Why Elon Musk is an increasingly bad choice to run Tesla

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2018. (credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

There have been a lot of signs recently that Elon Musk’s tenure as CEO of Tesla is not going well.

Musk’s lawyers are scheduled to appear in a New York courtroom today to convince a judge not to hold Musk in contempt for tweeting out a production forecast without first clearing the tweet with Tesla’s lawyers—something the Securities and Exchange Commission says Musk committed to do in a September settlement.

Yesterday, Tesla announced a 31 percent quarter-over-quarter drop in vehicle shipments. The decline was partly driven by difficulties shipping the Model 3 to Europe and China and partly by a dramatic 44 percent fall in shipments of the more expensive Model S and Model X. Tesla’s stock dropped about 9 percent when trading opened this morning.