This “open letter” might be fake. It could be real. I don’t know, but it reminded me of a column I’ve been wanting to write.
The letter is purportedly from disgruntled Tesla employees who want Elon Musk to stop being CEO so the company can go back to selling lots of electric vehicles. His DOGE bender has damaged Tesla’s brand so much that he should step back, according to this alleged letter.
Even if this is a made-up missive, it raises an interesting question: Why would the CEO of the world’s most valuable car company wander off for months to pursue political dalliances when the electric vehicle battle has just entered a new, crucial stage?
The answer may be simple: Elon is bored making cars.
He spent the last decade working his butt off to pull Tesla out of near bankruptcy and turn it into the dominant EV company of the Western world. There was a lot of innovation and many sleepless nights.
But now, one could argue, EV manufacturing is a solved problem. Tesla has gigafactories and other giant facilities around the world churning out hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. The next stages are all about refining these processes and scaling efficient production — and, yes, persuading people to buy the products.
This isn’t really Elon’s jam. He likes to invent new things, not tweak existing products. This story from The Information put it well when it described why Musk rejected his lieutenants’ advice to pursue a cheaper EV, and instead went all-in on artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and robots.
This quote, from a person familiar with the situation, stands out: “I think Elon is just uninterested in making a [Volkswagen] Golf-type car. It just doesn’t wake him up in the morning. He was, ‘Let somebody else do it.'”
What type of new CEO would Tesla need?
The open letter isn’t the only indication that Musk is losing favor as Tesla’s CEO.
After I first published this column, The WSJ reported, citing anonymous sources, that Tesla’s board opened a formal search for Tesla’s next CEO about a month ago.
So, who else would do this job at Tesla, and what would this mean for the future of the company?
If Musk were to relinquish the CEO role, I think he’d need a Tim Cook-style executive to take the reins.
Cook is a supply chain genius who took over Apple when Steve Jobs died in 2011. At that time, I was a tech reporter at Reuters, and many experts were predicting doom for Apple.
Like Musk, Jobs was a mercurial tech founder who was loved for his visionary inventions and feared for his brutal approach to people management. (Jobs also pulled Apple back from near bankruptcy.)
In 2011, investors just couldn’t imagine how Apple might continue to thrive without this creative driving force.
In one way, they were right to worry. Since then, Apple has not launched many truly new and inventive products. The car project failed. The Vision Pro goggles have stumbled out of the gate (and followed Meta’s Oculus anyway).
In another way, though, Cook has taken Apple to new heights that were unimaginable 14 years ago. And he did it by taking another solved problem — smartphones — and perfecting it over and over and over again.
Since 2011, Cook has obsessed over minute iPhone product tweaks, redesigned the chips in-house, switched out and negotiated (hard!) with hundreds of suppliers, and carefully evolved one of the world’s largest supply chains in the face of pandemics and dictators.
I asked Apple for comment on Monday and didn’t get a response. I also emailed Elon and asked him if he wants to spend the next 10-plus years of his life tweaking Tesla’s EV operations. I didn’t get a reply, not even a poop emoji.
Apple’s now a $3 trillion company
The value Cook has added since 2011 is astounding. Late that year, the company was worth about $350 billion. Apple is now valued at $3.2 trillion.
By iterating intensely on an existing product — grinding costs lower and efficiency higher — this CEO has generated almost $3 trillion in shareholder value, and made Apple the most valuable company in the world.
When Apple became the first company to pass $1 trillion in 2018, I edited a story by Mark Gurman that marked this moment. The piece quoted Tony Fadell, who helped Steve Jobs create the iPod. Instead of harping on about Jobs’s legacy, Fadell focused mostly on Cook.
“Tim and team have done a masterful job of continuing to develop Steve’s vision while bringing operational and environmental excellence to every part of Apple’s business to achieve their unheard-of scale while continuing to grow unprecedented margins in the consumer electronics business,” Fadell said.
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Tesla’s ‘2011 Apple’ moment
I think Tesla could be at a “2011 Apple” moment right now.
Musk hasn’t died, but his passion for EV manufacturing may have faded.
Like Apple back then, many Tesla investors can’t image the company without Musk as CEO. But he could, in theory, step back from day-to-day leadership duties while continuing to work on newer, cutting-edge projects in the background, such as the Optimus robot.
Meanwhile, a Cook-style executive could take the CEO role and start hammering away at the solved problem of Tesla’s core EV business. This could also reduce the brand damage done by Musk’s political foray.
Apple shows what’s possible in a scenario like this: Almost $3 trillion in market value created from basically doing an existing thing better and better.
I asked Grace Kay, Business Insider’s hot-shot Tesla reporter, who might be a good candidate to replace Musk as CEO. She suggested Omead Afshar, a low-profile, mild-mannered executive who once ran a major Tesla manufacturing operation and has become a trusted confidant of the visionary founder.
Sound familiar?
If you want to know more about Omead Afshar, check out Grace’s amazing profile.
Editor’s note: This column was first published on April 30. It has been updated to include The Wall Street Journal’s report about Tesla searching for a new CEO, published later that day.
