Power Play summary

The idea of the electric car is as old as the car itself. Automakers have been attempting to create battery-run vehicles since the mid-1800s. Although this was technically possible, producing batteries powerful enough to keep a lightweight, high-speed electric car on the road for long periods of time consistently proved too difficult.

But with the Roadster, Tesla managed to achieve what no other company ever had. Led by a man named J. B. Straubel, Tesla’s engineers produced a fully electric sports car using lithium-ion batteries – the same lightweight batteries that were used to charge laptops. This groundbreaking technology would set the Roadster apart from any other electric vehicle.

At the end of 2006, Eberhard sat in his office with his head in his hands. He had received a call from Musk who, after a weekend of test-driving the Roadster prototype, had a host of complaints and requests for changes. His long list of woes included everything from uncomfortable seats to lack of mechanical buttons for the doors, all of which would cost the firm millions more to address. 

This was an increasingly familiar pattern at Tesla. Musk was pushing all of his ideas. It wouldn’t be long before he would take over Eberhard’s role as CEO. 

For even the most experienced automaker, setting up a new factory is an enormous challenge. But institutional experience does make the process a lot easier, as lessons get passed down through generations and integrated into a playbook of processes. Toyota, for example, established a long-running method for solving maintenance problems, in which any worker is encouraged to stop the line of production until the problem is solved. 

But Musk was not interested in learning from other carmakers. Unlike Toyota, he preferred to keep Tesla’s assembly line running even as issues were being resolved. This translated into chaos on the factory floor. Under Musk’s leadership, everyone raced to beat the clock.

The auto industry is notoriously hard on start-ups. Of all the carmakers selling today in the US, for instance, the last automaker to emerge that was still producing cars was Chrysler, founded way back in 1925. 

At the core of Tesla’s vision was the central question of whether the start-up could really make it in one of the most entrenched businesses around. Even Musk questioned whether his company would be able to join the ranks of GM, Ford, Toyota, and BMW – iconic global brands that sold tens of millions of vehicles every year. But even though the odds were stacked against Tesla, Musk was set on the quest.

On a cold day in January 2019, Elon Musk stood in a field on the outskirts of Shanghai with the city’s mayor, Ying Yong, smiling for a photograph. The occasion was a ceremonial ribbon-cutting to celebrate Tesla’s first attempt to manufacture cars outside of the US. The duo posed in front of the company’s brick-and-mortar factory, six thousand miles away from the assembly line tent back in California. Photos of the smiling duo immediately landed on news screens around the world.

The key message here? At a valuation of over $700 billion, Tesla is currently the world's most valuable automaker.