[legion]

Part III:

All told, more than 36 Tesla vice presidents or higher-ranking staffers had left the company in the previous two years. Some of them weren’t replaced. Soon, according to various sources, there were 19 people directly reporting to Musk and another 11 executives who did not have superiors. (Tesla disputes those numbers.) Musk had enormous oversight responsibilities, particularly as he was running other companies at the same time. “It felt like the adults were leaving the building,” one senior finance person told me. “There was really no one left who could push back on Elon anymore.”

By then, even Musk had conceded that the company’s fully automated factory vision, the “alien dreadnought,” wasn’t working. Workers ripped out conveyor belts inside the Fremont plant. Employees began carrying car parts to their workstations by hand or forklift and stacking boxes in messy piles. In April, Musk halted production for an entire week to make repairs. On some level, Musk seemed to recognize that he was undermining Tesla. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake.” He once told a colleague: “We just have to stop punching ourselves in the head.”
...
Rumors of Musk’s behavior made their way to potential hires. One story that numerous people recounted involved a candidate for a retail development position. When he came to his interview with Musk, he wore blue shoes. Musk turned to a colleague and said he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes. The colleague explained the candidate’s qualifications. But Musk was unmoved; he rejected the candidate. (In a statement, a Tesla spokesperson said that Musk rejected the candidate because his experience wasn’t right for Tesla, and “the fact that Elon also mentioned in passing that he didn’t like the candidate’s shoes had nothing at all to do with why he wasn’t hired.”)

The story, however, came to be seen as an example of Musk’s impulsiveness. “After hearing about that, you stop recommending to friends they should apply,” a former executive told me. “You don’t want to put friends through that.”
...
On July 1—more than two years after opening reservations for the Model 3—Musk finally sent the jubilant email many employees had been waiting for. “I think we just became a real car company,” he wrote. Tesla had manufactured 5,031 Model 3 vehicles during a seven-day period. They had hit their goal, six months late, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and dozens of executive departures. “What an incredible job by an amazing team,” Musk wrote. “Couldn’t be more proud to work with you.”

Employees inside the company also thought it was amazing, though some cite different reasons.

“For me, the fact that we were able to build at scale, amid all that craziness, that’s the real accomplishment,” one former engineering executive told me. “Just think about it: We designed a car that is so simple and elegant you can build it in a tent. You can build it when your CEO is melting down. You can build it when everyone is quitting or getting fired. That’s a real accomplishment. That’s amazing.”