You see it in history: the victorians built a ridiculously over-engineered, insanely extensive rail network. It didn't make any money, but at the time, there wasn't really anything else to invest in with a reasonable return rate. So everybody went in on the one thing that had the possibility of a massive pay-off. Recognize the unicorn-logic here?
Tesla kind of takes all the decades of Toyota kicking ass, and gets the lesson completely wrong - the 'machine that builds the machine' is exactly what GM was doing. Toyota was good at building cars because they were far less automated than their american competitors.
Then it works because electric cars are a great idea, batteries are massively subsidized by the phone industry, and incumbent car makers don't really have relevant expertise (since they're really good at building internal combustion engines, and a lot of the other stuff is a secondary concern). Also, because Tesla has an enormous amount of investor cash.
So why does all this bother me? It's because of where the cash comes from. Tech companies don't really pay taxes, and they don't have (relative to revenue) employees. If you imagine how many jobs Microsoft Office has replaced, you get the picture. All this is fine in itself (minus the tax thing), but when the money just gets poured into these obvious money spouts, into a company that's pretty obviously only workable because it sits at the bottom of one of those money spouts, lead by a guy who's clearly not as smart as he thinks he is - well, it feels a bit like a great example of the waste and unfairness of the system itself.