Organizational issues aren't simple. And Musk is known for undervaluing organizational structure.
That could be his kryptonite.
Indeed that's been widely reported and repeated. However, Maxwell Motors was a startup in 1904. It was bought by Walter Chrysler in 1921 who renamed it after himself in 1925.
True, though Chrysler is the youngest incorporated. There have been so many mergers you need a flow chart to track the history of all these companies. The major automakers have different nameplates in part because sometimes they wanted a car nameplate that would appeal to a different demographic, like Saturn, but in some other cases the separate nameplate was a separate company gobbled up by a bigger car company.
Jeep is about the last remaining remnant of a big mishmash of cars companies that make up American Motors. That included Willys-Overland (aka Jeep), Nash Motors (which was also merged with Kelvinator appliances before joining American Motors), and Hudson Motors. When Jeep was picked up by American Motors it was part of the Kaiser empire.
General Motors similarly gobbled up a lot of different car companies in its early days.
There is a Youtube channel called Autozone or something like that which had a few interviews with Munro Associates about their Model 3 teardown. It was interesting but the host was speculating which car company was going to buy Tesla like it was a foregone conclusion. The idea that Tesla could make it as its own car company was an idea beyond consideration. That's the sort of mindset driving some of the opinions in the media. They aren't in anyone's pocket, they just can't conceive of something that different happening.
The car industry is far more conservative (small c) than the electronics industry. The rules of the entire electronics industry has been rewritten entirely several times in my lifetime. When I was 5 my father was doing some photographic work for the new scientific calculators from NCR (yes they once made calculators) and I got to play with some of the samples he had. They were the coolest electronic gadgets I had ever seen. By today's standard they are stone age technology. I hadn't even seen a push button phone at that age. My aunt had the first one I had ever seen and that was a couple years later.
But cars evolved a lot less over that time. My father bought a Chevy Caprice when I was 7 months old. It definitely has differences with ICE sold today, but if you subtract the revolutionary electronics, there is very little difference. Suspensions have improved, and so have transmissions, but the same small block V-8 is still going into many GM vehicles today with some tweaks to the design. How many electronic components that were key elements in designs from the 1960s are going into electronic devices today with few changes?
The car industry in the US has faced a few shakeups over the last 50 years. The biggest were the Japanese "invasion" during the oil crisis and the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, but those aren't that big when compared to the massive revolutions in electronics. In the 1960s a "computer" took up a large room and probably had less computing power than a cheap Android cell phone. Back when I was looking at those calculators handing the most forward thinking visionary in the electronics industry an iPhone may have caused their head to explode.
Tesla is a car company with it's feet planted in Silicon Valley. They think on electronic industry time frames and the car industry gurus can't get their head around it.
Tesla is way ahead in battery production, fast charging convenience, updating cars, and a few other areas, but the one area they are ahead and few people notice is in head space. They think differently from the rest of the car industry and don't have the conceptual boxes that hold everyone else back.
As I commented above, I agreed Elon is not great at organization and that is a sword that cuts both ways. It frees Tesla's minds to think outside the industry's boxes, but it also makes the company chaotic and struggle to get some things done that are rather easy for other companies.
Fiat-Chrysler makes pretty crappy cars overall, but if you get in a minor accident, there isn't a massive delay for parts and when your car breaks down there is rarely a long wait for service.
