Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
There’s just a flood of disappointing news from Tesla-killers this month. I’m actually really surprised at the wholesale level of fail going on here. It’s hard to believe how far behind they are. For sure these companies have the resources to catch up with Tesla and they must have plenty of top notch engineers. If these were sports teams the obvious call would be to fire the managers.
I'm not so sure it's possible: how do you transform a company with ~300,000 employees and a corporate culture of being a big player in an established, safe, 100 years old zero-sum industry with very little genuine innovation, into something that can compete with a fire-breathing, fail-forward Silicon Valley high-tech startup?
Innovation isn't just about great engineers, it's about a whole process, environment and culture that fosters innovation - from top to bottom. Tesla and SpaceX does this well, and so do a lot of other companies, but I don't think there's any example of a big, established company getting infused with innovation at a later stage. Inertia of the ocean liner is just too great.
Killing Tesla in its infancy was always their best shot IMO.