The catch is that Tesla has a bunch of problems that might cause the company to be in serious trouble soon, and if musk leaves before the company starts tanking then we'll have to hear endless bullshit from people about how musk was so great that he single handedly was what kept the company going.
If the company really tanks even after saving 56 billion dollars that they could spend on literally anything else to improve their products, maybe they shouldn’t be a company anymore.
Whilst Elon was playing dumbass with that cyber truck monstrosity that can only be sold in a select few countries because it's so fucking dangerous, Tesla lost the entire headstart it had. It has a very limited set of older models for sale that only really are interesting for people with money. Meanwhile China is here now with loads of cheap EV cars. Then there are fraud investigations that will turn bad as musk has for years been promising lies. See Theranos for an example on how that would work.
I could go on for a long time, but suffice to say, Tesla will be bankrupt within 3 years and so will musk.
That's my exact point. Tesla's house of cards is about to fall and if elon leaves before it happens then idiots will say it crashed because he left, rather than the truth which is that he's the one who put it in that position of an inevitable fall. Though in 3 years i don't think it'll go bankrupt, it'll just be much worse off
Musk being at the helm is 50% of the reason a lot of people won't even consider buying a Tesla. Boneheaded engineering decisions he dumped on the engineers are the other 50%. Replacing the hype with decent cars would be a win for everybody not named Musk.
Honestly. the naming scheme is not a problem for me. What is a problem is that they took away the option to have Tesla cars make fart noises to warn pedestrians that the otherwise quite quiet cars are coming.
When I was using that failed platform Reddit, I got permabanned from a Elon Musk sub because the mods read some anti-Musk comments I made IN OTHER SUBS. Talk about a clusterfuck. Hey hey ho ho, Phony Starck has got to go!!!!
The reason he's able to make this ask and not immediately be laughed out of the room is that Tesla's value is massively inflated based largely on the personality cult surrounding Musk himself. If Tesla starts being valued as a car company rather than a speculative tech company with a "genius" leader at the help (quotes doing a lot of work there) , the stock price will be a fraction of what it is now.
That's what shareholders stand to lose, and it's why Musk has any leverage to make this ridiculous ask in the first place.