Electric Vehicles discussion (was NJ bans Tesla dealerships)

i don’t trust the company because of Elon. He lies about everything.

 

I’m glad the VW scandal was raised

Its a good example of why weak corporate governance is dumb and bad. And it’s good there were heavy consequences.

 

@Yoshou

It's interesting that we've known most of this story for a while, but big media are only just starting to report it properly. Gift WAPO article

This, which we talked of at the time, is a blatant governance failure and indicates how conflicted the CEO really is.

 

So my wife is headed for a battery conference (in the Floridian Democratic Republic of DeSantistan - I advised her not to go in case she gets arrested for speaking out of turn and reassigned to a role of handmaid, but she's gotta look out for her career). One of her former coworkers from PENA (Panasonic battery manufacturing at the Tesla gigafactory in Reno) came over for dinner - he's also headed to the conference, transiting through SFO from China.

They got to talking about how Elon protects his position. He actively prevents anyone at Tesla from developing into an alternative that the board could consider as a replacement for him. One example is former CTO JB Straubel, now running a recycling technology company in Carson City, but got pushed out shortly after the gigafactory opened. A current candidate is Drew Baglino - the guy who called my wife a dingbat shortly before she left Tesla - who rose to VP but has not been given the CTO position, because Elon doesn't want him to gain additional power. She hears that his position is "precarious" - he's been able to deflect blame onto his underlings for a while now, which results in the underlings getting fired, but he's running out of underlings. He's supposed to talk at the battery conference this week, which is unusual for Tesla, they usually don't want their executives making public speeches, so this might be his attempt at a next career move. Then there's this guy Tom Zhu, who back in January was "promoted" from head of Tesla in China to head of all factories in North America, and then, silence - no mentions of this guy in the news since January.

So we talk about failure of governance from the board, but Elon apparently knows how to play the game as well, by not giving the board an easy alternative. The one counterexample is Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, who does seem to be competently running the thing, but also Elon doesn't interfere in SpaceX nearly as much as he does in Tesla, so the SpaceX board hasn't found it necessary to take action.

 

Interesting stuff S.murf

I get the feeling from the court case that the Tesla board don't have any real power. In theory they do if they all came together but too many of them are Musk's creatures.

 

my read of the testimony in the recent court case is most of them are musk stooges. That is how he managed to get paid a gazillion. They just go along with whatever he wants.

 

That was my thought.

Which is going to cause Tesla to lose market share. They need to realize that they are now a car company with technology and not a tech company with cars.

 

Agreed - its pretty much the common factor in every major corporate scandal

 

I think the VCs are totally fine with Elon's puppets on the board. VCs have shown themselves recently to not be the smartest tools in the shed - think SVB as an example - but they think of themselves as the best of the best, and Elon is like the ideal VC, the absolute pinnacle of how the VCs want to see themselves, so they're going to support him.

 

This is quite interesting on some other EV projects that were at SXSW

https://the69thchamber.substack.com/p/sad-by-southwest-a-dispatch

 

Right

I mean this very criticism was made of the Twitter board who were largely useless for years as the share price languished. Often the incentive seems to be to pad your own CV than to cause any problems