I am so happy that the author of this piece clearly states, right up front, that ElMu did not actually found Tesla! The marketing aimed to perpetuate this misunderstanding has always irked me...and led the entire world to believe stupid things about this guy.
I used to be a fan of the guy, now I’m not a fan, yet before Musk, I think Tesla to many people was just this exotic car that no one drove. Todays Tesla make the world believe in electric cars again and moved an industry. You have to give credit where it’s due. Things don’t always have to be binary.
This also applies to SpaceX. They took a rocket that wasn't designed to land and made it land on legs, on land or on barges, reliably. But then, through some combination of second system syndrome and Elon's ego, they overreach and get Cybertruck and Starship.
It was obvious these bad times would come for Tesla. Without Musk it would have never come because there would have been nothing like Tesla in its current form. Now that it's happening, of course the reasonable question is can they navigate the murky waters? Is Tesla strong enough to survive? The article asks, why didn't Musk spin off the supercharging company instead of firing everyone? The article also answers its own question by saying supercharging is a huge money sink and less important now that other companies are building out supercharging networks with reciprocal agreements back to Tesla. Making the charging port a standard was pretty smart in retrospect. But we all know standards are incredibly useful to incumbents. Musk and his teams made Tesla into an incumbent from scratch. Now can they stay alive when the era of cheap money is over?
It's a lot simpler than that. Elon is on a mission to show that he is the great inventor and creator: from falcon 9 to Starship, from model 3 to cybertruck, and showing the world that he could make a commercial success of Twitter by catering to the people who never outgrew Ayn Rand.
With nobody to blame but himself, he isn't going to back down.