MUST WATCH VIDEO FOR INVESTORS
Brand new public info (to my knowledge) about the inner workings of Tesla:
> Complimentary valet team accepts your car at the office entrance and takes it away to charge if it's an EV. No wasted time on parking.
> The office has nice showers, a good gym, world class complimentary artisan coffee bar, and world class gourmet food. Everyone has the same quality and access with no preferential treatment. There is no executive tier or anything. Oh, and the office also has desks and chairs, but they're mostly deserted, because everyone's on the shop floor.
> Elon has worked every job position on the production line at least once, drilling holes, gluing stuff together, snapping parts into place, and programming robots. The rest of the corporate management team is running power tools and robots too, for at least some of their time. And it's not light work either. Every able-bodied employee lifts 45 lb/20 kg objects on a daily basis.
> They view the entire operation as hardware programming, consisting fundamentally of CAD (Computer Aided Design), CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), FEA (Finite Element Analysis), and G code (for programming the robots). They aim to have everything so efficient that the "compile time" for the hardware design is less than a day between design and test, ideally less than 5 seconds. Humans are solely for creative intuitive problem-solving; automation is for everything else.
> Tesla has incredibly detailed data about every customer's cars, service profile, likes and dislikes, and more. Every measurement the car performs is fed into the digital twin model which is fed in aggregate into machine learning models that prominently display what customers want all over Tesla facilities. Everyone has apps on their company phone showing this information. Teams swarm to solve problems on a 3-6 hour sprint cycle to push these metrics higher. A direct, clean feedback loop between owners and the design-build-test cycle.
> Everyone from the moment of hire is authorized to spend company money, but is accountable for being able to justify the decision from first principles reasoning if asked. A newbie could buy a million dollar robot or initiate search for new land acquisition on day one--with a sufficiently compelling rationale. Penalties only apply to bad intention, repeated severe foolishness, or slow rate of attempted innovation. Mistakes are treated as opportunities to improve decision-making skills.
> Tesla does not have a central procurement or supply chain organization. They do have a central database with information about different suppliers, which teams use to just figure out what they need and do their own shopping. The Master of Coin and his Funding Team, which is one of the only centralized organizations in the whole company, mainly is responsible for ensuring there is a sufficiently massive pile of cash for everyone to spend.
> The three hour sprint cycle is a critical factor in getting people to leave their egos at the door, because no one really feels a sense of personal exclusive ownership over any design or process. Imagine if I'm on day shift and I make some decisions...well night shift is going to improve on them and hand me something better than I did. And then I'll improve their work. Thus no one develops ugly baby syndrome/not-invented-here bias.
> Every single car is put through fully-automated, non-destructive, regulatory homologation testing on the "Bamboo Line" to legally certify it for sale. Government officials are permanently stationed on this line for oversight. The reason: Teslas are like snowflakes; the design of the car changes every 3 hours roughly in every position on the line, and so each car might be different than the previous one.
> The Bamboo Line was the origin of Tesla's autonomous driving program.
> Elon's sleeping bag is on the floor in the North Paint building. He still sleeps there often when working at Tesla. This has not stopped now that Production Hell is over.
> Tesla does not really use PowerPoint except for public (recruiting) presentations. In fact, there is essentially no reporting other than face to face conversations with management with the topic of discussion in front of everyone's faces. Reporting is unnecessary because nearly the entire company is having a party on the production line and information travels at the speed of gossip aided by robust visual controls and software measuring progress on all company goals. Managers are working the line too. Gemba is not something managers pat themselves on the back for making a few hours a day of time for, like at most manufacturers; Gemba is the lifestyle at Tesla.
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They are a much flatter and leaner organization than I think anyone outside the company truly realizes. Imagine the STAGGERING implications for Tesla's overhead growth and operating leverage as production explodes this decade. This is how they achieve such incredible innovation on a mere $2-3 billion annual R&D budget. The very concept of a segregated R&D budget almost has no meaning at Tesla, because for them, all spending is, in some sense, a form of R&D.
This is a fascinating hybrid of capitalism and socialism, individualism and collectivism rolled into one. It's a meritocracy yet classless. It's personal empowerment and liberty with social accountability and long-term altruistic orientation. It's a flat UBI of $19.50/hr and merit-based options to buy deeply discounted ownership equity in the means of production. All tools are shared collaboratively. Everyone is taken care of, but there is no coddling nor sympathy for those not willing to work like beasts. We witness what will soon be the most financially profitable enterprise of all time achieve that by pursuing the most ambitious social goals of all time.
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