Alumni Geoff Cain authored an article for the WSJ discussing supply chain issues in America.
After many grueling nights designing and building a car in “makeshift tents,” Elon Musk emerged with a prescient lesson for Tesla. “The issue is not about coming up with a car design—it’s absolutely about the production system,” Mr. Musk said in 2019, during the unveiling of the car maker’s SUV, the Model Y. “You want to have a good product to build, but that’s basically the easy part. The factory is the hard part.”
Mr. Musk wanted to take vertical integration—or control over the supply chain—to what he’s since called “absurd” heights. His business philosophy was decisive. In February 2022, the federal government announced that supply-chain issues meant that American manufacturers had five days’ worth of chips in their inventories—an emergency shortage compared to their 40-day supplies three years earlier.