It's the gateway problem to any of the ones he might find more interesting, and if he isn't willing to engage with that problem enough to satisfy investors, he should be “Chief Ivory Tower Visionary” and let someone else be CEO. Or, at least, get a COO and gracefully hand off boring operational questions to them.
He does desperately need a good COO though to make sure Tesla can actually deliver on its promises.
No, the CEO role is turning abstract vision into concrete strategy and communicating that strategy especially to investoes, because money people always want to hear things from the horse's mouth. It's a good thing for the CEO to be the visionary rather than channel someone else's vision, if they can do the rest of the job, but they can't be stuck in an ivory tower and think that addressing the path from present reality to distant vision is beneath their dignity.
That doesn't disqualify your statement, but it does highlight that - if that is correct, a COO is needed to put some sanity on the Ivory goals.
Then again, I was working for a startup. I guess that was a success (~25M funding before fizzling), as far as startups are concerned.. lol.
And how much of that image of a all knowing visionary CEO is just a manufactured image ?
And of course the image of an all-knowing visionary CEO is a manufactured image! It's not like people can actually predict the future. Rather, it's selection bias at work. Those CEOs whose vision doesn't resonate end up getting replaced, or their company goes bankrupt, and then they get written out of the history books. The thing is, you need to have a vision to get people excited and actually rowing in the same direction (nevermind the right direction), so without that you're dead in the water anyway.
My point is that left to their own devices, most of those engineers would rather toil away on their own startups or hobby projects, and that convincing them to all work on a tiny piece of a big project requires someone who's both charismatic and has a finger on the pulse of what problems can excite people. Musk has been uniquely successful in aligning people to work on big, hairy, audacious goals.
Everyone wants to sit and cross t’s and dot i’s because they are trained those matter more than net new
If those are the only conversations you have, only doing things you’re sure will be comfortable the economy and society stagnate
Economics are not the law of the land or reality. They’re a control mechanism for our output as a thinking, feeling, creative species
Let’s just make more banal phone apps I guess. The ones where the economics are well known to keep us safe
See stories about kids not playing outside or being allowed a quasi dangerous chemistry set
No one wants to be wrong so we take the safe route, which protects the status quo we all bitch about
Of all the 100% electric cars on road, he has two in the top 5
Who else has been pushing battery storage and solar systems that aren’t ugly af and simply made of old parts glued together in parallel?
All these other experts with experience can’t seem to hang with Johnny come lately.
Humans don’t have a history of being petty over others not being the same as them, or worse, outperforming them. We’d never cherry pick facts, and ignore the whole story. Why that would make us no better than animals
I watched Armadillo do that in 2005
>Of all the 100% electric cars on road, he has two in the top 5
And neither invented the category nor managed to turn a profit on it
>Who else has been pushing battery storage and solar systems that aren’t ugly af and simply made of old parts glued together in parallel?
For batteries: Panasonic, LG but also literally every battery company and chemistry department in the world.
For solar panels: also every chemistry department and dozens of companies, "China" as a vague term.
And these other experts: they're making money instead of losing it.
But even then this whole post buys into the idea that I some how have to disprove that Elon Musk does these things. He doesn't. Companies that Elon Musk is CEO of do those things.
I guarantee you John Carmack would not say he did anything close to what Musk did.
I get that Musk really enjoys thinking big and changing the world, and to such a person questions about capital expenditures might be dry and boring, but they're still important and need to be answered. If he doesn't want to do it then he should delegate.
Unless you believe that Musk is selling the ability for people to say they have a reservation. In which case there's no point to even bother building the cars in the first place.
If they could afford long term planning and investment, by definition they wouldnt be poor.