Tesla has partnered with Curevac to help fight the coronavirus, but what is the extent of this partnership? I’ve seen claims all over Twitter from a few of Elon Musk’s critics saying that he should “stick to making rockets.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently responded to a CleanTechnica article on Twitter by noting that Tesla is really like a dozen different startups. What would these startups be? Let’s explore some possibilities.
This story is about Tesla’s moats, but I don’t mean to imply that Buffett would invest in Tesla. Tesla is far from the value investments of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Rather, Buffett’s comments are to demonstrate the importance of moats. Morningstar even has a guide called Why Moats Matter. Understanding the moats a business employs is clearly important to understanding the business and its future.
Klaus Grohmann, the former head of Grohmann Engineering, the German manufacturing firm recently acquired by Tesla, was ousted as an exec at Tesla following clashes with CEO Elon Musk. Well, that’s the rumor anyway, originating with an unnamed source quoted by Reuters.
While the United Auto Workers union in the US has yet to successfully unionize Tesla’s workforce, and has apparently been viewed by CEO Elon Musk as nothing more than an agent of the larger auto manufacturers, the situations in other parts of the world are perhaps a bit different. Case in point: in Germany.
Elon Musk believes deeply in vertical integration. Maybe that marks him as a control freak or maybe it just means he is a smart businessman. Over the past year, Tesla has added Riviera Tool & Die to its list of corporate acquisitions and changed its name to Tesla Michigan. That brought control over many aspects of the manufacturing process in-house. While other companies rely on “just in time” relationships with suppliers, Tesla wants to exert greater control over the quality and scheduling of its supply chain.
