Tesla is interesting because his innovation was to create an electric car that actually looks nice and had great acceleration making it actually desirable to drive. All the ones before that were butt ugly and sold on their environmental credentials. Not sure if that will be enough to make them profitable in the long run. Oddly, the big car makers are still unable to make an electric car that is not ugly. Baffled as to why.
His 'The Boring Company' seems like a non-starter to me as there is no innovation except making smaller tunnels than usual. Cannot see how that is will work out, but time will tell.
His 'Hyperloop' idea is not original and seems like a dumbass idea to me. Maybe that is why he has not actually put any money into it and merely encourages others to develop it instead.
He is an entrepreneur so some or even most ideas will not work out, but with the occasional hit. His PayPal was a hit and so is SpaceX. If he has no other hits that is still two more than most people.
BTW, it was Peter Thiel that lead Paypal thru the rough times. Musk was a part of it but he was kicked out before you could say that Paypal was a success.
Come to think of it, moving people efficiently is a largely-solved problem given sufficient population density. Hyperloop is just dumb.
NYC has a throughput problem. High speed doesn't improve throughput, it worsens it.
With ultra-dense city cores the only way to fix them is proper city planning - meaning: tearing down skyscrapers outright or converting them from offices into affordable housing to reduce the hordes of low-income staff travelling for hours just to get to work.
The "free market" has failed here because stuff still works (=people get to work and make money) but the cost is put onto society as a whole (congestion, smog, life quality degradation, hours upon hours wasted being in transit).
The guy has plenty of flaws, but he’s apparently terrifically good at synthesizing complex technical data in an extraordinarily wide range of topics, and arriving at solutions that others missed but look obvious in retrospect.
Engineering and learning from mistakes maybe less so.
We have no idea, of course, what would have happened if the original founders had stayed in charge and Musk hadn't joined. Maybe the company would have failed. Maybe it would be doing even better than it is. Who knows. That's immaterial to the argument. Regardless of what Musk would like you to believe, or what a court settlement allows, he did not actually found Tesla.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/tesla-motors-founders-now-there-ar...
Isn't even a modern coal-fired power plant cleaner than the ICE in a car? It certainly isn't perfect to have fossil fuel sources powering the electricity used to charge a car, but I'd much rather isolate and improve CO2 capture at coal-fired plants over having 250+ million polluters spread out over the entire country.