Elon Musk: Tell Me "Who the F*** You Are"
Ed Note: Tim Higgins's new book, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, tells the history of the most famous electric car company in the world through its highs and lows. In the excerpt below, the author recounts how Musk took control of a factory when Model 3 assembly was falling behind, firing top executives and engineers with a manic brutality.
As they struggled with the automated assembly line, Antoin Abou-Haydar, an engineer hired several months earlier from Audi to work on production quality, raised an observation to Doug Field and other executives. The engineering team had done such a good job designing the Model 3 for assembly that in the previous July and August they had had a comparatively easy time making the car by hand. Instead of the complex automated assembly line that they were building, maybe they should just start over again—without robots?
The suggestion didn’t go far. Musk was invested in making his line (which he had taken to calling the Alien Dreadnought) work. He was selling investors on the idea that eventually the factory would need only a few people, similar to the way Tim Watkins had programmed machines to work an overnight shift alone. Musk had envisioned a three-story assembly line, with parts of the car moving overhead on the top level to workstations on the second level, where workers would add parts delivered from the third level beneath their feet by a conveyor belt system. It seemed like an eloquent system to save space and manpower. In practice, it was a mess. Engineers couldn’t get the timing right. The lack of space at the factory led to a crowded environment, one that felt like walking through a battleship.
