> I'm not sure "mature" is a word that can be applied to anything Musk touches.
Certainly Musk is very far from the traditional notions of maturity that you'd expect from a corporate executive, and clearly Musk doesn't care whether anyone thinks he's mature or not. But there's absolutely no question that Tesla and SpaceX are both as mature as any corporation could possibly be.
> At a time when it needed showmanship, he was its showman.
I never understood this line of thinking. I think Musk is a self-evdently terrible showman[0] but everyone has retconned some supposed showmanship as a component explanation for Tesla's market success. In my opinion, Tesla never needed a showman, because the product itself was always the "showman." Musk could have handed launch event duties off to a marketing exec and the outcome would have been functionally identical.[1] Perhaps marginally fewer early sales, but they were manufacturing constrained for so long that it wouldn't have had any impact on production ramp or total deliveries.
I'd bet at least 99% of Model 3/Y buyers never saw the launch event. They bought the car because of word-of-mouth from satisfied customers and positive reviews. The launch event sold a bunch of pre-orders, but there were enough people interested in the car to fill their order book for a long time. Within a year, these cars were selling themselves.
There's a lot of parallel with Jobs. In Jobs' case you also had a pre-eminent showman, but ultimately the star of every show was the product itself, not the slide deck or the speaker's tone. Both Musk and Jobs were obsessed with the product, and steered the ship of their respective corporations to focus on making a product worthy of dramatic reveal. This meant knowing what about the product actually mattered. (Consider, for example, whether it was more important for Tesla to focus on software or panel gaps.)
When the "Model 2" is ready, Tesla could do literally nothing to launch the vehicle. Just add it to their website and they'd sell everything they could possibly manufacture. Its continued success will be driven by customer satisfaction with the product, not marketing. The only point in having a launch event would be fan service.
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[0] I would distinguish his skill as a presenter with skill as a speaker. He's a terrible and often cringe-worthy presenter. But when he's talking about things he's passionate about, he can be a deeply compelling speaker.
[1] Arguably better because a C-suite in suit-and-tie would have stuck to the script and not waffled on with overly optimistic predictions about future R&D milestones.