I wouldn't even try to wrap my arms around what Elon is doing. Cars, Energy, Rockets, etc. It's not everyday that someone who wants to change the status quo comes along. All I know is he must be very lonely with so many people hoping he fails.
NOTE: I'm not a hater or a fanboy.
But.....the grand visions before the boring grunt work of engineering has been accomplished, and trying to build massive $5 billion factories before any kind of profitability is on the horizon is not going to help Tesla stick around beyond a few years at most.
They're also right about hydrogen fuel cells. They're stupid. Maybe if we get into space and can get an abundance of hydrogen things will be great. But, here on Earth you have to manufacture the hydrogen and create a vast infrastructure to transport and store it.
Tesla also have a big lead in the use of telemetry and their ability to do software updates over the air and their approach to security and building this in-house. Other car manufacturers will continue to outsource this and continue to fuck up completely.
However, Tesla had to follow through with all of this, maybe be out of the public eye for a while and iterate over the engineering, keeping costs to a minimum and doing the R and D, before moving on to other capitally expensive projects. They've massively overstretched and I don't see it being recoverable.
Huh, I'd have assumed the opposite -- that the masses of people following the progress greatly outweighs the man-will-never-fly crowd.
Moreover, if he succeeds it is not only for his personal merits. That's one of the things that the media gets completely wrong. It is more for the merits of a large group of people working in engineering, advertisement, financing, and because of the general state of the economy. Similarly, if he fails it will not be solely because of his personal qualities.
Who else is trying? A lot of people who could do this are reading Hackernews right now. How many of them are actually trying to do it?