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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> Who knows what's actually happening.

What's actually happening is executives are leaving. Many more of them than is normal in such a short time. That's what's actually happening.

Why that's happening is certainly open for debate, but there are no answers to "why" that are good. The only reason that wouldn't suck is that it's just a coincidence that they don't want to be there. But keep in mind, one of the finance people was new to the company and quit. To me that says they walked in, saw what was happening and said "yeah, sorry, no." But that's speculation on my part. We should stick to the facts - an unusual number of executives have been leaving the company in a short time.

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> Many more of them than is normal in such a short time.

They have 37,000 employees. If 1% of them are "executives" and the average executive stays for five years, the mean time between executive departures would be five days. Are they actually averaging significantly more than one departure every five days?

But, how many of the "executive" 1% are at the level of Chief Accounting Officer or Director of Manufacturing Engineering? Probably less than 370?

Probably less than 74 people a year "at that level" have left.

Look at the 8k filings, they are easy to find on Yahoo finance and show corporate officer departures/arrivals.

There are a lot of them for a company like Tesla. People join for the big payout — when corporate big shots suddenly find reward in spending time with family, you need to ask questions.

> Look at the 8k filings, they are easy to find on Yahoo finance and show corporate officer departures/arrivals.

Since the beginning of the year I see this business everyone was talking about last week with the Chief Accounting Officer, and then one for the Director of Manufacturing and Engineering and one for the President of Global Sales and Service. Is this supposed to be an unusually large number? The other 8-K filings do not appear to be related to departures/arrivals.

By comparison, in the same time period GM replaced their CAO, their CFO and a member of the board.

The numbers in both cases would obviously be higher if you broaden the category to include lower positions that don't make the 8-K filings like the Tesla VP in the current story, but people are saying "look how many" without specifying the breadth of the pool or how many should be expected.

The GM CFO retired after 40 years with the company. The GM CAO left for another job and gave 90 days notice. It’s a little different.

None of this takes away from the amazing achievements of the company. But the company is probably on life support and it’s time to sell.

> The GM CFO retired after 40 years with the company. The GM CAO left for another job and gave 90 days notice. It’s a little different.

The original claim was that the number of departures was high. Comparing the number of departures, there does not appear to be a large disparity.

You raise the question of the context. The first Tesla CAO left citing personal reasons. The conspiracy theory is that this is a dog whistle for some kind of accounting irregularities, but as far as I know neither he nor anyone else with actual knowledge has even suggested that as a motive. What actual evidence is there that he didn't honestly leave for personal reasons?

The second CAO actually described his reasons:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/tesla-cao-dave-morton-quit-a...

The whole "funding secured" drama literally happened on his second day and he didn't like it.

Nothing about that episode is super inspiring and his reaction is entirely understandable, but how is this supposed to spell doom for the company?

Meanwhile the other departures seem to be for the normal reasons with people in a low unemployment job market finding another job somewhere else and that sort of thing.

But given the drama, now people are looking under every rock for something to gossip about.

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