Don't think calling Elon a con artist is fair - he built two of the most important companies of the 21st century.
Which makes his descent into erratic flimflammery all the more tragic.
Tesla was already built before Musk came along. He has helped maintain it, granted.
The second important company he built is OpenAI.
Whatever Musk's faults, it's really interesting to see people rewrite history.
A sustainable, profitable automobile manufacturer would be slightly more difficult.
It is really interesting to see people rewrite what we're talking about.
Actually building any car at all was just maintenance?
He joined in 2004. First car in 2008. Path to profitability starting in 2015.
I'm inserting the opinion that maybe some of that stuff since 2004 was highly relevant to "building" Tesla.
Interestingly, one of Musk's faults is dishonestly rewriting history to make himself appear to be a co-founder of Tesla.
And here are many of us saying the same about the people who fall for the cult of personality that surrounds this serial liar. To be fair, many of us are speaking with hindsight, as we too fell for it years ago, before his penchant for lying was laid bare.
It would be "cult of personality" to pretend the Musk did everything personally, obviously a lot of dedicated people contributed.. but it's just as dumb to act like he wasn't involved.
SpaceX was luck. Luck he ran into the people he did (people like Zubrin) at that time he did. Luck that his Tesla con paid off.
He has certainly helped maintain Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal at different points, but they were already built before he arrived.
Tesla, the car, was not, but we are clearly talking about companies, not cars.
Is it that you are unaware of the difference between companies and cars?
How big do you think it was exactly when he joined? And at what level of product maturity?
1%. It is at 2% now. Which isn't a knock on what Tesla is doing today, but to tell how it pales in comparison to what the company will be doing 1,000 years from now. We are still in very early days.
If that is how you want to measure it, Tesla hasn't been built yet. It is still under construction. No matter how you slice it, it is impossible for Musk to have built Tesla.
Building a company isn’t about who filed the paperwork, it’s about defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision.
You might not like the guy, but he clearly built Tesla.
That's fine if we want to hold that definition, but then your insistence that Musk built Tesla does not logically follow.