You’re right, balancing internal and external communication is a challenge. Musk isn’t the first CEO of a high growth company to have to grapple with it. In most ways Musk is superior to most CEOs, but on this particular management challenge, Musk’s impulse to give aggressive projections is quite detrimental.It is not as simple as this. There is an interplay between external and internal deadlines - and how seriously people take the internal deadlines.
BTW, the deadlines that are too aggressive also demotivate people. So, EM has to balance between setting too unrealistic a deadline and too much gap between internal & external. I beleive his internal deadlines are indeed more aggressive than what he is tweeting out.
For eg., it is likely he thought by Aug 16 Enh Summon can indeed be out. Afterall we had EAP get new enh summon a couple of weeks back. So, it could have been out potentially by now.
In anycase this is what I think Tesla should do in terms of increasing FSD price :
- Rollout the feature to EAP
- If early feedback is good, announce likely increase of FSD in "coming weeks"
- Release feature, set the date for price increase 1/2 weeks out
- Increase price on the date set
In the last earnings release, the company tried to rectify previous guidance errors by giving very little specific guidance. That won’t work for two reasons: 1) WS dislikes vagueness, and 2) Musk will continue to impulsively spout projections (“tough Q1, not as tough Q2, terrific Q3”, whatever that all means).
Musk and his management team should collectively agree on specific, very conservative guidance, publish it quarterly, not deviate from it in his public comments, and hopefully beat it most quarters if it’s truly conservative enough. That’s how they’d win the public’s trust, a very valuable thing to have.