Success isn’t always a smooth road. More often than not the path is rather tough, and requires a good amount of audacious determination and bravado to move forward. No matter how far you have come, further growth always comes with more difficulties and complications that often test your patience and courage. It is the willpower to brave those challenges that differentiate a person who is successful from a person who is not. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk doesn’t need further description or explanation. There is absolutely no question about the fact that the richest man on the earth is indeed successful. The question here is whether traversing this path has been a cakewalk or a promenade through hell. Seems like Musk will choose the latter for an answer.
Closest we got was about a month. The Model 3 ramp was extreme stress & pain for a long time — from mid 2017 to mid 2019. Production & logistics hell.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2020
The Stepping Stones
Tesla’s exuberant success does have a bitter backstory. A story that clearly shows that success and growth do require a lot. Because before shaking hands with success on the finish line, you got to wrestle with failure on the tracks. Everybody has to go through this phase, and it was not any different for Elon Musk.
The years 2017, 2018, and 2019 were a rather tough time for Tesla as its entire future was hanging by a thread. This was the time when the electric car manufacturer was gearing up the production of the Model 3 Tesla, the company’s cheapest electric car. Apparently, things weren’t going quite as expected and the company was a step away from bankruptcy. It was a time for some tough decisions as Musk was forced to weigh the opportunity cost and make a difficult choice.
“Production and logistics hell” is proof enough that the time wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. During the mass production of the Model 3 Tesla, the overall potential and promise of the vehicle were in question as it was rather slow to come off the production lines. The company’s investors were sweating a lot because Tesla was finding it hard to sell the vehicle for the cheap price of $35,000, and make an agreeable profit that justified all the trouble.
In order to save the company from going bankrupt Musk had to make a difficult choice that invited the wrath of quite a number of his investors. In order to save Tesla, he decided to shift resources from the solar company which he acquired three years ago. In Musk’s own words,
“If I did not take everyone off of solar and focus them on the Model 3 program to the detriment of solar, then Tesla would have gone bankrupt. So I took everyone from solar, and said: ‘instead of working on solar, you need to work on the Model 3 program.’ And as a result, solar suffered, as you would expect.”
What is interesting is the fact that this is not the first time Musk and his company have gone through this test of fire. Back in the year 2008, the beginning years of Tesla, the company was a mere three days away from going bankrupt. Failure was right there waiting to close its trap. However, last-minute funding that came through on Christmas eve became the company’s savior. Musk recalls the hardships he had to face during Tesla’s initial years as it was rather difficult to get people to invest in an electric car company. He had put all his money into the business as he was preparing to get in the ring with failure, and we all know very well who emerged victorious in the long run.
