>the worrisome implication is that TSLA has trouble attracting and retaining senior talent given the work pressure and thin financial margin
A lot of "senior talent" are probably entitled, slow, and pedestrian. A lot of companies like these people because they are good at maintaining a caste system and shaking hands.
I think Tesla, as a disruptor, both needs and hates these employees. They need someone who has "done it before" so they can get out ahead of rookie mistakes. But they also need someone who will work hard, fast, and not get caught up thinking that they know everything.
I have never been bothered by high churn for execs at Tesla. Have any of you ever even met or worked for/with "senior talent?"
I bet Musk would rather be in the room with engineers who hate having reports than people-people.
Musk is precisely the bad kind of senior talent--imperious, oblivious, and completely unwilling to listen to advice from others even when he's been shown to be wrong.
The senior talent that's spent the last 3 years leaving Tesla? They've got documented success at other companies within their respective niches. With Finance, especially, you want someone with experience and knowledge because Finance is quite literally the heart of your company. The CFOs and other CxOs that have left Tesla have done good jobs at other companies, so the fact that so many of them are leaving Tesla, especially within such a short window and without replacement positions lined up, is good evidence that Tesla's books are in bad shape. No CFO of a publicly traded company leaves the job voluntarily if everything's fine.
>Musk is precisely the bad kind of senior talent--imperious, oblivious, and completely unwilling to listen to advice from others even when he's been shown to be wrong.
That's just like, your opinion, man. Steve Jobs was an awful boss to some, but a visionary to others. Same with others throughout history.
>They've got documented success at other companies within their respective niches...The CFOs and other CxOs that have left Tesla have done good jobs at other companies
And the CFO before them was doing a good job too. And the CFO after them will do a good job too. I think manning the helm of a big self-steering monolith is a different game than running a disruptor.
>No CFO of a publicly traded company leaves the job voluntarily if everything's fine.
This is a common trope that never gets called out when it ends up not being true. It only sounds good when a CFO leaves, never when the company they left doesn't go bankrupt or die off because they left.
And the CFO before them was doing a good job too. And the CFO after them will do a good job too. I think manning the helm of a big self-steering monolith is a different game than running a disruptor.
It's really not different at all. Same rules apply. Only minor differences related to industry-specific practices, most of which effect lower-level (non-CFO) finance functions. Internal corporate finance/compliance is one of those areas where disruption is not a good thing.
This is a common trope that never gets called out when it ends up not being true. It only sounds good when a CFO leaves, never when the company they left doesn't go bankrupt or die off because they left.
You are missing a few words so it's not clear what you're trying to say. Being a CFO of a well-run publicly traded company is a very cushy job, so CFO's rarely leave voluntarily unless it's for an even cushier job or the company has serious financial issues.
Also, CFOs aren't responsible for the company's commercial success, so it's not their fault if a company goes bankrupt--that's on the CEO and COO. CFOs are responsible for tracking the finances of a company and managing cash flow, but they don't make the business decisions of how a company's resources are used. For a poorly run company like Tesla, the CFO's job would generally also entail juggling debt payments and incoming income to make sure their is always sufficient cash flow to keep the lights on.
Tell that to the investors. He has made them a fortune in every enterprise he has ever run. What kind of senior talent would you want? You talk about documented success, but who has more of that than Elon Musk? It's a short list. If you don't like him, just say it, but don't make ridiculous claims.
Well, not SolarCity. They were about to go bankrupt and were saved only because Elon used Tesla to acquire them. Not BoringCo, which has yet to make money and is privately owned. Not SpaceX, which just announced massive layoffs (and which is also privately owned).
Not even Paypal, where the technology stack came from Thiel, and the business decisions that led it to becoming the payment gateway for a generation of Internet companies...also came from Thiel. Elon's reign as CEO was a disaster and he was unceromoniously fired.
1) Paypal was built on Thiel's tech and business acumen. Almost nothing of Elon's startup survived the merger that formed Paypal. Elon's reign as CEO was so disastrous he was fired returning from a business trip following an emergency board meeting scheduled while he was in the air.
2) Jury's still out on Tesla. All of their misfires can be traced to Musk, including their billion-dollar assembly line that couldn't actually assemble anything.
3) Gwynne Shotwell wants a word with you. SpaceX was nothing until she took over day-to-day and it's quite offensive to think that Musk has anything to do with SpaceX's success. SpaceX, noticeably, is the only one of Musk's current ventures where he isn't in charge of day-to-day operations and it's the only one that isn't a comedy of errors.
4) SolarCity was on the verge of bankruptcy. They were saved from immediate death by the Tesla acquisition. Since then, they've gone from being #1 or #2 in the market to a non-player; SolarCity now does less business than the larger regional solar installation companies. They're business is so bad right now that Panasonic is selling almost all of the output (i.e., solar cells) of the Gigafactory 2 in NY to SolarCity's competitors because SolarCity can't handle even a fraction of the supply.
And the sad thing is that Tesla and SolarCity would be doing so much better if Musk weren't in charge...like SpaceX, where he's not.
A lot of "senior talent" are probably entitled, slow, and pedestrian. A lot of companies like these people because they are good at maintaining a caste system and shaking hands.
I think Tesla, as a disruptor, both needs and hates these employees. They need someone who has "done it before" so they can get out ahead of rookie mistakes. But they also need someone who will work hard, fast, and not get caught up thinking that they know everything.
I have never been bothered by high churn for execs at Tesla. Have any of you ever even met or worked for/with "senior talent?"
I bet Musk would rather be in the room with engineers who hate having reports than people-people.