For a super smart inspirational genius, he sure is doing the usual terrible corporate boss routine.
”Here's a bullshit goal I want you to meet all of a sudden. How are you going to do it? That's your problem, not mine.”
I really don’t want to come across as a Musk apologist, but blasts like this from a ceo can be effective and making a difference. Imagine you’re an engineer who wants to produce a great piece of machinery to tight tolerances, but your boss is yelling at you to meet deadlines. Now you have something to point to when they’re saying to cut quality. The organization needs to be able to handle this kind of pushback, but it can work.
Given that teslas have notoriously bad tolerances, like gaps on the order of millimeters, ya might want to fix the cause of that first lol.
This is how "entrepreneurs" "innovate". They just say they want something and everybody else tries to work around the roadblocks the CEO probably put in place that make achieving the goal way harder than necessary.
I used to work for a company that made stamping dies for aluminum cans, and some of those dies had tolerances close to .0004", because the aluminum is very thin and could crack and tear if the dies were not made precisely. The cans themselves are not that precise, they just need to hold beer without exploding. I can't speak to Legos, but cars absolutely do not need this kind of precision, not even in the bearings. And especially not in the sheet metal body panels.
I can't speak to Legos
Legos famously have a weirdly high tolerance for injected molded plastic*, it's part of the branding they use to justify their high price. It does make them snap together more reliably than Mega Blocks or whatever, but Mega Blocks or whatever usually snap together anyway, so I don't know whether that extra precision counts as necessary.
* People quote all sorts of tolerances for this, but the most credible-looking one I found was 0.04 mm.
Critical support for
demanding sub-human hair tolerances for the panels of that shitbox. I'm sure you will get it done for a bargain.Email? He doesn't send down dictates via Xeet now?
I've used waterjet, CNC, and EDM parts. The waterjets typically give me ~100 micron accuracy, CNC ~20 micron and EDM ~10 micron.
"All parts of the vehicle"
Yeah just cut out the body in waterjet, how hard can it be?
Doesn't temperature affect precision within that range? Like when the parts cool down, they'll be unprecise.
For years, the production rate of cybertruck was 0/year.
Musk wants us to use EDM to manufacture all the parts, so we're committed to producing a single cybertruck a year
Five hours later, in another email: “Sorry everybody I was super high when I sent that last one your way.”
No way he’s ever said sorry for anything
Teslas, famous for their tight tolerances.
Elon heard that there's tolerance in manufacturing and his apartheid brain went "not on my watch!"
precision predicates balls
It really does take a genius and visionary to sit back and say "Hey, guys, let's make this, but with as small an error as I can imagine. Don't like, assess how precise stuff needs to be or consider any of that. Just make it all like really, unreasonably well, okay?"
I'm sure the engineers are blown away by that big mind, what a privilege. It reads like an excuse to blame the engineers when the truck inevitably sucks because they didn't follow his perfect design.
He's known for flipping the fuck out on anyone at anytime for any reason. I worked with a number of people who came from Tesla and they had endless horror stories about him. Basically you just pray never to run into him and if you do, try your best not to get noticed or you might end up losing your job that day just because he likes to instill fear and make himself feel big by firing people for any or no real reason.
Yeah I hate those fake appeals to "genius". To the extent that someone like Musk provides "guidance" at all, it is to merely hop on his email and say some Captain Obvious shit to thousands of people who are too busy doing real work to read that shit.
Bourgeois apologists always deny the theft of surplus values from the workers and insist that profit is merely the boss's "wages" for his "unique labor" of "training, guidance, and planning".
But most of the actual training, guidance, and planning is not done by the actual owners, but by managers, who are employees that are paid a high salary, but are not usually board members or share holders or other bourgeoisie who live primarily off of surplus value.
