Diamonds & Dogs

DIAMONDS & DOGS BY JAMIE CARR

‘Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO’

Games Workshop Te s l a

Cashing in on chaos & conflict D r i ve r l e ss ca r m a ke r

Fantasy games have long been enjoyed by the sort of people who have an above-average chance of hitting the headlines as proud proprietors of a dungeon in a basement where residents are kept manacled to the wall, but they have become a sizeable business. Nottingham-based Games Workshop is responsible for unleashing Wa r h a m m e r 4 0,0 0 0, which may not exactly be a household name but among cognoscenti is the most popular miniature war game in the world.

It is set in the distant future, where a stagnant human civilisation is fighting it out with hostile aliens and supernatural creatures. Its devotees spend a fortune to assemble armies to fight battles between the forces of Chaos and the Imperium of Man. Games Workshop sells the rule books that are essential to navigate the bewildering complexity of this fictional universe, the model parts that players then assemble and paint, and all the peripherals such as dice, measuring tools, paints and glues.

The company has more than 500 stores worldwide, is highly profitable and fared well during the pandemic, thriving in a situation where its customers were stuck at home with nothing else to do. It is poised to make a quantum leap forward after announcing a deal with the mighty Amazon to develop films and television programmes based on its characters, and its share price rose 14% when the deal was announced. The hope is that this will bring the universe of Warhammer to a whole new audience, driving growth in the core business as well as delivering material royalty income. x Amid all the chaos generated since Elon Musk bought Twitter, perhaps the most alarming is the feeling that he is so distracted that he has gone completely Awol from Tesla. Since he paid $44bn for Twitter, it has been one catastrophe after another. He’s laid off half the workforce, advertisers have been running for the hills and there is already talk of a possible bankruptcy. Despite saying in April that there would be no further sales of Tesla stock to fund the Twitter deal, he has now cashed out about $23bn to cover the funding shortfall.

Even some of his most devoted fans are now revolting. Leo KoGuan, reported to be the third-largest individual shareholder in Tesla, has gone on record as saying: “Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO.”

Mu s k ’s share sales have helped crash Tesla’s share price, which has dropped from $399 at the beginning of the year to $158 last week, though clearly some of that collapse must be attributed to the broader sell-off in tech stocks. KoGuan also says “ an executioner, Tim Cook-like is needed, not Elon” .

All the distraction is far from needed when Tesla is facing other major challenges, given that traditional car manufacturers are finally getting to grips with the electric vehicle market, Chinese manufacturers such as BYD are expanding into Europe and there is the real possibility that Tesla will get frozen out of the Chinese market if trade relations between China and the US continue to worsen. These are difficult times for the company, and it needs hands on the wheel. x

good week

Le t ’s ignore the roughly R24bn paid for David Jones, not to mention the subsequent billions bled from Woolworths’s share price as — surprise — the acquisition of an outdated department store didn’t pan out the way then CEO Ian Moir thought it might. Current C EO Roy Bagattini has finally removed Wo o l i e s’s Australian albatross — along with itsR17bn of liabilities — in a deal that looks to be no fire sale. Now management can finally focus on what it should have all along — the core South African business and its Country Road operations in Australia. x

Lindiwe Sisulu’s fall from grace has been a vertiginous plunge into the political abyss. Seldom has a collapse been as dramatic or as sudden. One minute a minister of state, ANC “roya l t y ” and the only survivor of a Mandela cabinet; the next, nothing. All she got for years of service to the party were fewer than 50 votes in a presidential nomination from the floor of the ANC conference this week — and a lot of mocking laughter. Not a nice way to leave the building, but the vanity she brought to her jobs may have been her undoing. x

bad week