While I think just about anybody could do a better job with US car companies than the current management (or of the past 20 years), I don't know that Elon Musk has proven he has the ability to run a car company effectively, either.
Tesla has consistently delivered late, made numerous financial and legal missteps, and they've underestimated (dramatically) the cost of producing their cars (the Tesla roadster is more than twenty grand more expensive than the early price estimates). That's not to say they aren't learning fast enough, or that they won't build a great car company...I just think it's early to suggest that Elon Musk is a genius at running a car company at this point in time.
To be fair, this has absolutely nothing to do with Musk actually trying to run Detroit and everything with getting some free press for saying that he should.
The only reason Tesla is still in business is a massive $350 million U.S. government loan. Tesla is just as bankrupt as Chrysler and GM but has better PR and lobbyists. They are exhibit A in America's new crony capitalism-- US taxpayers give a loan while a bunch of millionaire investors and Daimler get all of the upside.
But they're not successful yet, that's the point. (Of course, this is under the crazy assumption that we're defining business "success" as turning a profit)
"relative" to what? Relative to Toyota, Tesla is not successful. Relative to, say, General Motors, Tesla has, so far, successfully avoided bankruptcy. Tesla has built cars and sold a few of them, but they are years away from making money at it. Which is OK, of course...car building is capital intensive and takes a long time. But the jury is still out on whether Tesla will succeed or fail. I just think it takes massive chutzpah for Musk to present himself as someone that knows the answers to fixing Detroit, when his own car company has a lot of blunders in its history (which it may have learned from, and it may very well turn out to be a great car company...but, as I said, nobody knows that yet).
I could be remembering my history wrong, but wasn't Paypal successful because they didn't do any of the stuff Musk suggested when Confinity and X.com merged?
Was he the guy that pushed for a mass-migration to Windows for PayPal infrastructure (despite the fact that the existing UNIX infrastructure was working fine)? If so, I retract anything nice I've ever said about him. The man is clearly an idiot.
It wasn't necessarily that simple. They were trying to merge a company with a Windows infrastructure with a company that had a Unix infrastructure and were trying to decide on one infrastructure moving forward. But yes, he was the one pushing for Windows.
Definitely an idiot. This was way back in the 90's. Windows was simply not an acceptable substitute for a server operating system back then (though it might be today, for some classes of problem). I'm actually not able to find Max Levchin's deeper technical discussion of the issue (which I remember being a pretty compelling case, and I read it a couple of times back then), but I did find several references from others discussing it, including pg:
PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows—even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead. - http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
I think what is simple is that Musk ignored technical reality based on a personal whim, and seemingly let personal conflicts get in the way of sound technical decision-making for a multi-million (soon to be billion) dollar business.
Tesla has consistently delivered late, made numerous financial and legal missteps, and they've underestimated (dramatically) the cost of producing their cars (the Tesla roadster is more than twenty grand more expensive than the early price estimates). That's not to say they aren't learning fast enough, or that they won't build a great car company...I just think it's early to suggest that Elon Musk is a genius at running a car company at this point in time.