Tesla, or what might be described as the Tesla group of companies, now employ nearly 100,000 people worldwide.
But in the Tesla universe only one name counts: Elon Musk. In recent days Musk’s activities have come to dominate the news so completely even Vladimir Putin has had a hard time getting attention from the global media with his offer to buy social media platform Twitter for $43 billion.
The Twitter board has apparently moved to block Musk’s acquisition bid with a poison pill, setting the stage for what could be an old fashioned 1980s takeover battle.
Bid comes as Tesla faces challenges
But does Musk really want to do that when Tesla the electric car company and SpaceX are facing critical issues?
Musk loves to troll people on Twitter and his range of targets is fairly broad. Among them are the Securities and Exchange Commission, President Joe Biden, Rivian, General Motors, not to mention the United Auto Workers, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and anyone who doubts the efficacy of his ability to deliver a self-driving car capable of going from San Francisco and New York — so maybe he’s merely looking for more bandwidth.
While the legion of fans relishes Musk as a troll, his own favored persona seems to be the hard driving boss who makes the entire enterprise move forward with his energy, persistence and capacity for solving an infinite array of problems. It is this identity, even if requires sleeping on the factory floor, as he did in Fremont, California to get Tesla’s EV assembly line moving, that endows the Musk legend with much of its appeal and has been a subtle but important part of the Tesla sales pitch.
With a bit a luck and trial and error and some on-the-job training, Musk has built an organization capable of building cars and tackling very complicated technical problems. His self-driving vehicle unit is seemingly well ahead of the competition, and his team of software engineers is credited with figuring out clever ways to get around the semiconductor shortage.
Court battles hobble company
The Tesla CEO also has hired not merely platoons but battalions of lawyers to throw into his growing fights with regulators, disgruntled employees, consumers, disgruntled investors and unions. Only last week, Tesla lawyers were in court on the losing end of a lawsuit involving Musk’s use of Twitter in misleading tweet storm about the financial scheme to take Tesla private in 2018.
The lawyers did succeed in getting a $137 million verdict against Tesla in a case where a Black employee successfully argued that Tesla’s supervisors failed to deal with a racially hostile work environment reduced. Tesla will now only have to pay $15 million in damages.
But Musk appears to have tempered his expectation as he ramped up new gigafactories near Austin, Texas and Berlin, which have now have professional, if anonymous, management teams in place to make sure the assembly lines get cranking.
Cybertruck postponed
In early February, Musk said during a conference call Tesla will concentrate on expanding production from its existing factories rather than bringing out new products such as the Cybertruck to market in 2022.
“It was a breakthrough year for Tesla and for electric vehicles, generally,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, notes during a conference call with analysts and investors following the release of the company’s financial report for 2021. For the full year, Tesla says it delivered nearly 1 million vehicles, 936,172 to be exact, as revenue increased 65% and net income grew by 760 percent.
Musk added during the same call he expects Tesla’s production to increase by 50% even though its new factories in Austin, Texas and in Brandenburg, Germany, just outside Berlin, are going through the launch phase and are not at full speed yet. The company expect to “squeeze out” more vehicles from its plant in Fremont, California and Shanghai, he said.
Work on other products such as $25,000 electric vehicle to fill out the Tesla product portfolio and Tesla robot that could be used to move material in the company’s manufacturing plant on hold for now, Musk said during a recent TEDTalk interview.
The delayed products, however, are very much on Musk’s mind as late as he told crowds at the grand opening of the Austin gigafactory — dubbed the Cyber Rodeo — the Cybertruck will arrive in early 2023, according to press accounts, and the robot is still a big part of Tesla’s future plans.
Big company has issues to address
Tesla, the company or group of companies, has been around for nearly 20 years, and it has developed its own in-house talent in areas such as finance and accounting and even purchasing where it has succeeded in maintaining good relations with outside suppliers, which by nature can be a twitchy lot if they are not handled with care.
As for SpaceX, Musk’s other big venture, it lost 40 satellites it was paid to launch, in a geomagnetic solar storm this past February, and the company’s is still literally dealing with the fallout. The failure also dealt a blow to Musk “Rocket Man” persona.
Musk’s $43 billion bid for Twitter certainly has generated a lot of heat, given that in a democratic society it appears unseemly for the world’s richest man to buy up one of the world’s largest microphones and treat it as a private plaything.
Just as importantly, if one checks any of the social media forums, it seems his desire to purchase the platform has generated divisiveness among shareholders. Some believe the company should take the $54.20 a share offer and run — some claiming the board is violating its fiduciary responsibilities if it doesn’t — while others claiming that this isn’t the best offer and they should hold out for something better.
As previously mentioned, the board enacted a poison pill option as of publication.
However, it could be another of Musk’s passing whims, which this time is magnified by the enormous wealth he has gained from the success of the Tesla companies, where the pace of innovation may be slowing just as the company is facing some genuine competition, which he can’t really fight on Twitter.
It takes a South African to realize the importance of Freedom of Speech in America (and the rest of the world).
You’re referring to the guy who has repeatedly taken steps against free speech? His PR team would attack anything critical, no matter how accurate. Then Musk decided he wanted no PR team nor any vehicles for review. Shall I continue? Like much what of what he does, this move is about him, not about free speech.
Paul E.