Apple coasted on for a long time under Sculley as well, but in the long run, they stagnated and almost went out of business. After Jobs came back and restructured everything, they went on to become the most valuable public company in the world. It's premature to say that Apple is fine without Jobs, companies have a lot of inertia, for better or for worse.

Apple is a bad example, since it literally almost failed after they ousted Jobs... And yeah, Musk is one of very few who created major changes in several industries, and 7 billion people didn't. Removing Musk now, when Tesla is on a brink of becoming profitable can create an avalanche of bad things that will destroy it. I agree though, that tweet was very unfortunate, really doesn't seem like clever thing to do if you can't back it up.

I think the primary fear is that he’d be replaced with a visionless drone and the company would cease to push any kind of bar, sliding into the same sort of profitable stagnancy found at every other American carmaker.

The impact would be reduced now that the big guys are finally starting to take full electric seriously, but the impact would still be there. Without Tesla’s constant pressure I could see full BEV adoption being delayed by 5 years or more.

There's already a solution for what you're describing.

She's running SpaceX. They're already doing it there.

You make Musk the product lead or equivalent, chief visionary. The CEO is a specialist focused on operations, manufacturing. You don't need the CEO to be the chief visionary so long as you have Musk in the company. There's no good reason he needs to be overseeing every detail of manufacturing, there are people far better at that than he is.

I get that argument, but I'm pretty sure that a stagnant Tesla still ships the Semi, Model Y, the new Pickup Truck, that little something else that keeps getting whispered about, and maybe even the Roadster. Maybe the timeframes for each elongate by a few years, but there is still a pretty clear pathway to success.

And the cool thing? Elon Musk could join a competitor, grow them over 6 years, and leverage their sales to regain control of the business. That last bit is mostly joking, but good on you if you get history that it references.