Musk Shocks Tesla's Valuation.

If history is an indication, Tesla Inc. is worth more without Elon Musk.

Isn't it finally refreshing to see this in black and white: Tesla Inc. would be a far better company if Elon Musk no longer ran it. Here’s why:

The past few weeks seem to have been ripped right out of the pages of a Marvel graphic novel: An embattled -- yet flawed -- high tech industrialist faces off against quasi-evil sounding government regulators. There were tweet bombs, legal death rays and valuation explosions as the effects of this comic book battle ripped through markets. Drop in a Hans Zimmer soundtrack and some special effects, and voila. it’s a summer blockbuster: Iron Man 6: The Elon Musk Story. 

But any sort of sober, measured look at Tesla’s Post-Information Age valuation narrative shows that the story of the entrepreneur/manager facing down the stresses of a growing company are nothing new to the Sweep of American Capitalism.

Including to Tesla’s namesake himself: Nikola Tesla.

“What people forget is that Tesla could have had more money than Bezos, Gates and Buffet combined,” explained John F. Wasik, business writer and author of Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity From the Life of Nikola Tesla. Wasik has covered both Tesla the company and Tesla the genius inventor/entrepreneur from their respective origins. And his measured take on the Tesla narrative is invaluable. 

“Just think all the power that has been generated by alternating current since Tesla commercialized the technology back at the turn of the 20th century.” explained Wasik. “And he would have gotten a cut of every single electron/” 

But the practicalities of getting paid did not interest the man who invented the Tesla coil, the Xray the drone boat. The inventor tore up his royalty contract with George Westinghouse, and then died essentially alone, and penniless, in the New Yorker Hotel.

And Wasik argues that there is a powerful -- and not particularly attractive -- analogy between Nikola Tesla and Elon Musk: Both serious struggle to work well with a team. 

“Society wants to give credit to the lone wolf. Edison with the original lone genius,” Wasik explains. But Edison is not what really built the company. It was his team, which Tesla himself briefly was a part of back in 1884. Edison handed much of his day to day problem solving to a diffident English textile engineer named Charles Batchelor, who Edison met as a 25-year old. Batchelor evolved to become treasurer of the ginormous Edison General Electric Company. And Edison eventually became the Wizard of Menlo Park, and the intimate to the likes of Henry Ford, Marie Curie and President Herbert Hoover. 

“But when I look at Musk” said Wasik “Who was back to sleeping at the Tesla Inc. factory earlier this year, I see somebody struggling to work with a team.” He big idea, says Wasik, was to make his cars robotically. But automating assembly lines is really hard. You have to reinvent the process. That takes time. What can somebody like Musk do on the assembly line? “You not going to know more than a process engineer or a mechanical engineer,” said Wasik.“You should not be doing that, you should be delegating.”

But the top talent Musk so desperately needs can't seem to stay at the firm. The Los Angeles Times probably accurately estimates that nearly a dozen executives have left of recent. And it quoted Ross Gerber, founder of Gerber Kawasaki, who holds a serious investor position in Tesla as saying, “Executive departures are the real issue.Tesla’s board needs to build a team around Elon. There’s no bench.”

Tesla had the same kind of dysfunction as Musk. When Tesla succeeded, he had brilliant engineers to help him, like this nephew, Nikola Trbojevich. But when the inventor become obsessed with building a wireless power station in Shoreham, New York, he quickly proved to be a miserable manager. Tesla could memorize pages of construction drawings and speak 7 languages. But he could not manage a team that got things done. 

“His operations letters, that I have directly studied, showed his company was a total farce,” said Wasik. “There is no ecosystem of talent to make Tesla’s big ideas real, the whole company broke down.”

You also need some leadership skills. You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors, but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it. 

Page was smart enough to get a professional CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt to be his operations guy. But Musk appears not to be. And the future he has to manage is incalculably cloudy. The stock is valued on the assumption that electric motors would dominate. And that Tesla would supply the motors to every car maker on earth. But now every single car company globally has an electric platform, served by dozens of firms. Any sort of list of current battery makers is easily larger than a dozen. We found a reasonable list of Chinese bus battery companies had about 10 interesting looking companies.

There is also the problem that are only a few places in earth where you can get the lithium you need for these advanced batteries. And history is not on the side of mining for electric power. One of Edison’s greatest failures what his iron ore company. And all of those problems are behind Musk’s basic reality of running out of cash.

“The hurdle is getting bigger every day,” says Wasik. 

“We are at the point, were what is needed a really high end engineering management firm from Japan Detroit to come in and start solving these problems, one at a time,” says Wasik. A new team of serious car and battery nerds, that really knows what they are doing. 

In other words, pretty much anybody but Elon Musk. What really stuns us here, is none of this is news to the serious Tesla investor: Let’s end on what Mr Gerber, that investor from Gerber Kawasaki has to say about Musk. 

“The most important thing that could happen right now is a succession plan. Not because Elon needs to go, but because the company needs a succession plan.”