Whee! Shareholders of Tesla TSLA, +4.28% are celebrating because the company managed to make and deliver 95,200 cars in the same quarter for the first time ever. The stock is up 5% or more, CEO Elon Musk is retweeting memes about how his critics can kiss his [posterior], and the notion that the electric-car future is imminent is back.

But Musk should still be replaced as CEO. That’s not incompatible with the notion that Tesla is going to turn the corner into sustained profitability, or maybe even justify the company’s $42 billion stock valuation.

In fact, replacing Musk may be the most essential ingredient to that sustained profit and focus.

Whatever else delivering 95,000 cars in three months tells you, it teaches us that Tesla is a real, big-boy-pants company now, and needs a leader to match.

And Musk ain’t it.

First, the good news.

The electric-car future actually is imminent. As I’ve said before, the expert dispute over when electric cars will be as cheap as internal-combustion vehicles is mostly about which year in the 2020s will be the tipping point. It’s coming, thanks mostly to manufacturing improvements and economies of scale for lithium-ion batteries.

The upshot of this, as well as regulations and tax incentives that favor EV development, is that more than 300 models of EVs will be on the road within a few years. So Tesla’s market will be there.

The last piece of good news is that Tesla still has a significant lead in market acceptance and product development.

Each of its three main vehicles — the Model X crossover, the Model S luxury sedan and now the midsize Model 3 sedan — is the sales leader for all cars, electric or not, in their market segments (at least as Tesla defines the segments).

By the time General Motors GM, -1.04% gets its ballyhooed, Cadillac-led EV lineup onto U.S. roads, Tesla will have the Model Y SUV and its Ford F-150–challenging electric pickup truck ready.

At that point, Tesla will have enough models aimed at enough major automotive markets to be a “real” company, more than it already is. And, if it’s not making fairly steady money, we’ll know that the enterprise is unsuccessful. We’ll also know why — a leader who struggles with focus, lurching between letting production and cost controls get off track, and running crash campaigns to get back on.

Looking at reports even from bearish analysts shows how it can work.

Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino rates Tesla shares “sell,” but even he sees Tesla’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization doubling from $2.1 billion this year to $4.2 billion in 2021.

At 10 times EBITDA, a company like Tesla makes perfect sense. That valuation, including debt, is actually about the same as Ford’s enterprise value–to–EBITDA ratio for 2019. Self-appointed accounting guardians may knit their brows about the depreciation expenses that cut Tesla’s pretax net income to less than half of that in Goldman’s model, but any company that builds factories as rapidly as Tesla will have those. Omelettes, meet eggs.

The problem is getting there.

Analysts I’ve talked to marvel privately at how Tesla, having solved problems in battery technology that stumped incumbents, and aced them on design and selling the vision of electric vehicles, stumbles on the relatively easy process of manufacturing. And that’s a management question.

Only one person speaks for Tesla, and that’s Musk. Only one person leads — or is allowed to be seen by the public leading — the intermittent rushes to tighten up the company’s loose ship, improvising as he goes. He’s the one who’s the subject of all the leaks about how hellish the company is to work for, and at the center of childish disputes with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

At this point, even I can tell you the Tesla vision — and can explain how the product line will be filled out. The prototypes of these vehicles exist.

What remains is getting them made and sold, consistently and coherently.

That will get harder as Tesla grows. There will be more factories than Musk can sleep in at once. Marketing will get more conventional as the number of vehicles to be sold rises. And since Tesla really could use an extension of the government’s tax credit for EV buyers, which is expiring as the company passes sales thresholds, a more conventional charmer may be an aid to the company’s government relations.

So the specific value that Musk’s strengths adds gets lower, and the stakes bet on him fixing his weaknesses get higher.

The answer is to move Musk to a role that values his vision, and disguises his strengths. I’ve said it before, and nothing about Tuesday’s news makes it less true.