Source | Tencent News Deep Web
After the outbreak of the epidemic, Tesla's Shanghai factory originally provided employees with two meals a day for free became one meal a day, and the bathroom quietly ran out of toilet paper. Tesla Chinese employees even began to ridicule, "Musk even has to approve boxes of toilet paper." ”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of four companies, worries about things as far as space and as deep as the Earth's crust. He is the richest man in the new world, the 2021 person of the year of Time Magazine, and he personally estimates that this year he will become the most annual tax-paying American in history, paying as much as $11 billion.
But Musk's management of Tesla is still as granular as it is.
The resumes and interviews of each of the more than 10,000 employees are documented in detail, packaged and sent to Musk for final approval — including assembly line workers. Each budget of more than $10,000 also needs to be approved by his email.
Tesla Chinese employees on the front line have been unable to contact Musk directly through email, and Musk's final approval emails are forwarded by Zhu Xiaotong (Tom), president of Tesla China. His email responses were always fast and concise, with only six characters: "OK, Elon."
Tesla has been established for 18 years, with nearly 80,000 employees and 2.4 million car owners worldwide, and its total market value exceeds the sum of 9 traditional car companies such as Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors and Ford. However, the company's operation is almost entirely tied to Musk alone.
"The people who can shoot the table with Elon are basically gone." A former Tesla Employee in China is still lamenting that even Robin, a college classmate who has known Musk for more than 20 years, has left. According to Bernstein's 2021 data study, the turnover rate of Tesla executives directly reported to Musk was as high as 44%, while the turnover rate of executives from other companies in Silicon Valley was only 9%.
It's not a forest, but Musk is a special case. SpaceX Employee No. 23 Kevin Brogan lamented in an interview with Ashlee Vance that every time Musk fired someone, he would take over that person's job, and he could complete whatever the project.
Clowns, geniuses, funnys, dreamers, industrialists, performers and scoundrels, this is Time Magazine's summary of Musk's characteristics, and can also be used to describe Tesla, which is highly bound to Musk's image.
This year, people have constantly questioned Tesla's quality and credibility, and repeatedly chose to forgive, pushing Tesla's sales in China to an unprecedented height this year. The peak came in September, when Tesla sold 52,000 vehicles in the Chinese market, about 1.9 times the combined sales of Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal (referred to as "Wei Xiaoli") in that month. This month, the price of the Model Y high-performance version also rose by 10,000 yuan.
How did the balance between the constant security and public opinion crises and the doubling of sales? How long can it last? After deep web conversations with a number of employees involved in manufacturing, sales, public relations and other departments, we saw a Tesla China: its products are safer than we think, but the state is more dangerous than imagined.
The honeymoon period is over
In the first half of 2021, Tesla's hidden crisis poured out of the water.
Before and after the Shanghai Auto Show, Tesla owners defended their rights several times and several responses from Tesla's public relations leaders caused controversy in public opinion. After that, the relevant traffic accidents in China and the United States and the confirmation of rights and responsibilities for data security in the special period have led to another round of fierce discussions on Tesla's safety issues. Bloomberg commented that Tesla's honeymoon period in China has ended.
The honeymoon period may have ended, but the interests are still closely bound. In the third quarter of this year, Tesla's Shanghai factory sold about 133,000 vehicles to the global market, more than half of Tesla's total sales figures in the quarter. Although the Berlin plant in Germany is ready to enter the production stage, Tesla's Shanghai plant will remain an important export center for cars in Eurasia.
While China has given Tesla the treatment of wholly foreign-owned factories, it has also obtained more tax revenue, foreign trade growth, and a more prosperous pure electric industry chain.
Today, the Shanghai plant is undergoing a 1.2 billion yuan expansion project, which is expected to be completed next April. After the expansion, the Shanghai plant will increase the number of employees by 4,000 to a total of 19,000.
Even so, if Tesla wants to develop in China for a long time, repairing trust is still a must-do thing. According to Reuters, tesla has stepped up communication with regulators since May.
In order to study Tesla's attempt to repair the trust of consumers, two weeks after the roof rights protection incident fermented, the author went to an experience store in Beijing's Chaoyang District as a consumer to test drive - the consumers in the exhibition hall were in stark contrast to the scene at the beginning of the year. The Tesla sales staff who docked suddenly sighed on the way to the test drive with the author, "Tesla has been really difficult recently. He probably didn't expect it at the time that the decadent demand was a flash in the pan.
Slightly different from the previous test drive process, the sales staff spent 15 minutes to explain all the negative events and rumors about Tesla to the author after getting on the car, and emphasized that the domestic data existed in China, and the communication was also used by the services of the three major domestic operators, and there was no StarLink service.
Driving to the main road, Tesla test drive sales directed the author to experience what he called "true self-driving" - FSD (Full Self-Driving) beta features. The salesperson said, "I came home with an FSD and played with my phone along the way." ”
After flicking the pocket gear lever down twice in a row, and the gray steering wheel logo appears on the left side of the screen, the Model 3 turns on the FSD function. "Hands relaxed, feet can be removed."
Without controlling the directional speed, the car can also drive safely on the road, and the author's attention is unconsciously gradually withdrawn from the driving state and dispersed to other places. Walking to the intersection, the test drive sales suddenly sounded "Stop! Startled, the author was in a hurry, and his foot consciousness probed forward, and he mistakenly stepped on the acceleration pedal. Fortunately, the speed itself was not fast and the pedal was immediately loosened, which was just a false alarm.
This experience reminds the author of an air crash in the early hours of June 1, 2009. When the captain of the Air France AF447 left the cockpit, the autopilot system was unexpectedly disconnected and the captain took over, and the co-pilot called the captain to misjudge the situation after several unsuccessful attempts, causing the aircraft to stall, and a minute later the captain returned to the cockpit but it was too late. The Air France AF447 is engulfed by the pitch-black Atlantic Ocean.
The advent of autonomous driving systems has brought the accident rate per million flights close to zero, and pilots can always confidently hand over the entire aircraft to it after entering the stratosphere. Dr. Michael Clamann, a senior research scientist at Duke University, said that when complex tasks are completed, human attention can only be concentrated for another 20 minutes, and it will take buffer time to restore full concentration, "which is human nature."
Therefore, in an emergency, automatic driving suddenly switches to manual operation, and it is difficult for humans to react correctly in time.
The same is true for autonomous driving systems on the road. Tesla's first autopilot fatality in 2016 was due to the driver's excessive trust in the assisted autopilot system, resulting in no human intervention at the time of the incident.
To this day, the late driver's father in the accident is still fighting with Tesla, and his lawyer has said that the amount of compensation is not the main purpose, and he hopes to let the public know that the autopilot technology is still flawed through the case, and also hopes that Tesla will be more cautious in marketing publicity, and not to package immature autopilot as an eye-catching selling point.
Professor Zhu Xichan of the Automotive Safety Technology Research Institute of the School of Automotive Science of Tongji University believes that Tesla's autopilot technology is basically stronger than the ADAS (driver assistance function) of all mass-produced models on the market, which is an L2+ level driving assistance function. "Users can also subtly feel that this car can indeed drive itself."
But this is limited to the general conventional road. Zhu Xichan said that the current autonomous driving system cannot handle unsafe scenarios that have not been seen. "L2+ is the most dangerous phase because user expectations are higher than the system capabilities."
The simplest and most effective solution is that car companies align information with consumers at the beginning of sales.
However, when the automatic driving function gradually becomes the representative of the technical strength of car companies, the level of automatic driving declared by car companies has jumped year after year, and in 2019, the L2 level driving assistance function has just been popularized in the mainstream brand new models, and by 2021, a number of car companies have launched new models with L4 level automatic driving capabilities. Among them, WM CEO Shen Hui was the first to jump out and promise that the responsibility for the unmanned accident would go to the main engine factory (car company).
In addition, in recent years, the automobile market in China, Europe and the United States and other countries has changed from an incremental to a stock market, and the car-making boom has made the already saturated track more crowded, and the pressure on car companies to sell cars is huge, and it is more in line with commercial interests for the marketing side to further package their own autonomous driving capabilities.
A Tesla departing salesman told the "Deep Web" that sales that can only reach the qualified line every month must be eliminated at the end, so store sales "almost half a year to change a round of people." He said, "Tesla is like this, thinking that its car is good to sell", and it is natural that the sales staff sells more.
An early Tesla sales employee said that when Zhu Xiaotong was still the general manager of China, if he found that a certain area did not complete the sales target one day, even in the early morning, he would directly call and ask which store employee was dragging his feet.
Tesla sales are commissioned on a quarterly basis, "compared to peers is really not much", but the base salary is higher. Different levels of sales have corresponding basic salary and commission base, "cap 300% (300% of the commission base), only sold to the minimum standard (sold 10 cars in two weeks) without commission." ”
Even if sales talk about self-driving are very different from what they actually are, Tesla can take away the responsibility. Because if you open the 155-page Tesla user manual, you will find that the description of the FSD does contain the words assisted driving.
A number of Tesla employees interviewed told the Deep Web that Tesla is not afraid of complaints, let alone lawsuits. An early Tesla employee said, "You sue me [Tesla], can you sue and win?" He remembers that a car owner sued Tesla in Beijing, and Tesla sent a team of more than a dozen lawyers to fight with the owner.
In September this year, Tesla second-hand owner Han Chao v. Tesla official suspected fraud, sales accident second-hand car case has won the second trial, Tesla needs to fulfill the responsibility of "one refund and three losses", payIng Han Chao 1.5188 million yuan.
However, 10 days later, Han Chao received a complaint from Tesla: Tesla sued Han Chao for violating the right to reputation, demanding that the latter compensate 5.05 million yuan and publicly apologize and delete the relevant Weibo. At the same time, the personal bank card account number provided by Han Chao to Tesla to get refunds and compensation payments was also frozen.
As of today, there is no final conclusion on the matter.
Disappearing data
Three months after the fermentation of the auto show rights protection incident, Tesla Model 3 car advocate Mr. also encountered the problem of "the vehicle is out of control, and the airbag does not pop out". He asked for help from the 315 platform, but the other party replied, "Tesla will never accept mediation, you go through the legal process." ”
When Mr. Zhang took the legal route, he found another problem, who claimed who to prove on the appeal, but almost all qualified testing institutions were one sentence, "We can't conclude that there is something wrong with this car." This means that prior art cannot produce accurate answers. In the end, Mr. Zhang could only ask Tesla for data, but the answer was "no" and "we don't have this data".
How much data does Tesla have? According to Reuters, the Dutch forensic laboratory cracked Tesla's driving data storage system in October and found a wealth of information that could be used to investigate serious accidents. For example, Autopilot's operating information, speed, throttle pedal position, steering wheel angle and brake usage can be stored for more than a year.
There are also clearer requirements for car data recording in China. From January 1, 2022, all newly produced passenger cars in China are mandatorily equipped with EDR (Event Data Recorder, Automotive Event Data Recording System), or DVR (Digital Video Recorder, Digital Video Recorder).
EDR, also known as the "black box" of the car, is mainly used to record the key operation data of the car in the three stages of the vehicle before, during and after the collision, and is used for automobile accident analysis. Such as vehicle steady state, throttle stamping position, airbag status, driver assistance system status and vehicle speed changes after the collision. For example, the United States has required all sales vehicles to be equipped with EDR since 2014.
Does Tesla have system problems that cause the vehicle to run out of control and brakes to fail? There is no clear answer, and government departments such as the United States and France are still in the investigation stage.
Musk has always stressed that Tesla is the "safest car." But when he declared in 2019 that the model 3's personnel injury probability was the lowest of the NHTSA's (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) test vehicles, NHTSA immediately sent a letter requesting that the use of the claim be prohibited, saying that it violated the guidelines for the use of data and was misleading.
The guidelines for the use of NHTSA are to prohibit the publication of statements of comparative patterns because security standards are relative. For example, the five-star safety evaluation of a medium-sized sedan and the four-star evaluation of a large SUV make it difficult to judge who is superior and who is inferior.
But Tesla was both strong and reasonable, telling NHTSA that the statement was not untrue or misleading, and hoped that NHTSA would accept the achievement. Musk also continued to use the "lowest probability of injury" statement when the Model S Plaid was delivered this year.
"Deep Web" found and sorted out a large number of Tesla accident-related data, industry data and authoritative evaluations and found that there is currently no set of data that can accurately evaluate the safety of Tesla compared to similar models. However, as far as Tesla's own products are concerned, the relatively affordable Model 3 may be safer than the Model S.
Accident mortality is the most real and direct data to judge the safety of vehicles. However, the latest quantitative analysis of car fatalities from IIHS (The United States Association for the Protection of Highway Safety) and NHTSA still does not cover Tesla. The existing data is difficult to support the thesis that Tesla compares with the safety of other brands, but a simple internal model safety comparison can be made.
We took the number of Tesla fatalities from 2015 to 2019 from NHTSA, taking the 2018-2019 model as an example, the number of deaths per million vehicles per million vehicles in the Model 3 is 35 per year, and the Model S is 77, which is safer than the latter from a data point of view.
In the tests of authoritative institutions, the Model 3 is also the best performing car. It is the only model that tesla has received the "all-five-star safety rating" from E-NCAP (European Union New Car Safety Evaluation Association) and the highest safety rating in IIHS, Top Safety Pick+. The results of the domestic Model 3 in the crash test of China Insurance Research Institute are also "excellent".
This means that looking at collision safety alone, the Model 3 is comparable to Brands such as Volvo, Toyota, and Lexus. In contrast, the Model S and Model Y priced at more than 800,000 yuan have performed worse.
After investigating more than 39 million insured vehicles and more than 5,500 claims, IIHS found that the 2016-2018 Model S had a fire claim rate of 3 times that of similar fuel models (such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi), and a model Y of the same year up to 7 times. The fire claim rate is approximately equal to the fire accident rate.
However, with the continuous iteration of models and software systems, the situation is slowly getting better, and a comprehensive survey of five thousand Model 3 owners conducted by Bloomberg in 2019 showed that the complaint rate of new owners fell by 44% compared with 2018.
The domestic claim rate has been directly reflected in car insurance.
On December 27, after the official launch of the new energy vehicle captive insurance product, many new energy car owners found that the car insurance premium increased. According to the feedback of many car owners, the total reporting fee of different models varies, Tesla rose by more than 80%, the total premium of Weilai, Xiaopeng and The ideal increase range was 16%-37%, and the total premium of BYD Qin, Roewe E50 and other models did not rise but fell.
The direct reason for the increase in premiums is that the original new energy vehicle insurance coverage follows the rules of fuel vehicles, and the exclusive insurance for new energy vehicles includes "spontaneous combustion risk" and "damage risk of the three electricity (battery, motor and electronic control)", and also sets up an exclusive additional insurance "fire accident limit doubling insurance".
According to the news of China Fund News, the property insurance industry said that the current loss rate of new energy vehicle insurance generally exceeds 85%, Tesla is more because it is an all-aluminum integrated body, it is not easy to repair sheet metal after the collision, it can only be replaced as a whole, and the amount of compensation after the insurance is more expensive than other models.
France, Norway, Denmark and other EU head insurance companies have found that electric vehicles have a 20%-40% higher accident rate than fuel vehicles, and the maintenance cost of electric vehicles is higher than that of fuel vehicles.
Sacrifice the scale of the product control
How was a Tesla Model 3 built?
Thousands of parts are loaded into trucks and transported directly to the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory production line without stopping in storage. The 637-meter-long linear production line is extremely automated, and almost only the installation and quality inspection links can see a large number of workers working around the production line. Parts travel between dense robotic arms and assemble into a car. The force, angle, and number of turns of each screw are recorded by the cloud system at all times.
The factory operates 24 hours a day, 7 hours a day, and a fully assembled Model 3 rolls off the production line every 2 minutes. Workers follow the assembly line order to work. Overtime is basically not allowed at regular intervals, that is, the efficiency of people is maximized within the specified time.
Like most car companies that adhere to the Toyota Lean Production Method, Tesla requires a production efficiency of 100, a fault tolerance rate of 0, and is always ready to improve efficiency. Dozens or even hundreds of product and production line modification opinions are conveyed and implemented daily from the headquarters on the second floor of the California factory in North America and the China headquarters on the second floor of the Shanghai factory.
Many respondents believe that the domestic version of the car is of better workmanship quality than imported. A person close to Tesla's final inspection (final quality inspection) said, "Imported models are often transported into the factory for quality inspection and often need to be screwed again." "The domestic manufacturing process is more rigorous, and the quality inspection speed has always been faster."
Even if the machinery is standardized manufacturing, it is difficult to ensure that a batch of parts is the same.
A General Motors supplier said that this difference does not affect the use but will affect the operation experience. However, domestic joint venture factories are only willing to accept parts of the same size, and North American factories accept all of them as ordered. Therefore, when they ship, they will screen the most standard parts to the domestic factory, and the rest will be sent to foreign factories.
Improper installation of parts has become a common problem in North American automobile factories, and Volvo America, Toyota America, Ford and other car companies have been recalled due to this problem.
According to the official website information, Tesla has carried out a total of 14 recalls, of which 10 official said that no relevant personnel were injured or collided before the recall. Differences in component quality and improper installation are the most frequent causes, 7 times.
However, tesla pays more attention to results than the process orientation of lean production methods.
Maximize the implementation of the production increase plan, even if the paint does not have time to dry; to maximize the completion of sales tasks, last year's annual sales target of 500,000, only 170,000 vehicles were sold in the first half of the epidemic, and only 450 vehicles were missing the standard in the second half of the year.
"One day at Tesla is equal to seven days for other businesses." A former Tesla employee said. A task takes as little as one day from publication to result, 8 rounds of interviews can be solved in a week, and the North American office alone can produce more than 50 changes per week.
In order to continuously improve efficiency, Tesla has been changing the line (modifying the production line), "if there is a small change, it is to change the line while producing, and the big change should stop the line (stop production)." A Tesla worker said that the second phase of the Shanghai factory is also continuing to recruit a third shift of workers to achieve a three-shift 24-hour operation.
In Musk's eyes, traditional car manufacturing plants have been wasting resources, "in fact only 2%-3% of the volume is really usable", and the time for cars to be shipped out of the factory is slower than ideal. Musk firmly believes that manufacturing will follow in the footsteps of information technology and move toward miniaturization (computer miniaturization began in the 1980s).
"In general, a factory will look at how much output value can be created per square meter. Tesla, on the other hand, looks at how much output can be created by one cubic meter. Zhu Xiaotong said in a media interview.
Musk is used to solving problems even only with first principles, that is, fine-tuning and modifying on the basis of original experience without analogy thinking, and finding essential problems from the perspective of physics and solving them. "If you always look at things in terms of past experience, you'll never create something new."
He is solving the problem of workmanship in the same way. Musk claims that the Model 3's poor seams are due to the lack of Tesla's latest all-in-one die-casting technology. Model Y not only does not have "disgusting" body gaps when used, but can also replace most of the functions of about 300 robots on a production line. "Save money and effort."
Tesla has installed more than one all-in-one die-casting machine the size of a badminton court and weighing about 30 blue whales (200 tons/head) in all its gigafactories in California, Shanghai, Berlin, and more. The final effect is similar to the integrated design of Apple's iPhone, and the body can hardly see the traces of articulation. Manufacturing time was reduced from up to 2 hours to 3 minutes, reducing manufacturing costs by 40%.
But with that comes the difficulty of repairing. The integrated body is composed of only a few huge cast parts, and the original vehicle only needs to replace the corresponding parts after the collision, and now if the front face of the vehicle is destroyed or deformed, it may be necessary to replace half of the body.
Although Musk proposed a "patching" scheme, that is, cutting and replacing it with a latch part to complete the collision repair. However, the sturdiness and safety factor of the body after the "patching" are difficult to restore, and the maintenance cost is likely to increase exponentially.
This is not only because the repair is difficult, the new maintenance technology means that the maintenance personnel need to study again, and the labor cost will eventually be evenly shared into the maintenance cost.
Referring to Apple's approach, Tesla may launch a repair service similar to Apple Care+ in the future, which can extend the warranty service time after purchase.
Brokers such as CICC and CITIC Securities are optimistic about the future development trend of integrated die casting, which expects that by 2030, global OEMs will follow this technology trend.
"Other car companies (compared to Tesla) have at least a 5-year gap." Wu Jianshu, chairman of domestic auto parts supplier Tuopu, described partner Company A as follows in a recent conversation with institutional investors. Wu Jianshu did not say who Company A is, but then mentioned that Company A's sales in Europe increased by 240% in May and sales in North America also increased significantly, which is in line with Tesla's reality.
But Musk's "first principles" are not tried and tested.
In 2017, Musk pushed for the design of a fully autonomous, worker-free Model 3 production line, fantasizing about subverting traditional car productivity.
However, this wild idea has taken Tesla to the "hell of production capacity". Musk had hoped that by the end of 2017, the Model 3 production could reach 20,000 units/month, but only 2,425 units were completed in the last three months.
"One of the big mistakes we made was trying to automate things that are very easy for humans but hard for robots to do." He said on an earnings call at the time, "It [the robot] looks very stupid." When you see it, you think, wow! Why are we doing this? ”
There is only a line between genius and madness
When an industry-leading enterprise has an occasional safety accident, as long as it is handled properly, most people will choose to forgive.
In 2010, Jobs acknowledged a problem with the iPhone 4's antenna but did not apologize or recall it. In the end, the iPhone 4 had a return rate of only 1.7%, less than one-third of the daily return rate of other mobile phone brands, and it was the best-selling smartphone on the market for a whole year after its release.
In 2012, Coca-Cola, which accounted for 17% of the domestic market share, was chlorine-containing, and although it was subsequently recalled and destroyed, Coca-Cola insisted that the batch of products met the standards and was safe to drink. Like Tesla today, Coca-Cola also left an arrogant impression at home. But Coca-Cola is still The most popular soft drink brand in China, with a 9% market share.
What these companies have in common is that there were no competitors with equal overall strength in the same period, and they were almost the best choice for the same price point and category of products in the same situation.
Tesla's arrogant attitude and rough workmanship are facts, and it is undeniable that technology is leading and many product definitions have become industry standards. You can see in a Tesla a number of mobile phones, computers, and even home appliances industry advanced technology and design integration, now smart electric vehicles on the "standard" suction doors, front trunk, OTA upgrades are from Tesla's open patents.
After all, if there is no large enough ally, tesla alone will be difficult to fight against the entire fuel vehicle system.
There is only a line between genius and madness, and cruel capitalists and great change-makers are often two sides of the same coin.
Ashley Vance, who wrote "Iron Man of Silicon Valley," said of Musk this way: He is not without emotion, but he just feels that he is the only one who understands his mission and is pressed for time. He is less concerned about the feelings of others than the average person, and he is more intolerant, because he takes too much risk. The employee should do his best to help him solve the problem, otherwise he will just get out of the egg.
Musk describes it this way, "Entering Tesla is like you choose to enter Special Forces." It's also good to be in the military, but working at Tesla, you choose to take on the challenge. ”
Tesla China and headquarters are in step with the rhythm.
A Tesla HR said that Zhu Xiaotong has three basic principles for recruiting people: smart, carrying (can be tortured), and recognizing Tesla. In Zhu Xiaotong's heart, "three months is a hurdle", and the people who can adapt to it in three months are Tesla people, "Not just leave." Tao Lin, the head of public relations, sometimes schedules the interview time at 11 or 12 pm as a reference for the strong willingness of candidates to join.
"People are like batteries, it's time to work the boss put it in, dry until the battery is out of power to change a battery." Hr said above.
Staying at Tesla for three months is considered an "old man" and six months is a "veteran". One employee explained, "It's really long because the working hours are so long. ”
A former Tesla China employee described the working atmosphere as a "white terror", promotion or salary increase usually only a simple email notification, more impressive is the "alarm bell long" full staff email received from time to time, which is a notification of the handling of illegal employees, the information detailed to the department position, name. In contrast, the departing employee notification email never writes the name, but represents the number of the labor tag.
"People are always worried about what reason they will be fired." In the memory of the above-mentioned departing employees, some people were caught by the traffic police for driving an unlicensed Tesla, and they were criticized and dismissed by the "alarm bell" email notification.
Even if Tesla employees leave their jobs, they are still restricted by Tesla for a period of time, and the amount of compensation corresponding to the information confidentiality clause is often millions of yuan.
In 2018, Business Insider reported that 40 percent of the raw materials at Tesla's Nevada plant were scrapped or reworked, quoting a source as saying, "There is a mountain of waste in the factory due to inefficiencies." ”
Tesla denied the news, but Musk sulked for weeks and sent an investigative team to find the leaker. In an internal letter, Musk described the leaker, Martin Tripp, a 40-year-old worker engaged in low-level manufacturing, as a "dangerous enemy," calling him involved in "massive destructive activities" that leaked data to the media and "unknown third parties."
Tesla then filed a lawsuit seeking $167 million in damages from Tripp. More dramatically, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, Tesla also sent private detectives to track Tripp and spread rumors that Tripp was a murderer. Musk also hinted on Twitter that Business Insider reporters had taken money from Wall Street bears. After several twists and turns, Tripp's lawyer said, "His (Tripp's) life was ruined." ”
In the early days, Tesla was able to withstand the loss of employees, and it was basically the only car company in the United States that could accept disruptive innovation, and it was the only choice for mechanical engineers with ideas and talents. The brand effect is enough for Tesla to continue to attract and recruit top talent.
But not what it used to be. At least in China, there are more and more new car manufacturers willing to give preferential treatment to top talents, and Tesla is no longer the best choice.
"The person in charge of body quality changed two or three people last year, and it has been difficult to recruit in the back." A Tesla China HR said that Tesla relied on the brand aura, at first it could recruit very powerful people, but then some positions could not recruit people who were willing to come, and the requirements gradually became less high.
Tesla's Shanghai factory is more inclined to recruit mature workers who can be directly started, and now it is also starting to recruit from technical schools. Although people who are worried about other new cars and "two into the palace" will come back to "steal information", they will not completely refuse. Because some positions "it's good to be able to come." ”
Most of the companies with a market value of 100 billion and trillion US dollars have the characteristics of "stability", solid operating rules, management teams, and decade-long strategic planning.
But Musk doesn't like the rules, much less likes to follow them.
In his advice to increase productivity, he said that if, in a certain situation, following the company's rules and regulations was ridiculous and would be drawn into a Dilbert cartoon, then the company's rules and regulations would have to be revised. "In general, use common sense to guide yourself."
This is Musk's path to turning his fantastic ideas into reality, and it is also the reason for Tesla's repeated crises. The question is, when one day, the 70-year-old Musk officially announces his retirement on Mars, what will Tesla do with Tesla who stays on Earth?
Musk still has 20 years to think about the answers to his questions.
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