Tesla
is trending to fail spectacularly. (CEO Elon Musk actually has an impressive
failure history.) Tesla has been burning cash at an unsustainable rate, and it keeps making avoidable mistakes that weaken it.
Here's what is weird: You'd think the firm's biggest problem would be
that every large car maker was working behind the scenes to kill it.
However, with the exception of the dealerships (which I'll get to), the
car companies for the most part appear to have worked harder to emulate
Tesla than to destroy it.
I expect that if Tesla fails, all fingers will point to Musk and the
executive team as problems because we focus more on blame than
understanding the cause of a mistake. This is problematic, because folks
then don't learn from mistakes -- they just learn to dodge blame and
avoid risks, which would be the wrong lesson to take away from this.