Elon's Ethics
Occasionally, when I mention to someone that I drive a Tesla or that I have investments in the company, I’ll get a response like, “The cars might be okay but that Musk guy sounds like a jerk” or something worse. If I ask what makes them think that, the answer is usually pretty vague or begins with a reference to him smoking pot or some rumor about him driving his employees too hard, etc.
So here are some plain facts (in no particular order) that explain why I am a fan of Tesla and Elon Musk.
Experience: It may come as a surprise to some that Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla, Inc. In fact, the company was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Elon’s first company – founded with his brother – was Zip2, which they sold to Compaq for $307 million. From there, he went on to create X.com, which became PayPal and eventually sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon’s share was about $165 million and he used $100 million of that to found SpaceX in 2002. He did not get involved with Tesla until 2004 when he became chairman of the board of directors and, eventually CEO in 2008. But did you also know that right now, Elon Musk has spent more time as the chief executive of Tesla than any other auto manufacturing CEO in the WORLD has spent in their current position? So much for the argument that he’s a “newcomer” to auto manufacturing.
Tesla’s mission statement says, “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Prove it.
Okay . . .
Patents: On June 12, 2014 Elon Musk posted a notice on the company website stating that “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” To wit: if you want to use some of Tesla’s tech to build a car that competes with Tesla in the marketplace, have at it! Come on in. The water’s fine! The more the merrier! By contrast, I can remember an incident a number of years ago where a pre-school in the L.A. area painted some Disney cartoon characters on the side of their building and almost immediately received a threat from Disney’s legal department. (Hanna Barbera contacted the school and offered to replace the Disney characters with some of their own for free. Score one for the kids.)
Code of Conduct: Like most companies, Tesla has a well documented Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. However, Tesla also enforces a Code of Conduct for their various business suppliers that ensures no one in the supply chain uses forced labor, illegal child labor or conflict minerals, among other things. It’s also worth mentioning that, during the California wildfires when some gas stations were gouging customers, sometimes charging triple their normal rates for dino-juice Tesla provided free supercharging and increased the range for drivers of standard-range vehicles in the evacuation areas through an over-the-air update.
Supercharging: Tesla does charge for use of their Superchargers. For this reason, I sometimes hear people opining that Musk is out to “make a killing on that supercharger network. It might be cheap now but you wait until they sell a million cars and watch the price go up”. Part of his master plan for world domination? Except there’s this . . . right on the Tesla website: “Tesla is committed to ensuring that Supercharger will never be a profit center.”
Integrity: For years, he’s had to read articles in the mainstream media and listen to sound-bites from Wall Street hedge fund folks trying to make their short positions pay off saying, “the big three automakers will eat Tesla for breakfast as soon as they get their EVs on the market”. Even after all this, when Ford announced their best bid into the EV market – the Mustang Mach-E, Elon did not put out a statement on why Tesla’s Model 3 is a better car or try to denigrate Ford’s design or engineering, as competitors might be expected to do. No. He CONGRATULATED the team at Ford for their accomplishment. Why? Go back and read the mission statement.
Have a Tesla Model 3 or thinking of buying one? Get mansplained and ma’amsplained in one book by two owners who share their experience and love of the car in a manner decidedly more fun than the standard owner’s manual.
