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.
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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.
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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.