The actual question is: why was he able to walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers. I’m starting to think that the answer is not Musk’s personal competence.
$8 billion in government subsidies? That critical DOE loan, for example, wasn’t even available to anyone else.
I mean, come on, GM was literally insolvent in 2009 and exists today only because of a government bailout!
GM did receive bailouts and I never even implied otherwise.
So you have existing automakers (GM) who were already in a weak position due to the 2008 crisis and used the bailouts merely to keep *current* operations afloat. I’m not saying it was right for them to be bailed out but that’s what happened. Importantly, it didn’t put them in position to spend a lot of money on EV development, it was life support.
On the other hand you have a startup (Tesla) who was running out of runway to fund their product development of EVs. In this case they could put 100% of the bailout towards EV development. That was just the start, the billions in government subsidies that followed allowed them to not only pay back that loan ultimately but got them to where they are today (a bit of securities fraud helped as well). This wasn’t just life support it was a lot of runway for a startup.
Hopefully the above makes it obvious that government subsidies are indeed the primary answer to why he was able to “walk into that area and do so much better than experienced traditional automakers” as without them Tesla wouldn’t even exist.
If you want to argue that Tesla required government assistance to bring EVs to market, that's fine. If you argue that they weren't recipients of exactly the same kind of assistance offered to other parties in the market, you're way, way off.
The nerds, like the people who founded Tesla before Musk bought in, had done the sums and realised battery EVs were the future.
Governments around the world funded the initial rollout, a bunch of environmental orgs helped, another bunch of private businesses making chargers or charging networks or charging apps. Literally millions of people worked to make this ahppen.
Musk just happened to be a loud mouthed asshole with lots of money and onnections that backed the right horse at the right time and ended up with even more money.
At best he's the Bill Gates of EVs.
What he did was "walk in" and put his name on things.
I've recently seen an anecdote from someone (claiming to be) a SpaceX veteran that at least there, there were whole structures in place within the company to "manage" Musk: people who would tailor information to his biases and moods, ideas presented to him in such a way that he could claim they were his, idiotic ideas of his that got conveniently forgotten, that sort of thing.
I've also seen multiple people point out that at Tesla and SpaceX, his narcissistic whims were always constrained by the physical: any changes to manufacturing processes both had to respect the laws of physics, and would take some time to physically build new components, retool the machines for different outputs, etc.
None of this holds at Twitter.
Thus, he's like a well-respected writer who has always had really good editors, but has become successful enough that he can now claim he doesn't need them.....and now everyone can see just how much those editors were doing for his work.
During the whole time of high gas prices over the last few months, I haven't refilled my hybrid- I've driven 8900 miles on 2.75 tanks of gas (14.5 gallons) and the rest has been electric charging. I am curious but have not computed whether this saved me any money, as electricity prices here are fairly high, but it's been wonderful to stay away from the gas station.