Thoughts on a theme

Oops. I have been watching a new series Invasion, and in it a couple have a Tesla vehicle ... which the male partner cannot get going - admittedly he is a bit flustered as they are under attack and, necessarily, in a hurry - the female partner takes his mobile phone from him and then uses an app on the phone to start the car. He seems to have forgotten that step. Hmmm. So what happens if there is a problem with the app. Lots of Tesla drivers found out recently when they were locked out of their cars after an outage struck the Tesla app. Some of them posted about the outage on social media - and none other than the Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk personally responded to one saying, on Twitter, "Checking". He later tweeted "Apologies, we will take measures to ensure this doesn't happen again."

This is not the first time Tesla has been in the news lately. One has been about a staff member who sued the company and was awarded over $137 million. According to his attorneys, the case was only able to move forward because Diaz had not signed one of Tesla’s mandatory arbitration agreements which the company uses to force employees to resolve disputes without a public trial. The claims of racial abuse apparently date back to 2016 - since which time Tesla has made numerous HR changes to improve the workplace. Tesla has countered suggesting $600,000 would be a fairer compensation.

And two more instances of Tesla in the news, both emails:

• A response to a colleague who queried about using headphones on the plant floor - with one in one out - no problem;
• An email telling managerial colleagues that there were three courses of action if they received an email from Elon about doing something: provide information about why they thought it was wrong; seek further clarification; do it. If they didn't do any of these, the suggestion was that they could be asked to resign.

Yes, there is little doubt that Elon Musk is the boss.