I would be interested to learn how this works in practice. In many companies separate divisions barely collaborate or take learnings from each other. 2 separate companies sharing learnings is unique.
Separate divisions barely collaborating is not the case at Tesla either (or SpaceX). One of their mantras is "everybody is a chief engineer." They're all supposed to know enough about everything so they don't design parts that make trouble for other parts of the car, or for manufacturing. It's the reason they moved the new production line for the next-gen vehicle to Austin, so the engineers would be there for it.
I don't think it's that unusual for companies to collaborate with each other on projects. And some of the sharing happens by default when you just encourage employees to migrate between the companies and take their knowledge with them.
The original plan was to put the first production line in Mexico. Then Musk realized his engineers wouldn't be commuting or moving to Mexico, and he wanted them to spend time on the factory floor so they could see what was hard to make.
I thought it portrayed Musk's flaws pretty vividly, but I guess if you started out convinced that Musk is a terrible human being with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, it would seem like fawning hagiography by comparison.
In any case, it was widely believed in the investor community that the Mexico plant was where the next-gen vehicle would be produced. I don't think California was ever really considered.
Well, the "investor community" wasn't really well informed. Tesla wanted to pull out of California due to regulations, and was only considering Texas and Oklahoma for the CyberFridge. Texas was selected the year after the initial CyberFridge announcement.
Ok but what I said above was "the reason they moved the new production line for the next-gen vehicle to Austin." The next-gen vehicle isn't Cybertruck, it's the forthcoming $25K car. That's what people expected would be built in Mexico.
(But based on "Cyberfridge" I can see this conversation isn't going to go anywhere productive, so I'll just wish you a nice weekend. Throw in a last word if you want.)
Musk does this routinely, also with the Boring Company or with Twitter - upon his acquisition, he took a lot of Tesla staff with him to Twitter HQ [1] to help out.
That was a specific case where he didn’t trust Twitter employees. And it was absolutely a galaxy brain move, given that Tesla employees had almost no domain expertise.
Its fun to say space man bad, but don't equate complex production cycles to teams of competent engineers not knowing basics.
Look at the differences between production & preproduction models and you'll see way less issues.