Elon Musk And The Art Of Success

Elon Musk And The Art Of Success
South Africa-born Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, certainly isn’t the shy, retiring type. Musk speaks his mind, and doesn’t care who he might offend. Last year, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates bought a new electric supercar, a Porsche Taycan, Musk put out a tweet saying, ‘My conversations with Gates have been underwhelming to be honest’. This was in response to a Tesla fan’s online comment, saying he was surprised that Gates chose the Taycan over one of Tesla’s electric cars. Gates, who had in an earlier interview on YouTube said that Tesla is the one company that has really driven growth in the electric car market, did not respond to Musk’s ‘underwhelming’ comment. Maybe he knew Musk enjoys a bit of trash-talking every now and then; the Tesla CEO has, at various occasions in the past, tweeted that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of artificial intelligence is limited and that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s plans to colonise space make no sense.

But what’s a few catty jibes between fellow billionaires, and if subtle diplomacy isn’t one of Musk’s biggest strengths, building electric cars certainly is. In the 15 odd years that he’s been at it, Musk has defied all odds, coming out on top in the electric vehicles space. Today, with a market capitalisation of more than $800 billion, Musk’s electric car company — Tesla Inc — is more valuable than any other car company on earth. Not just that, the stock market’s belief in Musk’s vision for the future of the auto industry is so all-consuming that it currently values Tesla more than the combined worth of 10 of the world’s biggest carmakers, including the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Honda, Peugeot, Hyundai, and Nissan. More importantly, in terms of EV capabilities, Tesla is miles ahead of every other automaker, including some that have been building cars for 100 years or more. How Tesla has managed to leapfrog ahead of global automotive giants is a David vs Goliath tale, one that seems to have been lifted straight from the biblical Book of Samuel.

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Some self-proclaimed petrolheads still choose to dismiss electric cars publicly, but in their hearts, even they probably know that the internal combustion engine is fighting a losing battle against the electric motor. With rapidly improving performance, high-end electric cars — like the ones produced by Tesla — have inveigled car enthusiasts to begrudgingly accept EVs as the inevitable future. And while a handful of other carmakers (Porsche, Rivian, Audi, Jaguar, BMW, and Polestar, to name a few) are also producing electric cars that are pretty good, Tesla is quite clearly head and shoulders above the competition. The batteries and electric motors used in Tesla cars are significantly more advanced, more powerful, and for now, the competition simply can’t keep up. That’s what you get when you have carmakers with decades of experience of building internal combustion-engined cars competing with a small, scrappy outfit that was set up, right from the word go, to only produce electric cars.

While the EV trend was till recently seen as a trend only in the richer countries in the west, things are beginning to change in India as well. Tata Motors is one domestic car company that seems to be doing particularly well with EVs, selling around 2,600 units of the Nexon EV in 2020, making it the largest selling electric vehicle in India. The company was quoted as saying that EVs’ contribution to its growth was going to be even bigger in the coming years. Mahindra is also expected to launch an electric variant of its XUV300 towards the end of this year, and Maruti might launch an electric Wagon R in the next few months. This uptick in EV sales in India could not have come at a better time for Tesla, as it was revealed last week that the American company had finally made its first move to launch in India. On January 8, Tesla India Motors and Energy Private Ltd was registered as a private subsidiary of an unnamed international company, with an office on Bengaluru’s Lavelle Road. Gaurav Gupta, Principal Secretary, Commerce & Industries in the Karnataka government was quoted in Mint as saying, “We have been interacting with Tesla for the last few months and it is happy news that they have decided to incorporate their company here.” According to Mint, the state government had indicated that Tesla would open an R&D centre in the city.

The three directors of Tesla India include David Jon Feinstein, the company’s Global Senior Director for Trade Market Access and Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla Inc’s Chief Accounting Officer, who, along with Chennai-born Jayaprakash Vijayan, the company’s Chief Information Officer, are the two top ranking Indians based out of Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto in California (Deepak Ahuja, the company CFO, retired in 2019). The third director is Venkatrangam Sreeram, a tech entrepreneur. He is listed as the Managing Director of the Chennai-based AI firm Clearquote Technologies India Pvt Ltd., and is also the director of Bengaluru-based Xenon Automotive India Private Limited, which specialises in providing hardware and software solutions for automotive industry in areas like dealer and fleet management. Among the clients listed on Xenon’s website are Tata Motors and Jaguar Land Rover. Interestingly, the day before the news of Tesla having registered their Indian subsidiary broke, The Economic Times reported that there was a ‘buzz in the market’ that Tesla was close to signing an MoU with Tata Motors to use the latter’s Indian manufacturing facilities to make their cars for the local market. The Tata Motors share price surged 25 per cent in two days on the back of these rumours, hitting a 52-week high.

Tesla RoadsterTo be sure, talk of Tesla’s imminent foray into the Indian market had been floating around for a long time. Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, was the first to confirm that the American company would start selling its cars in India in 2021 and depending on response, may look at setting up assembly and manufacturing operations in the future. The news was later confirmed by Musk on Twitter in October, when replying to a question from Tesla Club India, saying “Hey Elon, just thought we’d put this out here. We wait and hang on to hope wrt ‘hopefully soon’ for India Tesla entry. Would love to hear of any progress in this regard,” he said ‘Next year for sure.’ Much of Tesla’s sales currently comes from its dominant position in the US EV market. Musk’s push into markets like China, and now India, is part of his global ambition of selling 20 million Teslas by 2030. “I’m not saying for sure we’ll hit 20 million vehicles. But it does seem like a good goal to have because that would mean that we’re replacing one per cent of the global fleet per year,” Musk was quoted telling investors last year. The Indian factory, when it comes up, will be part of this big international push. Besides its facilities in the US, Tesla also manufactures cars in the UK, Netherlands, and China, while new factories are being built in Grünheide, Germany and Austin, Texas. The company also runs 438 Tesla Motor Stores across the world, and around 100 service centres.

Though Musk himself has never spoken in any great detail about Tesla’s India plans, analysts at top investment firms who have an inside track of the company’s working, hold high hopes for the country. Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, told Bloomberg recently that in five years, India will ‘represent 10 per cent of overall demand for Tesla’. He went on to add, ‘The demand picture has changed, and now with Giga 3 built out in China, Berlin, and Austin, India is next.’ Tesla’s ‘Gigafactories’ are giant manufacturing facilities that make the all-important car battery, besides other vehicle components. The first Gigafactory in Nevada, in the US, when fully complete, is expected to cover over 10 million square feet of space spread over hundreds of acres of land. Tesla currently runs two such Gigafactories in the US and one in China. One more is under construction in the US, and one in Germany. These Gigafactories are essential because of the company’s unending demand for batteries. “Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy through increasingly affordable electric vehicles and energy products,” the company says on its website. “To ramp production to 500,000 cars per year, Tesla alone will require today’s entire worldwide supply of lithiumion batteries. Tesla currently produces more batteries in terms of kWh than all other carmakers combined.” The Indian facility, if it is indeed a Gigafactory, would be the company’s sixth Gigafactory.

Tesla cars emerging from the assembly line at a US facility

Where Tesla’s factory will come up in India remains to be seen, and much would depend on which state will offer the best deal. Musk is known to be a shrewd negotiator. After repeatedly hinting about coming to India since 2017, analysts say that he held back setting up Tesla India because of the country’s onerous tax regime, and lack of infrastructure. He had even put out a tweet saying, ‘Maybe I’m misinformed, but I was told that 30 per cent of parts must be locally sourced, and the supply doesn’t yet exist in India to support that.’ That seems to have prompted the government to make big changes in its policy towards EVs. GST on electric vehicles has since then been