Elon Musk: Leadership, Financial Success, and the Future of Tesla Essay

Elon Musk is a person of a creative and critical mind. His leadership skills could be defined by five essential characteristics such as visionary thinking, confidence, decisiveness, reliability, and progressiveness. Musk’s visionary thinking led all of his campaigns towards unprecedented success through bold decisions in unexpected directions, such as the flamethrower incentive. Simultaneously, the billionaire exhibits confidence in his decisions and ventures. The majority of his ventures are self-sponsored, which clearly demonstrates his decisiveness. The reliability or rather trustworthiness of Musk could be seen through the marketability of Tesla corporation. The company is valued higher than the combination of the top ten auto-constructors in the world despite the low net profit margins. Nevertheless, Musk continues to progress his ideas through positive tenacity while regarding each failure as the learning steppingstone to success. This dedication to work allowed the billionaire to keep developing his companies to their current scope. Musk’s leadership is reliable and explosive akin to his creative engineering skills. With its first management, Tesla’s business strategy was not particularly effective. They had comparable ideals, but they were not very good at putting them into practice. While Tesla still has a number of issues with its production procedures, Musk was a little bit better at finishing projects. Musk’s ability to increase Tesla’s product offerings and raise consumer expectations for the company’s goods was perhaps his biggest achievement. This drastically reduced their marketing expenses and improved their beneficial impacts. The best PR will always be word of mouth. Technically speaking, his suggestions are far superior to anyone else’s. He does, however, struggle greatly with timelines and quality assurance. He is a highly talented manager, but his media statements portray an overly ambitious figure. From a human relations perspective, he appears to be doing okay. Although he presents himself as a highly demanding employer, he nevertheless appears to be approachable. In other words, he deviates from the perception of strong CEOs who act diva-like. The world’s three richest men—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet—do not appear to boast about their wealth. The market sees Musk as a sort of modern-day Steve Jobs. Elon Musk has a similar atmosphere of unstoppable success and limitless innovation when financial markets are considered. Although he is a resolute leader, Tesla’s current value is likely due to his resolution. The world is in dire need of such creative and reliable leaders. Financial situation of Tesla was eccentric and explosive akin to the character of its leader. Tesla’s share price was $33.87 at the end of 2012. They increased to well over $200 three years later. Shares increased to almost $340 by December 2017. Tesla divided its shares for the first time in 2020; prior to that year’s five-for-one split, the price of a single share had surpassed $500. Tesla stock has continued to soar after the stock split in 2000. In the first quarter of 2020, Tesla stock fell below $100 before rising to $1,200 around 18 months later. Tesla’s stock was worth $1,077.60 at the conclusion of the first quarter of 2022. Tesla’s (TSLA) present balance sheet and capital structure have been a source of worry for analysts and investors, despite the fact that it has been the darling of many investors over the previous decade. Tesla appears to have found success with its patient and long-term investing financial plan. Tesla must continuously boost productivity, cut costs, and grow production capacity. The business may be able to request debt financing at a reduced rate now that it is profitable. Following a successful fiscal year in 2021, Tesla is in a considerably better financial situation than it was a few years ago. Tesla achieved profitability in 2021, exceeded EPS projections each quarter, and had a substantially better debt-to-equity ratio. Therefore, a financial assessment of Tesla’s performance reveals the high competency of Musk’s leadership. The recommendations that could be made for innovator entrepreneurs will revolve around the notions of transparency and prolonged realization of the company’s projects. The main complaint against Musk and Tesla has been that they frequently break their promises, particularly when it comes to how rapidly they can increase their capacity for making cars. The problem may be made worse by hiring a well-known chief operating officer with a track record in manufacturing. An executive who lives and breathes manufacturing excellence and fills in holes in Musk’s history would be an obvious advantage for a team managed by a mostly self-taught production specialist who simultaneously manages a solar-panel company and the rocket firm SpaceX. Furthermore, Musk can continue to make comments at off-site conferences about climate change and machine learning that imply he is actually more interested in operations than vision, in which he excels. It is challenging to get a figure that would inform investors more about the business’s medium-term prospects and whether demand for Tesla vehicles is waning as rivals introduce electric vehicles like Chevrolet’s Bolt. Since the Bolt’s introduction in December 2016, around 8,000 units have been sold in 2 years, while about 400,000 Model 3 orders are pending. Due to a large number of inventories, Chevy said on Monday that it was prolonging a production outage at a Bolt factory. On CNBC, Jim Cramer remarked that Musk had dodged inquiries about whether missed shipping estimates for Model X SUV crossovers and Model S sedans indicate that consumer demand for the pricy electric vehicles has peaked. However, at the time, Musk’s commentary was not comprehensive.