Is Elon Musk Cracking Up?

Recently, Elon Musk sent out an ill-advised Tweet declaring that Tesla was going private, purportedly with funding from Saudi buyers, whom he had acknowledged had not yet closed the deal, but undoubtedly would. This came as news to the Tesla team as well as the buyers and Musk’s been forced to reconcile some of what he said with questions about his mental health and stability and the future of the company. Essentially since the start, Tesla has been in over their heads, creating a demand that exceeds their resources and falling behind on order deliveries, production schedules, and new releases. 

And it seems like that tweet might actually be a symptom of something bigger. We’ve always known that Elon Musk is a workaholic (who else causally has a space program?) but reports of twenty-hour work days and recreational drug use have cropped up more than once. Musk actually flew to his brother’s wedding two hours before the ceremony and took off immediately after it was over.

So is the stress catching up? Undoubtedly. Azealia Banks, who is no stranger to online controversy, stirred up a social media storm when she shared her opinions about Elon Musk during a weekend at his house, where she had been invited to record with Musk’s significantly younger girlfriend, Grimes. While it’s natural to be skeptical of Banks’s extreme comments about Musk’s family and African diamond mines and her claim about his tweet being composed while Musk was on acid, it’s hard to not wonder if there’s some truth to the claims that he spent the weekend cuddling his girlfriend and pretending he hadn’t sent out the Tweet in the first place.

Elon Musk purportedly hasn’t taken a sick day since he was bedridden with Malaria more than fifteen years ago. He has publically stated he needs Ambien to sleep, if he ever gets the opportunity, and in a recent interview with the New York Times, he was quoted as saying “Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now.”

Perhaps it’s not so much as someone as someones. Whether you believe Azealia Banks’s account that Musk was on acid while composing the tweet or whether you simply think he’s in over his head, it’s clear that the pressure of life as a real-world Tony Stark is catching up to the seemingly-infallible Elon Musk.

So what does that mean for Tesla? Well, for starters, it depends on what Tesla plans to do with Musk and what Musk plans to do with Tesla. From where we sit right now, the most effective course of action would be to keep Musk’s day to day work that of a consultant, a big ideas guy. Though attempts have been made to fill his positions in the past, Elon Musk continues to work 120-hour weeks, a clearly unsustainable pace. Perhaps that contributes to the continuing problems Tesla faces. Perhaps the ideas are simply too grandiose for Tesla to pull off all at once. We may find that when Elon Musk takes a step back, Tesla moves forward.

Naturally, it’s all speculation. For now, all we can do is sit back and see what Elon Musk tweets next – and what Telsa has to say about it. 

Image selected from Car Talk