Elon Musk is becoming like Henry Ford - and that's not a good thing

If Musk keeps courting celebrity and pursuing side ventures, the risk is that Tesla, the company that made him a household name, will fall from its premier position just as Ford Motor Company did in the 1920s.

Samuel Marquis, a friend of Ford’s, once recounted how the car maker “suddenly faced about, hired a publicity agent [and] jumped into the front page of every newspaper in the country”. Ford’s new philosophy, Marquis noted, boiled down to a belief that “it is a good thing to keep people talking about him, no matter what they say”.

Other ventures weren’t so wholesome. He purchased a failing newspaper known as the Dearborn Independent, pumping money into it and turning it into a large-circulation national paper distributed through his dealerships. It featured columns that ghostwriters churned out under Ford’s name. Sloan was ruthless and calculating, using financial statistics to cut costs and foster efficiency. The language he used to describe everything, one management theorist later observed, was as “cold as the steel he caused to be bent to form cars: economising, utility, facts, objectivity, systems, rationality, maximising — that is the stuff of his vocabulary”. He looked the part, too.

* scratches head *

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