Tesla boss Elon Musk the success of the company is gradually becoming eerie. Now the multi-entrepreneur has talked his own employees into the conscience.
Munich – Tesla* boss Elon Musk has urgently warned the employees of the Californian e-car pioneer of decreasing cost discipline. With a margin of one percent, Tesla’s profitability had recently been “very low”. Investors would indeed trust in significantly rising profits in the future, Musk wrote in his circular mail. But should the shareholders at some point come to the conclusion “that this is not happening, our stock will be squashed like a soufflé under a sledge hammer! 4besnews Tesla had been making losses for years and was now on the verge of insolvency. However, the car manufacturer has been profitable in the past five quarters. But the company owed this primarily to the sale of CO2 certificates. It was only in the past third quarter that Tesla had also made a significant step forward in operational terms.The bottom line was that the Californians had earned 331 million dollars between July and September, F9news almost twice as much as in the previous year. Deliveries also rose unexpectedly strongly* recently with an increase of 43 percent to 139,000 vehicles, as the company announced on Friday. In contrast, analysts had only expected Tesla to deliver 129,500 cars for July to September.
On the stock market, the development recently caused euphoria. Since the beginning of the year alone, the Tesla share* has gained a good 520 percent. With a market value of almost 440 billion euros, Tesla is now worth almost 2.5 times as much as the German carmakers BMW*, Daimler and Volkswagen* combined. The share price rally has also made Elon Musk a super-rich man. With an estimated fortune of around 128 billion dollars, the multi-entrepreneur has just overtaken Microsoft founder Bill Gates and is now the second richest person in the world behind Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. With a market value of over 550 billion US dollars, Tesla is currently by far the most valuable car manufacturer in the world. The price of Tesla shares has increased six-fold since the beginning of the year – which catapulted Elon Musk to second place among the world’s richest people. The upswing also brings Tesla admission to the important stock market index S&P 500, but the price explosion is apparently on shaky ground.
In an internal e-mail to his employees published by Electrek and CNBC, among others, Tesla boss Musk warns that the stock market boom could be over at any time if the company did not succeed in keeping costs down. Musk used a drastic comparison: if investors stop believing in the expected higher profitability, “our shares will immediately be squashed like a soufflé under a sledge hammer”. Currently, according to Musk in the letter, profitability is around one percent. In order to further reduce costs, he said, a lot of good ideas are needed. Even if each one of them can only contribute a tiny bit to the goal. The aim is to reduce the cost of individual parts, optimize processes in the factories, or work on the design – and at the same time increase quality and possibilities. To enable an electric revolution, Musk said, “We need to make electric cars, batteries and solar systems affordable for everyone. To his employees on this topic as well.
