It's been 2 years since Jérôme Guillen has become Tesla's President of Automotive. You wouldn't know.
Based on what objective metric?
Let me be clear. I own a Model 3, and I love it. I also own Tesla stock. And I cheer when their sales go up.
My criticism is from wanting them to be better. They've got all the really difficult stuff right (the car is amazing, comfortable, and we all love it). It's the easy stuff that's "boring grown up stuff of running a business" where they need a lot of help.
SpaceX has that and they have Gwynne. So do pretty much all other car manufactures, specifically with electric cars.
Having great service while scaling is insanely difficult. Just having some other influentual manager is not gone magically solve that incredibly difficult problem.
Overall the company has been anything but messy, rather they have been executing pretty well, better then most people expected.
I don’t know what people expected but I expect them to miss deadlines with the harder stuff where they’re trailblazers (like autopilot).
But building a reliable car is largely a solved problem. Even Elon has admitted they over engineered the manufacturing before they had to just use more people.
They continue to innovate and have been strategically investing in becoming a battery provider and building and expanding factories in all the important markets.
And building EV at good margin is defiantly not a solved problem.
There's no doubt that Elon is gifted from the engineering and vision side. But Gwynne is the one that actually (paraphrasing her words) turns his seemingly crazy vision into an actual project with milestones and how to get there. I think they complement each other really well.
You can see how much of a mess Tesla is, without having someone like that to complement Elon's skills. SpaceX (also because of the domain) seems like it is run by a grownup.
Tesla on the other hand seems like it's run by a bunch of people who excel at the tough engineering challenges (contrast the cars themselves with the service experience), but have less interest in the easier stuff (running a well stocked service center). Look at the way they confusingly change pricing so often.
Tesla needs an Elon Musk but they badly need a Gwynne Shotwell.