If you can’t beat them, join them?
When it comes to making surprising decisions, Elon Musk takes the top spot. Recently the Tesla CEO surprised guests in a rival carmaker’s executive conference when he popped in to give a motivational talk to 200 Volkswagen executives.
On Thursday, Musk spoke to Volkswagen executives on a video call and encouraged them to embrace efficient electric car production. You might be wondering, how did a rival company’s CEO just drop in and give a pep talk to the executives? Turns out, Herbert Diess, the CEO of VW personally invited Musk to attend the conference and brought him in as a “surprise guest” for a collaborative approach towards dealing with environmental problems.
Diess tweeted a thank you to the special guest and wrote, “With a new mindset & a revolution in our headquarter Wolfsburg we can succeed the new competition.Good meeting with 200 top managers in Alpbach. Big responsibility at a crucial point for our company. Thx for joining @ErinMeyerINSEAD & @elonmusk,we will visit you soon in Grünheide” Adding in on his Linkedin post, Diess said, “Happy to hear that even our strongest competitor thinks that we will succeed [in] the transition if we drive the transformation with full power.
It looks like Musk was more than happy to attend the conference and even left behind his competitive nature to talk on a mutual issue and shared his tips regarding Tesla’s car-building efficiency. But it was still a peculiar choice to have your rival company’s CEO join in on a executives meeting, weirder so since Tesla isn’t really known for keeping up with their own deadlines. Recently, the company delayed the commercial roll-out of Cybertruck, going as far as removing the prices and specs from their official website. Not only that, but Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software has been getting delayed for sometime now that even Musk admitted was a difficult task to achieve.
Nevertheless, it was an eventful evening for both the companies’ CEOs.
