The Tesla Brain Drain
The future of the struggling car company rests on Elon Musk more than ever before.
Before DOGE, there was Twitter. In 2023, Elon Musk seemed too distracted by his latest venture to run the world’s most valuable car company. Tesla was faltering as he focused on remaking (and renaming) the social-media network. So at Tesla’s investor-day event in Austin that March, Musk responded with a rare show of force. He was joined onstage by a cadre of more than a dozen of the company’s top executives, all to signal that even if he was extremely busy, Tesla was run by a world-class team: “We’ve obviously got significant bench strength here,” Musk said. Sure enough, Tesla closed out 2023 with the best sales it’s ever had.


