I wonder if this isn’t the differentiation though. No other company is willing to sink anywhere near as much into paying engineering salaries as Tesla.

I remember choosing majors and realizing that as a computer science major I could do political science, but it would be a lot harder to go in the other direction. Maybe there’s something similar going on here: it’s a lot easier for a company that’s great at engineering to learn manufacturing than for a company that’s great at manufacturing to learn engineering.