Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell (2024)

More concerning to executives were Musk’s low periods, particularly in the wake of his split from Amber Heard. In the weeks after the first Model 3 handovers, Musk occasionally didn’t show up for meetings, or they would be canceled at the last minute, former employees say. Colleagues say they would call him on his cell phone in the morning, to make sure he had started the day. Musk gave bizarre interviews: He described being in “severe emotional pain” to a writer from Rolling Stone and then asked for dating advice. “I will never be happy without having someone,” he said. “Going to sleep alone kills me.”

In the months after the handover party, Musk seemed angrier than before, according to multiple people. “It started to feel like every day you expected to be fired,” said one executive who says he had three supervisors in three days. “There was this constant feeling of dread.”

Some managers feared that by taking on more prominent roles they increased their risk of termination or public humiliation. One former executive described Musk shaming her in front of colleagues. “He was shouting that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was an idiot, that he’s never worked with someone so incompetent,” she told me. In a company with so many male employees, “as a woman it was particularly humiliating,” she said.

Todd Maron, Tesla’s general counsel, said in defense of Musk that “there’s a lot of people outside Tesla who will sort of sugarcoat what they actually think of your performance, or of an issue, because they don’t really want to have the hard conversation.” Musk, however, “is someone who, I think, puts a lot of effort into forcing himself to be fully honest, and when he genuinely thinks someone has failed at something, he will let you know that he thinks you have failed at that and that the company requires that you do better so that we can achieve our mission and succeed.” (A month after I spoke to Maron, Tesla made the announcement that he would be leaving in January, one in a string of recent executive departures, which includes the company’s chief information officer, chief people officer, chief accounting officer, and vice presidents of manufacturing, worldwide finance, and engineering.)

Whether it was because of Musk’s management style or in spite of it, progress continued. “And that was the weird part,” a high-­ranking engineering executive said, “because we were doing amazing work. I don’t want it to seem like the whole experience was negative, because when people were shielded from Elon, Tesla was amazing. We did incredible things.”

By the fall of 2017, parts of the Model 3 assembly line were starting to function smoothly. Production was beginning to pick up. Advances sometimes felt Pyrrhic, though, given Musk’s tendency to announce ambitious milestones. (Shareholders have sued the company over such announcements, and the Department of Justice has opened a probe into whether Tesla misled the public about Model 3 projections and production. Tesla, in a statement, said it was cooperating with the Department of Justice and that “Tesla’s philosophy has always been to set truthful targets.”)

Then, one evening in late October of that year, as things were still going badly inside the Gigafactory, Musk climbed onto the facility’s roof and posted a video on Instagram of himself and a few others roasting marshmallows, drinking whiskey, and singing a Johnny Cash song. “That did not go over well,” said a former high-­ranking engineering executive. “All these people are working super hard, and he’s drinking and having a campfire.” Soon afterward, the company revealed that it had lost $671 million in the previous quarter and had built only 222 Model 3s; it had lost $1.5 billion in the first nine months of the year. During a November conference call with Wall Street analysts, as his colleagues listened apprehensively, Musk declared: “I have to tell you, I was really depressed about three or four weeks ago.” But he had become optimistic. “Now I can see sort of a clear path to sunshine,” he said. He had been working nonstop, sleeping in the factory, personally diagnosing robot calibration problems. “We are on it,” he added. “We’ve got it covered.”