It’s a conflict of interest, which is unethical, if not illegal. There’s nothing wrong with a thorough, detailed competitive bidding process. That method consistently produces superior results.
If Musk is confident in his product, he shouldn’t be afraid to submit a bid.
Just wanted to share something military families are currently dealing with.
The "bidding process" might work sometimes, but I do think there are times when it just isn't the best method to select a company.
Our moving process was just overhauled and companies "bid" on being the sole household goods contractor. The company that won was Home Safe Alliance (/HSA). They were supposed to take over most all of our military moves this spring into the summer in a rollout type of fashion. Well it was so horrible that the Army has pulled ALL their moves back into the old system.
HSA bid a LOW price. That price would be what HSA used to pay local moving companies on each end of servicemembers move, and a driver to drive the household goods to the next location. Well moving companies that have LONG been working with military moves have bowed out and won't to the moves because the price is so low they will lose money. HSA knew what the industry pricing was when they put in their bid. They assumed moving companies would just accept the ridiculously low prices because they wanted the business from military moves.
Just as an example a move someone did last year from California to Virginia might pay out $20,000 total to pay for moving companies on either end and a driver, plus insurance for the goods as they are being transported. This year same time of year and same move was paying out half so $10,000 for the same exact move, yet prices of everything are up so not only is the payout half, but it costs the company more.
Service members are being forced to move themselves because the move time comes and no moving company is assigned so they now must rent a truck and buy boxes, etc and pack, load, drive the truck, figure out how to get their vehicles across country since they are now driving a moving truck. AND what they will pay the service member to do that is not enough to cover the cost of the move.
Bidding DID NOT give military families the best company to handle all this, it gave us the low ball one that is NOT qualified to do it.
I think bidding has it's place if there are many companies equally qualified and they would perform nearly equally, but when a company has no business even bidding in the first place and they win because it's the best price? No good comes from that.
