9. The History of Tesla, With Tim Higgins [FourWeekMBA Podcast]

What this episode covers

In this session, I interview Tim Higgins, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of a great book: Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, And The Bet Of The Century(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/4oCi0lTVc8JqaLqQ_w8GL_NBiZ9Akn1phSZvoWVR62tfy9Bvb8F6i4p1bku0KlcM9hsCAYGnOT4oo1Fa7KyuxM896nvSGRyFybC4jHhbZWtOuUV0lCs2KW5KdUlqT9aFNkL3hMPu) Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:It's really my honor, because your book, it's one of the best business books I read so far. And I'm telling you, I read a lot of business books and it's a great book because it's very well done research into the whole history of Tesla. I mean, you can find many accounts about Elon Musk. I mean, he's one of the most popular business people in the world. But the whole story of Tesla, how you tell all the details and the evolution from the early days, I respect people that do well-done research, and this is incredible research. So thanks for that.How did you get to research Tesla?Tim Higgins:Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate it. When I started working to write this book in 2018, I thought it was going to be about the collapse of Tesla because it looked pretty bleak. But as the years went on and I continued to work on it, it really became clear that this was going to be one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds of a generation with the success of the Model 3 and Tesla becoming the world's most valuable automaker. So a lot of drama in there for the reader, which makes a good book.Gennaro [FourWeekMBA]:It would actually make a good movie. I actually realized that in this series, in this podcast, I'm interviewing a lot of authors about which books might actually make it into great movies or series. So let's get started from there because as you said, the near-death experience that you're talking about, of course, is one of the last and hear that experiences of Tesla in 2018. And then, as you said, one of the greatest turnarounds, but Tesla is a company that is around for many, many years. Can you tell us a bit of the context of the very early days of Tesla, the main people around the project, and also a little bit of the context back then?Tim Higgins:Tesla began as really a very unlikely idea, a really wild startup in Silicon Valley. The founding CEO was a man named Martin Eberhard, and Martin was almost a serial entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley of the day, which was really much different than it is today, where you see these huge billion-dollar valuations.

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