I think this is what’s been going on behind the scenes at Tesla over the past year

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Some of this article has been widely discussed for months, but I think it goes a little deeper into how I think we got here. I could be wrong, but after following Tesla and Elon Musk closely for 12 years and having my assumptions and analysis confirmed by Musk numerous times, I think I might be right. And honestly, it’s not rocket science.

Okay, so I’m going to go back a little further than the past year. Musk clearly worked his butt off and endured a lot of stress for years to help Tesla mass-produce the Model 3 and become profitable. When Tesla became profitable, the short sellers got fried, and Musk no longer had the pressure from Wall Street, the press, or his own fear of failure, so he let go. He quickly got rid of Tesla’s PR team. He stopped worrying so much about what he said and tweeted (not that he ever held back 100%). And he decided to enthusiastically launch a new fun model, instead of focusing on more “boring” models every day (the Model Y, Semi, and a cheaper car). Of course, we all know which model I mean: the Cybertruck.

With regard to the very popular and unrivaled Tesla Model 3 and then Tesla Model Y, I think the assumption was that consumer demand would just keep growing and growing. Why would anyone buy anything else? (I know that argument well, because I’ve made it multiple times and Musk agreed with it.) Of course he knew they some eventually a limit, but I think he assumed that robotaxi capacity would be ready by then and that would only boost sales further – up to 20 million vehicles a year even by 2030.

The 50% growth Musk had been repeating for years was the reality, and he simply let that forecast grow, seemingly without much consideration for the possibility that it would be lowered and growth would slow. Or maybe it was just hubris in the development of FSD (Full Self Driving). Either way, we did not see 50% annual growth, and Musk eventually stopped talking about it, and would not even provide a sales forecast for 2024.

While all this is happening, he’s become increasingly distracted by other things. He now has 12 kids (I think), and assuming he spends any time with them at all, it’s a huge distraction. One of his kids is trans and disowned him, changing her name when she was 18. It seems that this, coupled with an atypical relationship with Grimes that included everything from trans issues to communism to squeezing the working class as a billionaire CEO, has left Musk far more focused than he ever would have been on social and cultural issues, and ultimately on political issues. (Interestingly, Grimes dated a famous trans woman right after a breakup.) Musk became increasingly involved in identity politics and then bought Twitter. He was essentially lured into buying the social media site and then tried to get out of it in court for months, but he lost the lawsuit and had to buy the site (which incidentally meant he had to lot of Tesla shares).

As Musk became increasingly involved in 1) running Twitter (now X), 2) letting his attention be sucked into Twitter echo chambers and conspiracy theories (like far too many people before and after him), and 3) trying to make Twitter profitable (while massively reducing its revenue), it’s hard to imagine him paying much attention to Tesla vehicle and software development. It’s also hard to believe he’s paying much attention to various sales trends and competition in key markets — China, Europe, even the US. He has said he works full-time at Tesla, but that seems unlikely, if not impossible. Some recent analysis suggests he tweets all day long. He’s conducted lengthy interviews with presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, among others, and you’d think he would have prepared for that to some extent (though given how they turned out, and Musk’s tendency to do things on the fly, that may not have been the case). I also saw Musk attend the World Cup final in Qatar, the recent US Open men’s final in NYC, and a number of other celebrity events around the world. Again, he has 12 kids (at least).

By the way, as for all his tweets, the Wall Street Journal recently analyzed it and found: “Both the AI ​​and keyword analysis showed the same pattern: Musk’s feed has fundamentally shifted from business to politics and social issues.” Where he used to tweet mostly about Tesla and SpaceX, he’s now much more focused on other things. I think that’s a clear sign that his attention is elsewhere. Another analysis found that he spends almost 3 hours a day on X (as a user, not even counting what he does in the background to run the site). Some days he can spend 5 hours. I imagine some days are completely consumed by X.

In short, I don’t think Musk is working full-time at Tesla. He could even quit quietly.

And let’s also recall Musk’s role at SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and a number of other companies, organizations, and foundations.

When you put the pieces together, with less and less interest in working on “boring” Tesla vehicles, probably little interest in hearing about the competition and consumer demand challenges Tesla faces in different markets, a strong aversion to fighting the pressure from Wall Street and the press again, and a huge circus of distractions, I think Tesla’s development is being massively neglected.

But he can’t say he’s taken the wrong course, he can’t say he’s too distracted, and he can’t say he’s failed in his duties at Tesla. And that’s where a Hail Mary savior comes in.

He can’t fail. Tesla can’t fail. And he’s been talking about and working on this damn robotaxi thing for over a decade. Yes, it’s years behind schedule, but it has to work. He just has to. It will reinvigorate consumer demand for Tesla vehicles. It will send stocks back to Mars. It will prove Elon right all along. And most importantly, it will allow him to keep focusing on the more interesting things that catch his attention at X every day. And it will allow him to keep ignoring the calls for a more affordable Tesla vehicle, and more variations of the Model 3 and Model Y to “grow up” and stimulate consumer demand like other automakers are doing. And with a snap of his fingers, Tesla can beat out all those pesky Chinese rivals that are starting to outpace Tesla, as well as Google’s Waymo, a competitor to Musk’s decade-long robotaxi vision.

Is this robotaxi savior really coming? Will it fix all of Musk’s Tesla problems? Will the TSLA world be okay again? Will Elon Musk become the richest man in the world again? Will robotaxis financially fuel a long-held desire to go to Mars?

I leave answering all these questions to the future.

I will close, however, with an excerpt from a recent article and book about Musk’s Twitter takeover. As we all know, many Twitter employees were unhappy with the direction Musk was taking the company. The book, which has just been published, is Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed TwitterThrough New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Rolling Stone highlighted this story from the book in an article about “11 WTF Moments”, summarizing it in their own words, except for the quotes:

“Musk is not overly forgiving of employees who criticize him — or give him answers he doesn’t like — as many episodes in the book illustrate. In one case, he was furious about a decline in engagement with his tweets and abruptly fired an engineer who suggested that public interest in him had waned since Twitter’s acquisition a few months earlier. But another employee, a data scientist who had already decided to resign after handing over memos on how to run Twitter more effectively, was even more blunt with Musk, explaining that he had been excited about the acquisition but was discouraged when, just weeks later, Musk shared blatantly partisan misinformation about an attack by an intruder on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. ‘It’s really only the tenth percentile of the adult population that would be naive enough to fall for this,’ the employee told Musk, who shot back, ‘Fu** you!’ The outgoing data scientist gave him some advice: “I hope you go bankrupt and let someone else run the company.”

Why is this relevant? Musk has had a tendency over the past year or more to believe and promote wild conspiracy theories. He jumps to conclusions that he seems to reach on a daily basis. And he is very bad at accepting corrections, criticism, and new information that doesn’t square with his claims. I believe it’s a similar story at Tesla. We’ve had reports of executives trying to convince him of the importance of various things (from making Tesla more affordable to maintaining a Supercharging team) and he’s gotten angry about it. It’s troubling, and it’s consistent with the reporting about his work at Twitter/X and many of his tweets. I worry, as many do, that Tesla is being neglected, that important work that could be done at the company is being dismissed, and that the company’s future is being staked on a Hail Mary. The above story attempts to explain how and why that’s happening. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s right. What do you think?