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‘It’s A Mess’: Tesla Insiders Dish The Dirt On Elon Musk’s Leadership

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Tesla employees are claiming CEO Elon Musk is quickly losing control of the electric vehicle company he helped form over 15 years ago, The New York Post reported Thursday, citing numerous sources.

The report suggests Musk is using a mixture of reality distortion fields and trick-mirrors to keep Tesla from imploding. He never appears interested in the practicality of some of the promises he makes to Tesla neophytes on Twitter, one source told the paper.

“He is very difficult to move off his stance,” the source said. “He’ll say, “The car can do X, Y or Z,’ And yes, that is possible — two decades from now … He bases his argument on the physically possible rather than the practical reality.'” Analysts have made similar arguments, with one suggesting Musk is perhaps too abstract a thinker for a company dependent on deadlines.

The tech billionaire’s vision is so far beyond what Tesla is capable of producing, Matt Stack, the co-founder of Devonshire Research Group, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in 2016 before Musk fused the electric vehicle company with another one of his projects, SolarCity.

“Elon is missing his Wozniak,” Stack said, referring to widely held belief that Apple needed Steve Wozniak’s engineering brilliance to produce Steve Job’s creative ideas. Wozniak helped the computer company meet deadlines in a timely fashion and allowed Jobs’s vision to come to life in a manageable way, Stack noted before adding: Tesla doesn’t have that luxury.

Another Tesla insider suggests Musk’s tweets about new features are often crafted in response Twitter followers who ask about the availability of futuristic technologies. He often emails the company’s tasked department, then responds to the fan with a scheduled date for the function’s release. The feasibility of whether that product can be delivered is never considered, the insider said.

The same source claims Musk creates the inevitability of Tesla’s success.

“Elon emails us directly, saying ‘We’re on top, we’re going to prove [everybody] wrong,'” the source added. “Everyone realizes it’s f–ked up, but everyone’s afraid of losing their job before Tesla ‘hits it big.’ It’s a mess.”

The Post’s report comes less than a month after Musk announced on Twitter his willingness to take Tesla private at $420 per share, which shocked Wall Street and confused journalists. Regulators also subpoenaed Tesla shortly after the announcement to determine how much the company’s board knew about Musk’s plan.

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