This post has been updated with news that Elon Musk settled with the SEC.
After an embattled summer, the future of Tesla in Elon Musk’s hands has been a question asked by many in the business community. Former Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin recently offered up some advice for the pioneering entrepreneur.
“I think he would need to take more discipline in the way he’s focusing on some of his projects, narrow it down and really dial into a couple key things instead of being so spread out,” Willink, who retired in 2012 after 20 years serving as a U.S. Navy SEAL, told Jen Rogers on Monday’s The Final Round.
Musk, 47, will not have fewer things to focus on Tesla (TSLA). On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit accusing the Tesla CEO of defrauding investors. The lawsuit seeks an order for Musk to, among other things, be banned from serving as an officer or director of a public company. (Musk is also the CEO of two private companies: commercial space travel company SpaceX and medical research company Neuralink.) On Saturday, Musk agreed to pay $20 million (while Tesla will pay another $20 million) and step down as chairman of the company — but remain CEO.
Babin, who earned a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart during three deployments to Iraq, said that Musk has “a lot of focus. And he needs to prioritize his efforts and focus on just the key things that he can control.”
Willink and Babin’s book, “The Dichotomy of Leadership” explores why, “as a leader, generally, you don’t want to spend your time in the extremes,” Willink said. “You want to stay more balanced.”
Babin said finding this balance “the most difficult challenge that we see with leaders.”
‘Funding secured’
On August 7, Musk said stated in a company blog that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share, representing a 20% premium over the stock price following the company’s second-quarter earnings release.
Earlier that day, Musk had written in a Twitter post that he had “funding secured” for such a deal. He concluded the blog post saying that the “proposal to go private would ultimately be finalized through a vote of our shareholders.”
The SEC wrote in its complaint that Musk’s statements “created the misleading impression that certain terms of a transaction to take Tesla private had been determined when, in fact, they had not even been explored, and in some cases, proved to be impossible.”
In a follow-up company blog post issued Aug. 13, Musk explained that his assertion of having “funding secured” was based on multiple encounters he had with the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, where he felt there was “no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed.” But the SEC wrote in its complaint that “Musk’s statements were premised on a long series of baseless assumptions and were contrary to facts that Musk knew.”