Elon Musk's apology distracted everyone from Tesla's ongoing problems — and that's the danger of Tesla's cult of personality (TSLA)

Elon Musk

Investors bid up Tesla's stock Wednesday after the company reported its second-quarter results.
At least on the surface, there didn't seem to be much to cheer, given the company's large loss and big cash outflow.
But CEO Elon Musk apologized to an analyst on the company's earnings call, and investors seemed to lap that up.
The move seemed to restore the faith of investors and fans in Musk — and faith is what Tesla lives on.

All seems to be well again with the Elon Musk personality cult.

Tesla's stock is soaring once more. And all it seemed to take was an apology from Musk.

Tesla shares were up a bit after the company reported its second-quarter results, but they really took off after Musk apologized to the analyst Toni Sacconaghi at the start of Tesla's conference call. That seemed to assure investors and fans alike that Musk was sane, stable, and back in charge.

"There's no excuse for bad manners, and I was kind of violating my own rule in that regard," Musk said, blaming lack of sleep and 120-hour workweeks for dismissing a question of Sacconaghi's during a previous call.

Since Musk took over control of Tesla, the company's success has relied in large part on investors' and customers' faith in him. They've been able to overlook all kinds of things that would have sunk just about any other tech company — the massive ongoing losses, the recurring need to return to the capital markets to raise more capital, the repeated production problems and shortfalls — just because of their belief in Musk.

But that faith seemed to be shaken in recent months. Even as Tesla was struggling to ramp up production of its Model 3 vehicle, Musk was acting more and more erratically. He lashed out at Sacconaghi and another financial analyst, journalists — including my colleague Linette Lopez — a whistleblower, and even a cave diver who helped rescue trapped children in Thailand.

When some might rightly have expected him to be focused on fixing the bottlenecks at his factory, he vowed to help out with that cave rescue as well as to help solve the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Amid growing concern about Musk's behavior and the ability of Tesla to ramp up production of the Model 3 ...

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