The narrative about Musk being some genius exploiter of subsidies playing 4D chess with all kinds of financial and marketing trickery is total nonsense if you actually look into it.
In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.
The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.
Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.
> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.
Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.
Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.
But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.
Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.
In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.
And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.
Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.
> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.
Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?
Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.