Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
In an interview for Full Send Podcast, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk was asked about the company’s dominance in the EV sector while naming Fisker and Nikola as competitors that stay far behind of Musk’s automaker.
After the mentioning of these two EV startups, another co-host immediately questioned “Is Fisker even a thing?” which Musk reacted with a laugh.
Host 1: The craziest thing for me too… how come Tesla for instance so dominant? Because, you know, Fisker, Nikola, and all these others… they can’t compete [with Tesla] at any level. Why are you so far ahead of these guys?
Host 2: Is Fisker even a thing?
Elon Musk: [Laughs]
Host 3: They’re trying, they’re trying…
Host 1: [Henrik Fisker] He’s on his second go…
Elon Musk: The hard problem is not making a prototype. The hard problem is making the factory. the factory is 100 times — maybe a 1,000 times — harder than a prototype. That’s why I’m working on harmonising the Tesla factory Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Host 1: You said you were there?
Elon Musk: I was there literally this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On the factory… all weekend basically. It’s really hard to do production. Prototypes are easy, production is hard. […]
Check the moment below.
In late April — when Twitter confirmed Musk’s offer to acquire the company — Fisker CEO deleted his Twitter account. Before deleting his profile, Henrik tweeted: “Please follow me on IG (Instagram) from now on if you want any updates. Thanks.”
A couple of days later, Henrik spoke about it for the first time saying he doesn’t want his free speech “to be actively managed or controlled by a competitor” referring to Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. Henrik, who was hired by Tesla to do body design and interior design work for Tesla Model S, mentioned that Musk would be able to “determine how the followers experience” the company.
The musk-Henrik controversial relationship started when Henrik launched Fisker Karma, the plug-in model costing $103,000… while he was under contract for the design of the Model S. “We were paying someone to do styling for his own car,” Musk alleged at the time.
In the early 2000s, Henrik worked for Aston Martin before entering as an early design consultant to Elon Musk’s Tesla. In 2007, he founded Fisker Automotive, which made one of the world’s first plug-in cars, Fisker Karma. Tesla unsuccessfully sued Henrik Fisker for developing the Karma while he was under contract designing the Model S.
Yesterday, in reaction to Lucid’s delivery numbers in the second quarter of the year, Musk said he “had more kids in Q2 than they made cars”. On Wednesday, Lucid reported 679 vehicles delivered cutting its annual production guidance from 12k-14k to 6k-7k vehicles.
In mid-May, Tesla CEO had said “unless something changes significantly with Rivian and Lucid, they will both go bankrupt”.
“Unless something changes significantly with Rivian and Lucid, they will both go bankrupt. They are tracking toward bankruptcy. I hope they can do something, but unless they can cut their cost dramatically, they are in deep trouble and will end up in the cemetery like every other car company with the exception of Tesla and Ford”, Musk said.
Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
