Elon Emails

Minimize delivery cost, not the end-of-quarter rush

From:
Elon Musk
Date:
November 26, 2021 (Header as published: Nov. 26, 2021 [time stamp redacted])
To:
Everybody (all Tesla employees)
Subject:
Q4 deliveries vs. cost efficiency
Per my email several weeks ago, our focus this quarter should be on minimizing cost of deliveries rather than spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4. What has happened historically is that we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the next quarter. In effect, looked at over a six month period, we won't have delivered any extra cars but we will have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter. We will still have quite a big wave of deliveries in the last few weeks of December, as we don't yet have high volume production either in Europe or Texas, which means a lot of cars on boats from China to Europe and on trucks [and/or] rail from California to the East Coast arriving late in the quarter, but this is nonetheless the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries. The right principle is take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly-traded and the notion of "end of quarter" didn't exist. Thanks, Elon

About this email

Musk tells employees to stop spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just to land cars in Q4, arguing the end-of-quarter sprint adds no deliveries over six months, and to act as if Tesla were not publicly traded.

Notes

First published by CNBC; body text retrieved from Electrek's reproduction, and the header (From/To/Subject/Date) confirmed on the CNBC page. The word 'cost' in the first sentence is emphasized in the published version. '[and/or]' and the redacted time stamp are as published. The email refers to an earlier 'email several weeks ago' on the same subject, whose text was not found.

Where it came from

Leaked to press; attribution widely reported.

Tesla, company-wide memo. Tags: deliveries, end-of-quarter, cost-cutting, logistics, q4-2021