The reason the original CEO was replaced by a guy and another guy and finally Musk is because the cost of Roadster parts was higher than the price of Roadster.
What Tesla needed was someone who is un-naturally good operator: someone who can drive the costs down, motivate the employees to deliver great product at a profit.
That was Musk.
And if you think that's just a given and any CEO can do it: currently Lucid and Rivian are still loosing tons of money on their cars. So does Ford and GM. Not to mention Fisker and few others who went bankrupt in the process.
You can do apples-to-apples comparison of execution of Musk vs. CEO of Lucid or Rivian by looking at "money burn at year N" of company's existence. Lucid and Rivian are still accumulating "money burn".
> The reason the original CEO was replaced by a guy and another guy and finally Musk is because the cost of Roadster parts was higher than the price of Roadster.
Interesting, I had not heard about that aspect.
That ability to see and remove unnecessary costs matches what Musk managed with SpaceX, so I can believe he also has that skillset; but more recently with Tesla (and continuously with Twitter) it's felt like he saw the costs and rejected the idea that any of those things might have value.
This would still make him the wrong person going forward, but for different reasons.
One way in which I think he would continue to bring value to Tesla, is that he can be an excellent showman (which goes with selling smoke and mirrors until the reality catches up), and this makes Tesla models far more iconic than many other more forgettable modern cars. For example, although everything about the Cybertruck screams "unsafe" to me, it also looks cool and nobody's going to confuse it for a different brand of truck.
What Tesla needed was someone who is un-naturally good operator: someone who can drive the costs down, motivate the employees to deliver great product at a profit.
That was Musk.
And if you think that's just a given and any CEO can do it: currently Lucid and Rivian are still loosing tons of money on their cars. So does Ford and GM. Not to mention Fisker and few others who went bankrupt in the process.
You can do apples-to-apples comparison of execution of Musk vs. CEO of Lucid or Rivian by looking at "money burn at year N" of company's existence. Lucid and Rivian are still accumulating "money burn".