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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
James Murdoch could become the next head of Tesla's board of directors. He is "the favourite" to replace Elon Musk, who currently serves as both board chairman and chief executive, the Financial Times has reported. However, Mr Musk said on Twitter that the FT report was "incorrect" without providing any further detail.
Mr Musk agreed to give up the chairmanship last month to resolve claims of fraud brought by US financial regulators. The settlement requires Tesla to install an independent chairman, among other penalties. It is intended to create more oversight of Mr Musk, who provoked the charges when he claimed on Twitter that he had secured funding and might take the firm private.
The terms of the settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission are awaiting court approval. A federal judge is due to review the settlement on Thursday. The FT report cited two anonymous sources, but added that other names remain under consideration.
[...] Mr Murdoch is currently chief executive of the US media giant 21st Century Fox, but he will step down after the firm completes the sale of much of its business to Walt Disney. He resigned from the board of Sky this week, following Comcast's successful bid for the European satellite broadcaster.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 12 2018, @06:54PM
The qualifications I'd demand from anyone on the short list is that they have some clue about how the car business works, and ideally has some automotive or software engineering background so they can address the problems in their products that have been causing the company to falter. Mr Murdoch definitely doesn't meet this qualification.
I have absolutely no use for the popular but baseless belief that just because someone is a good CEO of a company in industry A, they'll make a good CEO in industry B. The reason is that to manage someone well you have to have a clue as to how to do their job, which in turn enables you to have a real understanding of whether they're doing it well or not. And you might think that means that the CEO just needs to understand the roles of the CMO, CTO, COO, CFO, etc, but in order to properly evaluate them you have to see how well their evaluation of their subordinates matches up with your evaluation of their subordinates, and so on with their subordinates, and their subordinates, until you're down to the level of people who are doing the actual work of making your product. Failure to have that level of understanding means you're not going to necessarily trust and reward the best performers but instead trust and reward the most effective liars.
So, for instance, Bill Gates wouldn't be a great CEO of a pizza chain because he doesn't have any knowledge of food supply chains, recipe development, franchise management, or USDA regulations. And sure, he's a smart enough guy that he could study up on them, but he's probably not going to be as good at those issues as somebody who's an expert on all things pizza-related and can, for instance, know what to do in the face of price fluctuations in the market for spices. Sure, he can entrust those to his COO, but that would mean that if his COO is doing a lousy job he'd have no way of knowing other than the lowering margins or sales, which said COO could blame on some other factor because there's always another factor to blame.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.