{"id":10387,"date":"2026-04-05T08:16:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T08:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/10387\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T08:16:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T08:16:19","slug":"teslas-former-president-shares-lessons-from-managing-elon-musks-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/10387\/","title":{"rendered":"Tesla\u2019s Former President Shares Lessons From Managing Elon Musk\u2019s Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon McNeill is walking through Manhattan\u2019s Clement Clarke Moore Park, recalling the exact day when he\u2019d had enough of working for Elon Musk<\/a>. It was the end of a bruising 2017, in which Tesla Inc. was stumbling over its effort to release the Model 3 and, in particular, failing to get robots to build them<\/a>. McNeill, who was the company\u2019s president, and his deputies stood side by side with Musk on the assembly line figuring out how to reconstruct it. The whole process took eight months, and the car was late, but they eventually got it done<\/a>. Tesla\u2019s revenue soared; the stock price did too.<\/p>\n

To celebrate and unwind, McNeill took his wife and two kids on vacation to Vermont, expecting a relaxing week of skiing. Instead he walked into an intervention: His family sat him down and told him he\u2019d been a jerk. Dealing with Musk\u2019s extreme mood swings, McNeill says, had ground him down. When he wasn\u2019t trying to shield managers from the billionaire\u2019s tirades, he recalls, he\u2019d be peeling his boss off the floor of a dark conference room in a near-catatonic state. (Musk, who has self-reported symptoms of bipolar disorder<\/a>, famously slept on the factory floor at times while pushing Tesla through what he called \u201cproduction hell.\u201d) \u201cI choked up,\u201d McNeill says, unfailingly polite and with the bearing of a college professor. \u201cMean is the last thing that I ever want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jon McNeill is walking through Manhattan\u2019s Clement Clarke Moore Park, recalling the exact day when he\u2019d had enough…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[122],"tags":[9342,9339,474,9340,1847,9337,202,9336,6716,9341,3943,6714,203,1419,9338,584,6016],"class_list":["post-10387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-elon-musk","tag-a-walk-with","tag-automotive","tag-business","tag-businessweek","tag-career","tag-chief-executive-officer","tag-elon-musk","tag-elon-reeve-musk","tag-general-motors-co","tag-industries","tag-ipos","tag-lululemon-athletica-inc","tag-musk","tag-new-york","tag-sterling-anderson","tag-technology","tag-tesla-inc"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116351112537433418","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}