During my 45 year professional career I helped create, worked in or helped dismantle many joint ventures. Factually, more than 100, in many countries, at least a few on every permanently populated continent. None have been successful unless one side had absolute control and the other acted as a supplier or semi-passive investor.
Thus entities such as Airbus, Shell, SWIFT and the ones that have been structured to actually avoid governance issues by not really being quite JV's (e.g. Apple/Foxconn, Tesla/Panasonic) are not really exceptions to the rule. Even those have periodic crises that threaten their survival.
Frankly I think it would be quite plausible for Tesla to have relationships with OEM'S, public energy utilities, mining companies and others that could be durable and beneficial. For example, CATL seems quite close to that already. Probably there are a fair number of other suppliers and customers (mostly in TE, probably) already in that category. We will also see some emerging JV-like relationships with financial institutions including insurance companies.
As Tesla grows there will be more and more of those. It is not implausible for those to develop from Supercharger sharing, tier one suppliers beyond batteries (is LK/IDRA already there?) and more.
We don't really need to have the old-fashioned JV's to extract the benefits without enduring the pain.
Whether we like it or not the hugely complex supply chain issues are now being sources of conflict and outright business failures. Government policies play an outsized role in that (see UK today for reference). So too do business short-term thinking (see semiconductor crisis for reference).
Thus far Tesla has done a stellar job of developing and executing fast workarounds for such issues. That very fast reaction and manufacturing change to cope with unforeseen events distinguishes Tesla (and SpaceX) from nearly everyone else.
This quarter Tesla once again proven that it has manufacturing, design and process advantages oven nearly all competitors. Those would ahem been impossible if Tesla did not have very close connections with myriad outside entities. They don't call them JV's or anything like that.
Less us consider those things when we observe business volume and profit numbers from Tesla.
I actually believe Tesla has succeeded more because they’re willing to do it themselves as relying on others has brought on many of the issues.
We need more batteries. We’re telling the whole world we need more batteries. Who moved first? Tesla. It doesn’t count after the fact in my world.
We need to improve manufacturing processes. Make better use of factory space. Simplify the process. Make cars like Mattel makes toys. Who moved first? Tesla.
Make us space age doors. We tried, we failed. Never mind we’ll do it ourselves.
Build us safe and comfortable seats for cars. Pfft! Never mind we’ll do it.
More raw materials? Fine we’ll look into going directly to the mines.
We need special stainless steel - meh, we’ll come up with the formula ourselves. Oh, did we forget Tesla’s foundry?
Solar has to have battery storage and an integrated inverter and smart software - yup, we got this ourselves.
Chip shortage? Fine, we’ll just do some new software so we can use whatever chips we can get our hands on. Oh, it’s too expensive for Tesla to mfg their own chips. Uh, huh.
Insurance costs our customers too much. Fine, we’ll do that too.
And we’ll build our own AI stuff and Dojo and a Tesla bot and on the list goes.
I think it irks Elon to no end that he has to depend on others; others who move like snails, others who can’t deliver what they promise, others who don’t get it.
How many times has he said in frustration, we can only go as fast as the slowest part? We have to go faster.
No. As much as you think partnerships and relationships will grow in number and significance, I believe the opposite will happen simply because nobody to date has stepped up to the table and laid it all out. Everyone else is playing at it. Some playing better, but nobody risking everything for all except Elon and his companies.
