As an extension of Volumes I and II of this series, this book contains a very detailed elaboration of the Tesla story, in a way that also serves to examine the interaction of technology and economic forces that determine the evolution of the structural profitability of any industry, especially capital-intense industries. The underlying economics are the “five forces” introduced to the management lexicon in the strategic management corpus of research. Here there is a strong emphasis on the interplay among product technology, production and supply chains, and “Wall Street.”
This volume may be likened to a complete case study of Tesla through the time of publication, with the most salient learning points boldfaced and italicized. Many popular media articles are excerpted and abridged to illustrate points of emphasis. This keeps the story alive, meaningful, and urgent.
However, the author is a retired business professor, scholar, and researcher, and not an investigative reporter. His abiding research interest has always been the management of innovation and technology, a legitimate branch of management scholarship. For this book he conducted no interviews and double-checked no media data, though multiple media sources by themselves typically provided cross-checks. This approach does not portend to be any kind of tell-all “inside story.” It advocates no one person, no one company, no one technology, and no portion past, present, or future of the global automobile industry at large. It accepts the veracity of reported events and turns to their practical and theoretical interpretations.
The development of this book started in 1993 when the author decided on a research setting worth risking a career on, for his Ph dissertation in business administration. The “experiment” of choice was the electric vehicle (EV) movement in the early 1990s, and the unit of analysis was “the battery.” Data included over 2,000 public media items collected systematically and professionally. That dissertation was published in 1996. Now retired after a successful academic career, his interest has returned to studying EVs, and this book might better be subtitled “what my 1996 dissertation always wanted to be when it grew up.”
Here, a similar approach was taken: first developing a media item database, by the systematic collection of well over 1,200 media items from 2012 to 2018. Out of that database, about 150 items are excerpted or referenced. While there is plenty of other data that could be assembled, it would be much more haphazard and prone to bias. Truth notwithstanding, it is only fair to expect any given media company to speak in terms that its consumers expect. For example, many articles are from the business media, speaking to that clientele. Thus, while the data that appeared in the news media are taken at face value, at the same time, to use Tesla and Elon Musk in order to illustrate any kind of general business phenomenon should be done anecdotally. Any specific article chosen as an illustration does not necessarily represent an exemplar but sometimes, represents an interesting anomaly useful for instructive purposes.
Thus, the author is grateful once again to all who have helped him along the way since 1996, with special thanks to “the media.” The story told there, the first draft of history, is our story as it stands. Perhaps this book constitutes a second draft, but it won’t be the final draft, which cannot be properly written for years to come.