As long as there’ve been companies and the media, there’ve been leaks from one to the other. But try telling that to electric car-startup Tesla Motors’s iconoclastic founder and CEO Elon Musk. The PayPal founder and serial entrepreneur has apparently mounted an all out digital attack to plug leaks of sensitive company information to the dreaded media.
Why is Musk so dogmatic about this? Well, he seems to be walking a very tight financial rope - attempting to raise capital and debt financing to build the cars for which he has already taken and continues to take deposits. The story, according to Valleywag, goes like this:
A tipster writes: Life for the employees at Tesla Motors has got more depressing over the last few months. Elon Musk is now spying on everyone.
The inquisition began after an engineer named Peng Zhou revealed the company’s perilously low $9 million cash balance to Valleywag last October. Musk ordered a heavy-handed investigation. He hired an outside IT contractor go through the company’s email and instant messages, and then had an investigator take fingerprints off a printout discarded near a copier used to leak the email. The investigation implicated Zhou. Musk ordered Zhou to confess and apologize to the entire company, and then fired him.
Musk also appears to be using an old trick by sending each employee a slightly different email message to see which one gets picked up by the media. The move backfired when general counsel Craig Harding - who was not in on the scheme - resent his version of the memo to all employees.
In any case, Musk - who burned through 2 CEOs (and one interim chief) in 14 months before taking the reigns himself - appears to be playing a very risky game. From Valleywag:
For the record: Tesla is not “doing really well right now.” [as the memo stated] It is losing money on every car it sells, and plans to take deposits from customers for cars which it has no means to build. But this would not be the first time that Musk has invented fictions about the condition of his company.
A former CFO of mine would likely call Tesla’s situation “technical insolvency,” but who knows anymore.
Personally, I think what Musk has in entrepreneurial spirit and drive, he appears to lack in leadership skills and maturity. Creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear can’t be good for morale and productivity. But that’s just me.
What do you think? Should management spy on employees to stop media leaks or for any other reason?
Come to think of it, what kind of employee leaks sensitive company information? An attention getter, or something more sinister?
[Image courtesy of Tesla Motors]
