THE MORNING RANT: General Motors Hires Another Senior Executive from a Money-Losing EV Startup

Most start-up businesses fail, especially in tech and tech-adjacent sectors. Accordingly, most startups also lose their investors’ money. A small percentage of start-ups succeed, and when their founders and investors eventually sell, they enjoy a well-earned windfall for the entrepreneurial risk and hard work they put in to the enterprise. A miniscule number of start-ups become giant corporations.

General Motors - which is already an industrial giant – is staffing its senior executive offices with new hires whose corporate experience is at money-losing start-ups selling niche products. GM cannot succeed by employing a start-up strategy, but it certainly can fail. Inexplicably that is the direction General Motors’ executives and board have chosen to proceed.

It was just announced that General Motors has hired Claudia Gast away from EV manufacturer Lucid Motors to be its new Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development, and Technology Partnerships. In this role she will report directly to CEO Mary Barra. Ms. Gast will actually be wearing two C-Suite hats, as she will also be the new Deputy Chief Financial Officer, reporting directly to the CFO in that capacity. Ms. Gast’s role at Lucid Motors was Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development.

This hiring announcement comes on the heels of news that GM’s presumed CEO-in-training, Sterling Anderson, is also a new hire from a money-losing start-up. As I documented in a recent piece at The American Spectator (“EVs and Autonomous Vehicles: General Motors’ Doomed Focus on Unprofitable Boutique Products”), Mr. Anderson was hired less than a year ago from Aurora Innovation, a tech start-up he co-founded that is pursuing the grail of self-driving semi-trucks. After losing $4 billion over the past four years at Aurora, and putting less than 10 test vehicles on Texas interstates, Mr. Anderson left Aurora and has quickly positioned himself to be General Motors’ next CEO. CNBC reported a few weeks ago that Mr. Anderson “has consolidated power to oversee ‘the end-to-end product lifecycle’ of GM vehicles, including manufacturing, engineering, battery, software and services product management, and engineering teams, according to GM.”

I noted in the Spectator piece that despite GM’s massive EV losses under Mary Barra, “the company is apparently casting its lot with a tech executive whose profit-and-loss experience is with cash burn rather than cash flow.”

And now, with Claudia Gast, GM is yet again staffing a high-level executive position with a person who has no experience in high-volume, mass-market products, nor does she bring from Lucid experience in running a profitable operation.

Lucid Motors sells a low-volume, specialty product, specifically luxury EVs. The starting price for a Lucid is about $80,000, with sales of about 15,000 units per year. By contrast, GM sells about 3 million vehicles per year.

Investors in Lucid stock have been taken to the cleaners. From its split-adjusted* IPO stock price of $150 per share in 2021, the stock peaked at over $550 per share in 2022, and has since fallen below $10 per share – a 98% decline. (*The IPO was at $15 per share, but due to the stock price subsequently crashing to near-zero, Lucid did a 1-for-10 reverse stock split last August.)

As for financial performance, Lucid has lost about $12 billion over the past four years, and it is running out of cash. At the end of 2024, Lucid had $4 billion in cash. Nine months later it was down to $2.3 billion, and it will likely be lower still when the full-year 2025 financial statements are released soon. Ms. Gast is wise to jump ship before the cash runs out.

There is nothing in the resumes of Mr. Anderson or Ms. Gast that indicates they have any experience steering a ship with a product line and customer base like General Motors. After the catastrophic run under Mary Barra, and the damage from the EV distraction, GM desperately needs to focus on being a profitable, mass-market manufacturer of traditional gas and diesel vehicles.

GM’s Board of Directors should have brought in (or promoted) industry veterans who understand what GM’s customers want to buy and what its dealers can sell. Instead, they’ve brought in executives who have experience managing cash burn and losses on low-volume, niche products. This negligent oversight by the Board is a dereliction of their fiduciary duty.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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