I think people underestimate what an agile and lean startup like Elon seems to be running can accomplish. He's a super intelligent guy with a growing positive trackrecord. The vehicle industry has been waiting for disruption for 20+ years, and the giants finally have lost control and whatever unnatural advantages they tried to maintain. Technology for electric vehicles will only continue to improve, and costs will go down. Luckily for economies very attached to oil they can shift to systems like free re-fueling once a vehicle is purchased; That's pretty incredible and something I never even thought about or imagined possible, though it makes sense and works once the puzzle pieces are all in front of you. P.S. Elon's my new Man Crush.
In the next month I'll be dumping money into getting a patent. Time will tell if that ends up being a better investment than into Tesla. Maybe I should try to get Elon as an advisor / investor. I'll have to hope to not get giddy when speaking to him if there's ever the possibility ...
I'm not sure a company that is losing $30M a month (or $400K per year per employee, of which there are 900) can be classified as lean--and possibly not agile, given that they spent a fortune creating the Roadster only to abandon it three years later as being too expensive, having sold only 2K copies. I'm sure it was a learning experience, but Tesla's burn rate is only increasing, so I hope they learned enough.
And, while SpaceX's rockets are undoutably advanced and very safe, they aren't currently the cheapest cost per pound sent into LEO; that honor belongs to the Russians:
SpaceX has some cheaper launches "in development" but they've already revised their initial prices upwards of 100% of what they claimed early on for their operational launches, so you really can't trust what they claim for in development vehicles.
