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posted by Fnord666 on Friday October 12 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the tipped-20% dept.

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.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @02:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @02:46PM (#747905)

    Arthur T Knackerbracket is a titless whore

    Musk responded, via Twitter late last night.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:05PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 12 2018, @03:05PM (#747918) Journal

    James Murdoch. Figurehead of Fox. Murdoch - - - Fox. This is Rupert's little boy? Great. Hand fed by a man without ethics or morals to grow up and take over the empire. He'll do Tesla a lot of good, I'm sure - for some values of "good".

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:20PM (#747926)

    Who would you put on the short list to take over Musk's job at Tesla?

    How about Bob Lutz, he's been a huge critic of how Tesla operates, maybe give him a chance to try and fix all the production and other business problems.
    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/18/tesla-is-headed-for-the-graveyard-predicts-former-gm-exec-bob-lutz.html [cnbc.com]
    Of course, Lutz is well retired and may not want to step back into a hellish job like this one. I met him at a small event once, he certainly has a "presence" that we expect in leaders, and his experience includes BMW as well as USA car companies.

    Or someone from Silicon Valley, since these cars are getting close to being rolling computers (with all the security problems and additional safety problems)?

    Or??

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:33PM (#747935)

      Replying to my own AC comment, probably don't want Johan de Nysschen although he is available. He's the ex-Audi guy who was hired to run Cadillac...and decided to move the Cadillac headquarters to NY City a few years ago. It turned out to be a disaster and it was recently announced that Cadillac is moving back to Warren MI (northern Detroit suburbs).

      Here's a real possibility, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fields_(businessman) [wikipedia.org] Mark Fields did a good job at Ford until the Ford Family (who still have major stock holdings) decided that he wasn't doing enough "high tech". At Tesla, arguably they have plenty of high tech already in house, and need someone that knows about getting cars made and delivered. According to Wiki, he's moved to a "private equity firm" in the last year, so he also tics the vulture capitalist box,

      Fields was recruited by Ford in 1989 and moved up the ranks. He ran Ford's Argentina operations at the age of 36.[7] He then went to Japan to run marketing and sales for Mazda Motor Corporation (then owned by Ford) and was named president and CEO of Mazda Motor Corporation in 2000, at age 38. In 2002, Fields became chairman of the Premier Automotive Group, Ford's luxury unit, which at the time included Lincoln, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo Cars. He then was named executive vice president, Ford of Europe and Premier Automotive Group, where he led all activities for Ford's premium vehicle business group and for Ford brand vehicles manufactured and sold in European countries. In 2005, he returned to the United States to head the Americas division of the company. In this role, he developed the "Way Forward" plan, which was designed to make Ford's North American operations leaner and more centrally driven in areas such as product development, purchasing and engineering.

      In December 2012, Ford appointed Fields its chief operating officer.[9] He was named president and CEO of Ford effective July 1, 2014, succeeding Alan Mulally.[10][11]

      In the midst of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Fields announced a plan to move production of the Ford Focus from Michigan to San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Donald Trump used this proposed move as an example of how the North American Free Trade Agreement was bad for American workers. Before Trump took office, Fields announced the cancellation of a $1.6 billion investment for a new factory in Mexico. This incident is reported to have undermined Ford's board of directors' confidence in Fields.[12] Despite strong SUV and pickup truck sales, investors lacked confidence in Ford's future direction. Although U.S. stock market indexes rose sharply during Fields' tenure as CEO from July 2014 to May 2017, Ford’s stock price fell more than 35 percent in that period.[13]

      On May 22, 2017, Fields was replaced by James Hackett.[14] Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr. said he wanted Hackett to speed up decision-making and cut costs. "The clock speed at which our competitors are working …requires us to make decisions at a faster pace," said the Ford chairman.[15]

      Fields became a senior adviser at private equity firm TPG Capital in October 2017.

      He must be good at talking to rich owners, since he survived with the Ford Family for so long...

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 12 2018, @06:54PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday October 12 2018, @06:54PM (#748004)

      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.
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:35PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:35PM (#747936)

    With the next firmware update, the car can only make turns to the right.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 12 2018, @04:45PM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 12 2018, @04:45PM (#747962) Journal

      Don't let Aristarchus know that, or he'll submit another alt-right article.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @08:50PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @08:50PM (#748028)

        You shitpost way more soooo yaaaaaa.

        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 13 2018, @04:54AM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 13 2018, @04:54AM (#748175) Journal

          You may actually have something of a point. Ari doesn't post a helluva lot anymore. I post replies to many thing. So, posting - yeah.

          Ari makes more shit submissions than anyone on this board. He may very well make more shit submissions than all other members combined, including AC. I don't feel like searching through past submissions just to do the math.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:17PM (#747990)

      You laugh, but I drove an old VW Microbus that would only turn left. The steering linkage included an intermediate rod and lever/pivot assembly (bell crank). The bell crank pivot was at the end of a welded sheetmetal bracket that had rusted away except at one edge. When the steering force was in the wrong direction the bracket bent away from the frame and there was essentially no motion transferred to the tie rods to the front wheels. Steering the other way, the bracket bent back into place, the rusted area was compressed against the chassis, and things worked relatively normally.

      A quick look underneath diagnosed the problem before the bracket fell off completely, and luckily no one was hurt.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:16PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:16PM (#747955)

    This is one of the numerous ways the jewish rats install themselves as the owners of a company. It is utterly sickening.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:07PM (#747987)

      This isn't very good trolling. Tesla is a public company, the stock holders are the owners which is at least somewhat public information, for example, https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/ownership-summary [nasdaq.com]

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @10:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @10:09PM (#748076)

        People are blackmailed into doing things they would rather not do. Same happened with Musk. He was forced to write the tweet about Funding Secured after being told that it really was and it would be good to spread the news. Then the funders magically vanished and Musk was forced to be the scapegoat.

        And if he made public what happened, the computer-generated video of him with the teenager would surface, destroying him for life. Tough choice I would say.

        It is a hostile takeover by jewish rats.

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