James Murdoch in line to replace Musk as Tesla chairman (reuters.com)

or ICE getting a fleet of Tesla

But lead where? Without domain knowledge..?

They're also brilliant businessmen who have built the most successful news empire in America

Looking at the GM board of directors, I see:

- Former GM officials,

- Ex-managers of defense companies. They build machines too, right.

- Ex-joint chiefs of staff and business school head. They know management.

- Insurance and such. GM has a large workforce and managing that a good portion of activity.

Newscorp is a large organization too, but it seems more different from Tesla than the US Army, Cummins or even an insurance company is different than GM. So on it's face, it seems like the board knows something about manufacturing and managing large organizations. With Jame Murdock, it seems likes you could say "know something about spin", which might not be comforting.

To be fair he's used to doing that from his father.

Here's the son if someone else! /s

James Murdoch is good friends of Elon Musk.

So it is technically nepotism.

To an outsider like me it would look like a position awarded due to being a son of a powerful/rich father with relevant experience awarded the same way in another corporation (how likely is to become a chief executive in young age on own merit?). That would qualify it as a nepotism (father as investor to son); if Elon is a friend, then also cronyism. I have no hope in companies ran in such fashion; they can't survive Darwinian environment, bad decisions would accumulate in time, leading to larger and larger monetary loss, prompting fund withdrawal to cut the losses at some point.

I mean I think it makes the situation better for the various cronies in control of the administration. A guy focused on “deals” is a godsend for moneyed interests who just want to get their way.

Yes, I just saw this. I hope it's true.

I remember seeing an interview about 5 years ago that featured both Elon Musk and Bob Lutz, vice chairman of GM. In the interview, Musk was incredibly deferential to Lutz and talked about his respect for Lutz and considered him a friend. They were very cordial. Nevertheless, Lutz has been on the record for many, many years as lambasting Tesla, it ambitious and sustainable aims, and its business model.

So hopefully it's a real friend and not a keep-your-enemies-closer friend. Or maybe either is fine.

Almost every board has some sympathetic board members. Very different story for that person to be chairman.

Especially when the intent of the SEC agreement was that there was to be objective oversight of Musk.

Wow, actually just looked at her Twitter feed, it's pretty hardcore anti-Republican. Their Thanksgivings must be interesting.

Murdoch was already on Tesla's board of directors. This is simply a promotion.

There is no getting rid of cars for the foreseeable future, making them electric is the obvious next step for reducing their environmental impact

The United States, Canada and others are too sprawling and sparse for that. Cars are going to be a fact of life for a very long time yet.

As far as helping to solve climate change, cars are part of it, but I wish people paid much more attention to the larger contributor: Agriculture.

I often get the feeling that people think changing cars to electric will solve the problem. It's important and helps, but it's just one piece of the pie. Not the biggest piece of it either.

In most of the country, per passenger, per person transported a mile, cars are more efficient than public transportation. Electric cars take less than half the energy per mile driven. So they definitely have a role.

The reason why is that a bus has to run whether or not it has passengers on it. A lot of empty buses without passengers are running around all day and night in most metro areas.

So yes, public transit makes a lot of sense where it makes sense. But it only makes sense within a relatively small number of very dense cities.

Yes, they are. Even if they get their energy from fossil fuels for now, it's a whole lot easier to replace a few hundred power plants than it is to replace millions of ICEs and all the associated sunk cost that they represent.

It's also just generally easier to make electricity from renewable sources than to directly power cars with them.