Power Play Quotes

“Most people do not appreciate that no decision is also a decision. It is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate, because obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“His next vehicle, a pickup dubbed the Cybertruck, had many of the signatures of a car developed by Musk—features that appealed to him directly (including a dystopian appearance, supposedly bulletproof steel and shatter-proof windows) and that are likely hard to industrialize.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“The stock passed the $700 billion market value milestone that Musk had thrown down years earlier like Babe Ruth calling his shot. It soared from a value of $100 billion to more than $800 billion in 244 days, accomplishing something it took Apple almost a decade to do. With the stock he already owned, his wealth was surging from an estimated $30 billion at the start of 2020 to around $200 billion at the start of 2021, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, he showed total contempt for the SEC, saying he didn’t have anyone routinely reviewing his social-media messages. “To be clear,” he said, “I do not respect the SEC”—which on Twitter he mocked as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Largely thanks to Tesla’s success, the U.S. federal tax credit for buying a fully electric car would begin to phase out on January 1, dropping to $3,750 from $7,500. Midyear it would go to $1,875. By year’s end it would be gone.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“They ultimately agreed to the SEC’s new terms: Musk could keep his role as CEO but he was to give up his title of chairman for three years rather than two, as originally proposed. Musk personally would have to pay a $20 million fine, $10 million more than in the first deal. Tesla would have to pay a $20 million fine and agree to placing two new directors on its board. The company would also have to put in place a plan to monitor Musk’s public comments. He wouldn’t be allowed to tweet material information without prior approval. No more “funding secured” messages without a lawyer looking at it first.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Musk’s lawyers spent that night trying to change Musk’s mind about his refusal of the settlement, even asking celebrity investor Mark Cuban to prod him into a deal. Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, had had his own public battle with the SEC that dragged on for five years, after he was charged with insider trading. It was like a scene out of Showtimes’ Billions, as Cuban counseled the beleaguered CEO, warning”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“One of Musk’s chief assumptions had been that large shareholders would stick with Tesla, even as a private company. It was a naive belief. He learned that mutual funds, due to regulatory requirements, would be forced to trim their stake. His plan had assumed two-thirds of shareholders would follow him; if the likes of Fidelity and T. Rowe, which owned a combined 20 million shares, couldn’t go along, they’d have to be bought out at $420 a share. Or”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Musk called Egon Durban at the private equity firm Silver Lake about the deal. The firm, which included Larry Ellison as an investor, had carved out a high profile in Silicon Valley. In 2013, they helped Michael Dell take the company he founded, Dell, private in a $25 billion leveraged buyout. Durban cautioned that Musk’s hope of allowing all current investors to stay with the company would be unprecedented.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Normally, a company alerts the NASDAQ ahead of the maneuver Musk was now casually proposing, and trading is halted. It isn’t a courtesy, it’s the trading exchange’s rule; companies are supposed to notify the exchange at least ten minutes before any news that might create significant volatility in the stock price, such as an intention to go private, so trading can be stopped to allow investors to digest the new information. The announcement caught them off guard—Tesla hadn’t said a thing. NASDAQ officials frantically tried to reach their contacts at the company. Little”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had taken a $2 billion stake in the company, instantly making it one of the carmaker’s largest shareholders. Minutes later, as Musk headed to the airport to fly to the Gigafactory in Nevada, he typed out a fateful message on Twitter: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“The proposal caused rancor among some of Musk’s senior leadership team, who felt they too should be seeing a bigger reward for the company’s success. According to one former executive, among those hurt by Musk’s actions was JB Straubel, who had been there from the beginning and was considered a co-founder. “That was one of the breaking points,” the executive said. “It broke their relationship.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Now, as it came time to negotiate a new compensation package, Musk demanded the board give him a plan that would make him the highest paid CEO ever and, in theory, if fully paid out, one of the richest people in the world. The ten-year plan he wanted would be worth more than $50 billion if Tesla achieved a variety of financial targets, including reaching a market value of $650 billion—an almost $600 billion increase from its present value. The”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Musk, Ellison, Son, and Al-Rumayyan: Collectively they controlled hundreds of billions of dollars (though unlike those of his fellow diners, Musk’s fortune was largely illiquid). They all shared ambitions to make larger-than-life bets that, if successful, would change the course of humanity.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“He wanted to, he wrote, “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“If Tesla was positioning itself to build battery packs and sell them as part of solar panel systems, they should control the entire customer experience. To board members such as Gracias, it crystallized the understanding that they were moving into a new era for the company: the electricity storage business.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In 2015, JB Straubel, Tesla’s CTO, developed yet another new line of business for the automaker, selling large battery packs for home and commercial spaces, which appealed to solar customers eager to capture the energy they were creating by day to use at night.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“To many, the differences between the Model 3 and the Model S were hard to spot. And that, in itself, was the stunning thing: A car with a promised starting price of $35,000 might easily be mistaken for its $100,000 predecessor. The night was a spectacular coup.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“When Tesla first revealed the Roadster, they hoped to get 100 buyers willing to put down $100,000. It took a few weeks to do that. The Model S collected 3,000 pre-orders in the months after it was revealed. But this was unlike anything they had expected. Tens of thousands of people were signing up for the car, sight unseen. Then hundreds of thousands. The team was floored, searching for words. It was all so jarring: If you computed Tesla’s anticipated build rate for the Model 3, the reservations alone that night ate up the first few years of planned production.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Some short sellers, feeling the pressure, will begin to gang up together to attack a company—through the media, online investor forums, and, increasingly, on Twitter—all as part of an effort to change the narrative of a company, to highlight the negatives around its business or reveal a failing that normal investors may not recognize. Essentially, they’re trying to scare investors and drive a targeted stock price down.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Large corporations now owned dozens, if not hundreds, of franchises. AutoNation Inc., a publicly traded car seller based in Florida, was the largest with 265 franchises in the U.S., selling everything from Chevrolet to BMW. In 2012, AutoNation employed 21,000 people (compared to the 2,964 full-time workers at Tesla). Its largest shareholder was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who invested $177 million in the business that year. The company generated $8.9 billion in revenue off the sale of more than a quarter of a million new vehicles.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In another message, he assured workers they could talk to him directly. “You can talk to your manager’s manager without permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission,” he wrote in another note. “Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right things happen.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“The mere fact the Tesla Model S exists at all is a testament to innovation and entrepreneurship, the very qualities that once made the American automobile industry the largest, richest, and most powerful in the world.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart, but nothing is more rewarding or exciting.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“As he hired new managers and engineers, Musk was building a culture around how he wanted Tesla to operate. He subscribed to “first principles thinking,” a way of problem solving that he attributed to physics but that was rooted in Aristotle’s writings. The notion was to drill down to the most basic ideas, ones that can’t be deduced from any other assumptions. Put in terms related to Tesla: Just because another company did it one way, that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. (Or the way Musk wanted it done.)”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“We are revolutionizing the auto purchase and ownership experience,” Blankenship told the San Jose Mercury News. “At a typical car dealership, the goal of the dealer is to sell you a car that’s on the lot. At Tesla, we’re selling you a car that you design. The shift is people say: ‘I want this car.’ ”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“They claimed that a mountain bike, surfboard, and fifty-inch TV could lie flat inside—at the same time. Instead of storing the batteries in a giant box in the trunk, as they’d done with the Roadster, Straubel’s team imagined them in a shallow rectangular box beneath the floor. A motor, much smaller than the typical gas-powered engine, would be fitted between the back wheels. With the bulk of the drivetrain beneath the car instead of under the hood, it opened up a ton of interior room.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“He decided to oust Ze’ev Drori—and appoint himself (making Musk the fourth CEO to hold the position in about a year’s time). Musk told the senior leaders they needed to prepare for massive layoffs to preserve cash. The Model S would be the key to their survival,”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century