Weeks after failure, Elon Musk is already hailing a new “manufacturing revolution”
Do people still believe this guy?
Nobody can lie through their teeth and still make people believe they’re telling the truth with the same consistency and shamelessness as Elon Musk. He is the king of setting ambitious deadlines and missing them… and missing them and missing them and missing them again.
Less than a month ago, Musk sat down for an interview with Gayle King on CBS This Morning where King called him out for constantly lowering Model 3 production targets that he was still struggling to meet.
You started saying, ‘We’ll do 5,000 a week.’ Then, okay, that didn’t work out, ‘We’ll do 2,500 a week.’ And now it’s a little over 2,000 a week. Does that trouble you?
Musk, under fire from investors, could do nothing but agree with King’s statement with his trademark smugness — a trait indicative of someone who believes himself to be above everyone around him — and admit that his overreliance on technology as the universal solution to every problem may have been misplaced. However, whether he truly believes that the automation of final assembly “was not working” remains to be seen, as recent statements suggest he may have just been performing to appease his financiers.
Musk announced Tesla’s quarterly earnings on May 2, 2018, revealing that the company is stuck at around 2,200 Model 3s per week — Musk’s camera stunt about sleeping on the floor at the factory doesn’t seem to be paying off — and that he’s still promising it will reach 6,000 per week by the middle of 2018 — which, let’s be real, isn’t going to happen. And that wasn’t where it ended.
Just weeks after admitting that automating final assembly was a failure, Musk seems to believe enough time has passed for him to make the promise yet again: a “manufacturing revolution” to coincide with the Model Y electric crossover currently scheduled for 2020. (Do we think it’s really going to come out then after Model 3 delivery dates were also delayed?)
It’s these kinds of big promises that won Musk the adoration of technophiles the world over, who love his big ideas and defend him every time his deadlines get pushed and his concepts turn out to be not nearly as innovative as he led people to believe, because the worship of entrepreneurs has become gospel in our late-capitalist, faux-meritocratic society. Steve Jobs may be the only Silicon Valley CEO to top Musk’s skill at personal branding to attract a cult following — hence the frequent comparisons in the tech press — but it seems that investors, at least, are starting to tire of constant promises upon which Musk cannot deliver.
Musk’s reluctant admission that automation wasn’t working at Tesla’s Fremont, California factory came only after intense investor pressure, and it hasn’t stopped many mainstream media outlets, particularly financial publications, from openly wondering whether the company is headed for bankruptcy. After the earnings call, where Musk brushed off legitimate investor questions as “so dry” to instead take questions from his adoring YouTube audience, the share price dropped again.
Has Musk’s ability to convincing sell a lie finally faltered? His cult followers certainly won’t be swayed, but it does seem that a number of investors who may have been attracted by his aura of innovation may no longer be swayed by branding when the numbers — what really matters to them — and his assurances just don’t seem to be adding up.
