There are also important lessons here for regulators that are considering incentives to promote specific technologies.

Musk’s approach to most things is to start from scratch, ignoring the hard-won lessons of predecessors, especially in areas like manufacturing and customer service. At its heart, the book features a warning about change for the sake of change. But Ludicrous is also a cautionary tale for anyone starting a business.

Niedermeyer tells us how the original team came to be and what went wrong, giving credit where it is due. Through its efforts over the past 16 years, Tesla has demonstrated to the world that there is a market for appealing electric vehicles that offer the attributes that consumers want beyond environmental friendliness. Prime examples are the doors on the Model X and the two-speed transmission on the Roadster. But if you reach too far, you risk spreading yourself too thin on aspects of the product that aren’t ready for primetime and wasting precious resources. You need enough of the latter to convince customers this is the right path forward buy the cars and fund the business. This requires a balance between dreaming big and focusing on the elements that make your product special. But if your goal is to transform the auto industry and the way people get around, the business itself should probably be as sustainable as the powertrain. There’s nothing inherently wrong with reaching for the stars when developing new technology of products. In Ludicrous, Niedermeyer chronicles the story of Tesla, looking at what the company has accomplished and where it has gone wrong. But why should a company that for a time had a higher market value than General Motors or Ford, need to raise so much cash in order to achieve such a small market share? However, the cult of personality that Musk has built around himself has enabled Tesla to go back to the equity and debt markets over and over again, raising some $19 billion since 2010.

To date, Tesla’s business has never been self-sustaining. A key factor in Tesla’s survival as a going concern has been its ability to raise new capital to fund operations. He has also been the chief pitchman for the brand throughout most of its history.Ĭonversely, he has been in many ways the company’s biggest problem. Musk personally put in most of the dollars that made the Roadster a reality. Certainly, without Musk’s early and ongoing involvement, Tesla would almost certainly never have delivered a product or survived to this day in its current form. Unlike a biography of Musk published a couple of years ago, Ludicrous is not a hagiography of the man, nor does it especially even focus on him except to the degree that he has impacted the path of the company.

Ludicrous by Edward Niedermeyer