone competent got their own act together.
Then there's Autopilot; a massive distraction from the business of establishing a permanent lead over other car manufacturers. This has been on of Musk's favourite things, but it's been a (deadly) exercise in wasting money for no permanent commercial gain, and looks like it could be a money sink.
Cybertruck? 'nuff said.
Ultimately, if one goes back far enough one arrives at the point in time when Toyota had a stake in Tesla, and were trying to bring Toyota common sense and quality to the business. And why not, it's not like Toyota are amateurs at design, production, quality and workforce management. But no; Musk reckoned he knew better. Toyota saw the way of things and left him to it. Spurning Toyota looks like it's going to cost Musk / Tesla dearly. The only way Tesla is ever going to survive in a crowded automotive manufacturing industry is to successfully and permanently displace another manufacturer from it. Without Musk and his habit of wasting money and time there would have been a better chance that they could have converted that 10 year lead into permanence. With Musk it's looking like the opposite is going to occur.
>Recently back from Scotland where I hired a very excellent Polestar 2 (a car I've hired multiple times before)
There's a lot of excellent EV's out there, but the market seems to be declining regardless of the build quality or the tech level. The expensive and dysfunctional charging network (other than Tesla's) is certainly part of it. It's feeling now like we've been through Round One with the early adopters, and that's not translating into a larger and enthusiastic Round Two. What a lot of people seem to be finding is that a car that costs tens of thousands new is worth nearly nothing too soon afterwards, and that's entirely down to perceptions (real or imagined) over battery life, made worse by the replacement cost of a battery.
To me this suggests that, long term, the sector of the EV market that's going to survive is small cheap cars (exactly what Tesla doesn't have), where the car is more financially disposable. Also at the lower end of the scale the replacement battery prices can be low enough to be more incidental, and less like pouring vast sums of money down a plug hole.
I think this varies country to country. In China for instance there is a large EV market thanks to very strong incentives (Good luck winning the lotto to get a care plate for your ICE vehicle in Beijing) and a lot of smaller cars with less range can thrive there. In China my understanding is that most of the middle class do not keep cars a long time already due in part to increased emissions testing demands the older a car gets? (That is what I was told by a Chinese driver anyway, extremely tenuous on that lol) In the US, range is a massive cause of fear for electric cars because Americans have proven ourselves to be incapable of building any infrastructure and we rely on cars to be able to do absolutely anything. I think in the US range and battery cyclability need to be improved before we see more widespread adoption. Small cheap cars are basically unsellable in the US because... you know how America is. I don't think battery prices will become incidental any time soon, but reliability could be improved.
Tesla acts like a silicon valley company and is speedrunning the last century of automotive manufacturing lessons. Their huge lead time, reputation (and in the US, their unique way of selling and maintaining cars without a third party) has enabled them to goof around making the least reliable cars on the market and making them terribly. I think that really is changing though, while EVs may not be replacing ICEs any day now like some people though, they have secured a place. Basically everyone is entering the market now and Tesla's lead is slipping. Tesla *does* need to change a lot about how it operates, and a restructuring may be part of that, but I do not imagine that is what is happening here. They should be bringing on people who know automotive standards and getting more organized, "Move fast and break things" doesn't work when your product is designed to move fast, and it could break things.
"I think in the US range and battery cyclability need to be improved before we see more widespread adoption."
Anybody that needs to track mileage for tax/business purposes already knows that range isn't an issue unless they are spending most of their day driving outside of big cities. Some of the "range anxiety" is people thinking they'd like to have a lifestyle where they hit the open road every weekend and drive 250 miles a day, get home at 3am Monday morning, take a quick nap and get to their office at 8am where they are fresh as a daisy and do the things that they do that will change the world. In reality, they need to spend the whole weekend doing laundry, cleaning, fishing out all of the trash that's blown into the garden and only drive 5 miles total all weekend with a trip for shopping and a round at the pub if they're lucky.
I know what I drive both in terms of averages and longest distances. I know how often I make long trips and how much time I spend on stops since I've wanted an EV for some time and I wanted to be sure what I really need to make one work. In the last 5 years there's been one trip I wanted to make but wound up not going where an EV would have been a major impediment. In that case, if I had an EV, I would have rented something like a Prius or another hybrid to get the best mileage.
It must be TV that's telling people about all of the things they must have and the sort of life they must live, or else. Since I don't watch TV, I'm missing that and I guess that makes me not understand why all of those things are so important. I do know that the strawberries are coming along nicely and I need to make sure I have plenty of lids for the canning jars when I start getting lots of fruit.
> Anybody that needs to track mileage for tax/business purposes already knows that range isn't an issue unless they are spending most of their day driving outside of big cities
My work commute is right on the range edge of most typical EV's , and in winter I would have to recharge at some point. My ICE can make 2 trips without refilling.
Thankfully WFH has reduced the need to do this trip but for many people it is a big deal
Most of these same people shoudl be asking the REAL question, why are they driving in the first place ?
How many millions of people are driving to an office to sit in front of a computer to send email they could have done from home ?
Or how many epople are flying over seas to pretend they are giving a powerpoint they coud have emailed from home ?
So many jobs are pure fakeness and stupiduty and a waste of everyones time, money and pollution.
Chinese EVs like BYD are showing really quite good build reliability. According to JD Power, they are easily topping BMW, Tesla and VW (both their electric and petrol version). Where the Chinese manufacturers have still something to learn, is the *look and feel perception* of interior build quality: whether the door makes a nice solid clunk sound when closing, interior plastics etc. This is a learning curve about *marketing* feeding back to interior design. But the actual mechanicals and electronics are solid. BYD residual value is holding up over time better than BMW, Tesla and VW. VW is *really* struggling, they’ve been producing *terrible* cars over the past ten years.
Tesla does a lot of thing quite well, mostly tech things. They aren't so good at building cars.
Most car manufacturers have been around on one form or another for about 100yr. There isa lot of learning in there even if they don't always apply it.
Even if Tesla is a fast learner it's still going to take time to learn how to put a car together well and efficiently.
Hence Tesla being technically very accomplished especially in the drivetrain yet full of stupid quality issues in other areas.
What a lot of people seem to be finding is that a car that costs tens of thousands new is worth nearly nothing too soon afterwards
Which is why our next car (which will be a BEV) won't be new. For example, I was looking at Ioniq 5's - brand new was (roughy) £50k. A 1-year old, top spec one with about 2000 miles was £29k.
Ouch.
Mind you, we tend to buy cars and then keep them for 10 years or so - to get to the tipping point where maintenance issues start to be more expensive than the car is worth. So the C-HR has about another 4 years to go :-)
Similarly, I think the supercharger network in the USA is definitely a lot more reliable than competing networks. I think much of that comes down to the simplicity of the machines: no screens, no chip readers and presumably a much simpler set of software (I have seen both crashed windows and linux boxes on one network near me?) A lot of these networks seem kludged together from whatever parts they can get, at least from the outside the Tesla network appears very standard. In theory the experience at another charging brand could be better: no app, just tap your card or apple pay and you are good to go... but I think it is rare for me to see a charging station without at least one broken charger... Of course I cannot use Tesla's chargers with my vehicle, so I am stuck.
I would not describe them as fast though, pretty average. Old superchargers output up to 100 kW, new ones 250 kW. the slowest available chargers I have used are about 150 kW, and most new ones can output 350. Doesn't make a difference for most folks though, my car only accepts ~200 even when low and under best conditions, and on a cold day I may get below 70.
Admittedly I'm out a fair bit on a limb here, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Tesla Superchargers lack some of the basic safety functions of other standards? I want to say I remember seeing somewhere that the supercharger tries to pull a lot more current over only like 2 prongs, no ground/earth, but I could be conflating some things. So, they may be faster, but they're also going to be far more likely to be a safety hazard.
The way you get more energy into a car faster is to charge at a higher *voltage*, not just a higher current. Some models (Porsche?) reconnect the battery units in series to accomplish this. The non-Tesla high speed chargers also only use two pins for high voltage charging. The car is sitting on rubber tires and the whole system "floats" electrically. And it is the car that controls the charge rate, through communications back over the small control pins.
I smell another EEOC lawsuit coming. What do you want to bet black (and generally non-white) workers are disproportionately not "pass[ing] muster"? I'd put the odds somewhere between Extremely Likely and All But Certain.
Once again: As CEO the buck stops with you for everything that happens in the company. If shit hits the fan, maybe it's because you spend all your time being an alt-right troll on Xitter, or propositioning (white) women in your company to squirt a turkey baster of your cum in them and have your bastard* child. If you need to conduct regular pogroms that is a sign of failed leadership. Any board of directors actually doing their job^ would be starting the search for a new CEO about now, not contemplating giving them the largest pay package of any top executive in the country (world?).
* I mean that in the sense of a child born out of wedlock, though they may grow up to be a bastard in the sense of their personality given who half their genetics came from
^ Serious question: Doesn't the SEC have the authority to say that a board of directors is just a rubber stamp for the CEO and force the company to elect new board members? If not, it should.
Regarding your last question: the SEC assumes shareholders, who are the owners, are happy unless they say otherwise. This is, of course, somewhat shortsighted as it opens the door to the kind of class action suits that can ruin companies. This could be avoided more often with better governance.
It takes an amazing person to craft a world-beating electric car, a freaking space company, and other marvels out of thin air. (a GD personal flamethrower??) But intelligence doesn't equal wisdom, and this is being demonstrated weekly as of late. I used to frankly think Mr. Musk was brilliant but not sure what his worldview is these days and I'm not personally able to fathom it. He seems like he's emerged as a spoiled child that has never hands-on run a business before and has no idea how to act or react, especially when it comes to people. He seems like Trelane in Star Trek TOS these days IMO. (sorry for consecutive acronyms) He has world-changing influence but he's getting caught up in the most superficial, short-sighted BS. Introspection anyone? Unfortunately having a fire hose of money to throw at a problem masks many fundamental issues. So many of us are on 'the spectrum' I'm sure, myself included, but I don't get what he's going for here or how his perceptions could have gotten so skewed. (again IMO) Gawd, what he's done to Twitter (X) is like someone deciding the Mona Lisa would look better in plaid. (not a Tesla reference)
As someone on their 3rd. "career" and entering their August years, I've seen many companies fire a lot of core talent for many reasons, most of them trumped-up and myopic. You will never get them back and you'll rarely get the same caliber of people as you had when you notice you have people barely capable of making a salad at your salad bar, especially the long-gone people that believed in "the cause" and would walk through fire for you. You'll find yourself "surrounded by strangers you thought were your friends" to badly quote Bob Seger. Engineers as a lot are sane, gentle, practical people looking for a place to work their magic without constant upheavals and pointless politics, especially Gen X and Y folks. And Musk is treating them like a whore that tried to steal his wallet. Sorry for the rant, but this sort of thing disgusts me. I feel like many companies that failed, to the chagrin and ruin of good people, could have been saved with a little more applied common sense and counting to ten instead of knee-jerk reactions to their short-term stock price, at least where the top brass weren't just dishonest scum out for themselves like Enron.
I'm with you part of the way: Musk showed courage and conviction when investing in the companies he did. This meant he could pay for good management to deal with the day to day stuff and he could apply the Silicon Valley methods to ensuring a continuing supply of cheap capital to either pay for problems to go away, or, if this wasn't possible, to buy the competition. His wheeling and dealing should in no way detract from the great work done by employees at Tesla and SpaceX but the facts are that the emissions credits for Tesla and the deal with NASA made the financials look much better than the fundamentals, allowing the companies to continue to trade at very high CAPE ratios.
And he didn't always get it right, yes Twitter was the poster child of a bad deal done by an arrogant idiot at the wrong time, but SolarCity was really the deal that pushed debt beyond a safe level, though this didn't become apparent until interest rates started to normalise. And it's the prospect of having to refinance that debt that is going to cause Tesla and a heap of other companies a whole lot of problems. Those that survive will have done so because their business models are sound but we've had 15 years of companies effectively buying customers with "stolen savings" as a consequence of artificially low interest rates. Tesla is now an established brand with some extremely loyal customers so it will probably survive in some form.
Wow he didnt do any of the things you mentioned....
Flamethrowers have been around for thousands of years, a 15 year old could make one if they really wanted too.
Ive also got news for you, Elon didnt design/engineer anything at spaceX, he couldnt even get a job there if he applied under a psuedo name. I suppose you also believe that Hitler designed the V2, or that Nikita designed Sputnik.
In the US, other car companies are not adopting Tesla's standard, they are adopting a new SAE standard (J3400) for which Tesla has donated their plug and the protocol comes from the CCS standard. Some companies had "partnered" with Tesla to gain access to the Supercharger network (Tesla's trademark for DC fast chargers). There's a few issues. The cable on Supercharger stands are short and will only reach ports on the left rear or right front of an EV if it isn't too far back or a car will need to park one space over, blocking two spaces, for the cord to reach. Users will have to sign up for an account with Tesla and share all of their information with them. The Superchargers read the VIN of the car and handle identification and billing that way. I'm sure spouses are very happy to know exactly where and when a car has been charged and could be getting a monthly statement on that. The filth are really happy to be able to harvest lists like that. Tesla will be able to sell travel information to more of their "partners". The downside is if the card you have tied to your account is cancelled/expires/breaks for some reason, there's no way to use another payment method at the charger since there is no payment terminal and no associated retail location. This is a big downside to many chargers. It would be nice to see chargers at many locations affiliated with a retail shop where you could pay with cash if all else fails.
he has certainly got the bit where sending chaps over the top to be cut down by the machine guns will prepare for the big push, off pat.
The electrical and mechanical engineers (and I dare say other specialists) that have immersed themselves in the development of a contemporary EV aren't exactly an easily replaceable item. Once gone. and unlike sir Orfeo, they aren't going to look back into this Musk Hell.
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