Tesla Battery Manufacturing & Energy Storage

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

Are Tesla Energy and Automotive completely separate organizations? How should one from the outside consider it?

Yes. Elon is the common glue between all these large organizations. There are many small groups independent inside Tesla. There is no large committee that runs the whole organization. There is Tesla Energy, Megapack, solar, battery manufacturing, and then you have cars, autonomy, and consumer products like home chargers, etc. All of these units are fairly independent, then they all report into the SVP, and then it goes straight to Elon. The hierarchy is very small. There is a lot of independence within these organizations, but everything is located within the bigger picture. The big goal is to enable energy transition, and there are multiple ways to get there. One is to make cars, and the other is to make energy storage.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

That works well. What doesn’t work well? What was frustrating while you were there?

I'm not a person that gets easily frustrated; I’m fatalistic, I guess. Tesla wastes a lot of money, which wouldn’t work in many other companies. Tesla is not running on a tight budget, so Elon is willing to lose money on a project, as long as the outcome gets you moving forward. The Tesla batteries are a decent example. Tesla is definitely losing money on the Tesla battery, because the development cycle is very long. They spend huge amounts of money on equipment, people, and buildings to get this product off the ground, and still buy batteries from Panasonic and other companies. It has probably been three years or more that Tesla has been trying to get into that space, and it’s of limited success, and a lot of money has been spent on it. I think most other companies would have given up at this point, and just not done it. But Tesla is committed to producing their own battery. At some point, they will be successful, and everybody will be amazed how well it works, but a lot of money is being wasted, going down that path.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

How important is making money in the business?

Making money is not the point, but it's something you need to do to run the company. No one I know at Tesla is driven by money; nobody talks about how many stock options they have, or what the salary is like, or what kind of title they have.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.