Given how shit even current EVs are compared to the early Model S, you are totally wrong. It was always at most a side project for ALL the existing OEMs as we now know. They have have had chance after chance after chance to prove the thesis that "if they cared, they could produce a Tesla killer overnight". None of the OEMs have produced anything that is competitive with Tesla in all metrics (price, range, features etc.) all of them compromise in one or more areas.
The only real serious competitors are the Chinese. There is a reason when teardown analysis reports are offered on all the EVs, the Chinese care about one company and one company only: Tesla. Everyone else is just a follower and the Chinese are not even bothering to waste their time looking at them. You even see it in their actions. Tesla is the only "legacy western" company without a JV partner in China. China can happily dump all the other losers any time they want. They can't afford to lose Tesla so they have accommodated them.
>SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
Are you for real? In 2021 they launched ~380 Metric tons of mass to orbit while the rest of the world combined launched about 400 metric tons. In 2022? They were double what the rest of the world did and finally in 2023, they were 80% of all the mass to orbit launched. When I mean rest of world that includes: Rest of the US industry + Europe + India + China + Japan + Russia + everyone else. If you look at the other launch providers in the US they get far more subsidies and have delivered not even a fraction of what SpaceX has provided.
Can you think of many industries where a single company is doing 80% of worldwide effort? And they are on track to increase that by 50% this year (a metric they will likely achieve given their track record).
In the last couple years they have sent 42 humans to orbit and back. They year they are on track to do their first spacewalk.
Starlink now has 2.3 Million customers in over 70 countries.
I am seeing this outright dismissal of Musk more and more since the whole Twitter saga. Its reeks of ignorance just like all the people that repeatedly make fun of Apple users as idiots who just get duped by fancy marketing. Even in 2024 people here make that silly argument. Musk bashing is the new version of that. It just makes you look ignorant because you are so blinded by what you don't like that you have dismissed all these amazing achievements that no one else is doing.