First, large-scale manufacturing is a different thing from rocket engineering. It ceases to be about building something, and begins to be about understanding and managing people. That's what I challenge Musk is still learning, and far too slowly. He may never be able to learn at all—beliefs about people and management are far more hard-set than those about physics and engineering.

That said, I think he'll get it done, but it's still arrogant (and inefficient) to take all of the learnings of manufacturing and management of the past 30 years and try to "start fresh."

It's a waste. It's a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of human capital and life and happiness. He's expending energy to learn things we've already learned.

That's the sad part. I'm sure he'll get it done, but at what cost? At what despair and unnecessary strife? And at what level of waste and inefficiency.

Sure, you'll say, necessity is the mother of invention, and new knowledge and innovation will come out of this struggle—but how can we know even more could not be done in a better process? We can't, and this naysaying will go by the wayside. As perhaps it should.