"I moved to California 10 years ago, back when Tesla was a boutique car business. We were making 1,000 vehicles a week. My friends and family were telling me it was a big career mistake to work at Tesla. They said it would never be someone's main car, that it's a tech toy, that it's an iPad with wheels on it. But I was just excited to see what this Elon guy was up to."
"Tesla is a very flat organization. When I was there, even relatively young and out of college, it was two levels between Elon and me. That's very unusual to have such close proximity so early in your career. Just because it's a flat org structure, doesn't mean it's a horizontal power dynamic. Elon is the king. What he says goes. If you wanted to get something done, you really did have to go through Elon."
"The drawbacks were that the guy didn't have that much time. In 2017, he was running three different companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He was just getting started with OpenAI. He had two and a half days a week to really focus on Tesla exclusively. You'd have to get things approved in that period of time. But he was also very focused on the product."
An engineer relocated to California ten years ago when Tesla operated as a boutique car maker producing about 1,000 vehicles per week. Friends and family questioned the move, describing Tesla as a tech toy, but enthusiasm for Elon motivated the choice. Tesla featured a very flat organization with unusually close proximity to Elon, yet decision-making was centralized under him, creating approval bottlenecks. In 2017 Elon split focus across multiple companies, leaving limited dedicated time for Tesla. Waymo adopted a more vertical organizational design. The engineer later founded LightSource, an AI-powered procurement startup.
Read at www.businessinsider.com
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