Losses & profits. One dance, the other struggles. The contrast is striking. Tuesday, January 7, Tesla's all-powerful boss, Elon Musk, 48, enters the scene in Shanghai on the occasion of the release of his first "made in China" model. Like a child, he sketches a few steps on a frenzied music and drops the blazer like a music hall stripper. He makes the clown.
At the same time, Carlos Ghosn, 65, the scowling mine, is preparing his defense. The fugitive dreams only of washing his honor. A few years ago, he would have been able to dance at the motor show to celebrate the resounding success of his Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, which has become the world's largest manufacturer. Today, it is a pariah, accused of fraud, taken refuge in his country of origin. So, he summons the world press, yells at the plot, exhibits documents and realizes that, since his departure, his beautiful construction is only the shadow of itself.
Three mistakes
The South African entrepreneur, Californian by adoption, and the Franco-Lebanese-Brazilian meet on the world stage, but they do not dance to the same music. Beyond his lawsuit for his personal behavior, it appears from the statements of Carlos Ghosn himself that he made at least three mistakes. First, he failed, by his own admission, to find a successor who lived up to his ambitions. An arduous task in any business, it is even more so in a construction as singular as that of an industrial and capitalist alliance which does not give prominence to anyone except its creator. Changing the keystone of such a cathedral without collapsing the building was a challenge.
Hence the second lack, that of the consolidation of the whole, not only in industrial terms, but also of governance. Ghosn acknowledges the failure, but blames it on its shareholders, the French state and Japanese administrators, who are too obsessed with protecting their national interests, not always aligned with those of the company as a whole. His too late attempt to build a unified and simpler governance was fatal to him. Finally, he believed that one could get out of such a complex situation by adding complexity. In this case, a merger with the most heterogeneous of the world manufacturers, Fiat-Chrysler.
Tesla made three bets
Meanwhile, Tesla, which produces twenty times less cars than industry leaders, has a market capitalization that exceeds that of General Motors and Ford, despite having posted only four quarters of profit in ten years. stock market existence. But he succeeded in three bets that we thought were unmanageable: to persuade his investors that he was going to reinvent this old centenary profession, industrialize en masse, with the doubling of his production in one year, win the hearts of the Chinese, with lightning from a factory in Shanghai.
