Jon McNeill was prepared for the worst when he dialed his future boss. He hadn’t officially started his new job as a president at Tesla, but already, he was calling CEO Elon Musk to say he had made a mistake.
Weeks earlier, during an interview at SpaceX’s offices in Hawthorne, California, Musk told McNeill that the electric vehicle maker was struggling to hit its quarterly numbers. When McNeill investigated, he found a backlog of thousands of people who had test-driven the cars but had not received any follow-up.
