Hey, everybody. Barry Ritholtz here, I just finished recording an episode of Bloomberg's new podcast, Elon Inc. It's a weekly show all about Elon Musk. It was a great conversation with David Papadopolis, Dana Hull, and Max Chafkin, all about SpaceX Tesla, what does the future look like for new cars coming out of Tesla, and whether or not Elon Musk can continue running three companies at this high level. I want to play a little excerpt for you here.
Head over to the Elon Inc. Feed to listen to the whole thing, and if you like it, please subscribe.
Let me ask you this though, back on Elon the entrepreneur and the salesman, perhaps as good as a technologist and an engineering mind as he is. What are the great salespeople of our time? Right? Maybe?
No doubt Steve Jobs the second, Like everybody, how often you hit people described as the next Steve Jobs And it's always a pale imitation.
My theory in that is Steve Jobs died in what two thousand and eleven? That was when Tesla was ramping up the models, and so I think the media had quite a lot of a role the tech press in particular had quite a lot of a big role to play in this because Steve Jobs died and everyone was like, who's the new Steve Jobs.
But that ability to create that reality distortion field where people suspend disbelief and get pulled into a universe that doesn't exist. And it's a to be fair to Elon, it's a hopeful vision of the future where pollution is a thing of the past, and climate change has been managed and even if we have overpopulation, well, everybody just head over to my country home on Mars and there's plenty of room for all. I mean, he has created a narrative that is hopeful, and that's not the worst.
Thing the Steve Jobs thing. I think that was something that eld himself. I mean he has that he has explicitly modeled himself on Steve Jobs. Like he I mean you look look at look at.
Yeah, yeah.
Like the way he presents himself as a CEO, the way he conceptualizes the role of a manager, the way he goes.
The way he tweets, the rollout of the new vehicles he does.
The choice of Walter Isa. Look at the covers of those books, right, I mean it's like he dial he ordered up his own you know, Isaacson treatment, and I think that has been an effective approach. People were entranced by Steve Jobs, and to some extent, Tesla has managed to create an Apple like following and has been able to, you know, convince investors that the economics for cars are the same as the economics for smartphones.
So who's the Tim Cook in the Elon Musk story. We know Gwen is the Tim Cook of SpaceX. Who is the Tim Cook of Tesla?
Does said person exist?
So that's always been the interesting dynamic at Tesla. Whenever anyone has kind of risen up to be the sort of de facto number two, they've always been axed or they've disappeared suddenly. We saw that most recently with Zach Kerkorn, the very highly regarded CFO. He left in August. No one exactly knows why.
So that reminds me a little bit of Jack Welsh, who was running General Electric for twenty years, and there was a series of CEOs coming up under him, or potential CEOs, and they knew Jack had a death grip on ge and all these guys, the S and P five hundred is littered with CEOs who were potential Jack
Welsh replacements. There's a whole longer story about what a terrible job Welch did, but there are some parallels there in that it becomes hard to retain talent at the highest level if they don't see a path to work their way up ladder, if not succeed the CEO. You know, we saw that a little bit with Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan Chase, and we definitely saw it with Jack
Welsh at GE. The question is, at a certain point Elon is going to have to focus on whatever the next thing is, and he needs someone to run Tesla when he's too busy. I have no idea who that person might be.
Well, and it's really hard for someone from the outside to succeed at Tesla because the culture is so unique that the various people that they've hired from other industries or from other companies have never lasted long. I mean, the top the four named executives now at the top of the roster, there are all longtime Tesla executives who've been there forever.
No one else can be as hardcore as I musk, and that that's true.
I mean this is this is definitely true. So Barry, last question for you, your final thought on Elon and the difference between physics and humans.
Sure, so, his greatest success have come, I don't want to say, conquering the rules of physics, but working within the laws of physics to bend our expectations as to what's possible very quick, long range software driven cars, the ability to launch cheap, renewable, reusable rockets into space and land them where he's kind of you know, seems to have lost the thread. No pun intended was at Twitter. By the way, we don't know the impact on Tesla sales from him being such a kind of wackado on
Twitter because we don't have the control group. You know, we don't run an experiment. But I know personally and all right, I live in the New York area, which tends to vote Democratic, but that tends to be his Tesla potential base. You have California, you have Austin, Texas. You have you know, the liberal the big city.
You have the cash to.
Write, they have the income, they they're concerned about the environment, and they're willing to put up with some of the inconveniences of an electric car. If they think they're they're doing good for the world. Look I'm that is eventually a series of Harvard Business School case studies how to alienate your core customer and how long can you get away with that? My last thought is he needs a couple of no men. He needs some people around him to say, Elon, that's a really dumb idea. Elon forty
four billion dollars, that doesn't make any sense. Elon, focus on rockets and cars. Leave this social media crap to other people. And he doesn't have anybody, not only does any of people willing to stand up to him and tell him that's a terrible idea. That inner circle really seems to be a bunch of cheerleaders urging him on. You know, you know, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, a frat house, every worst instinct he has, and they're encouraging and chugging.
Does