The Playbook That Elon Musk Relies on to Make His Wild Ideas Work

Be rich enough that others support you just to give a good impression and look good for others so they don't get left out?

If everyone thinks everyone wants to suck up to the guy with money, low and behold, anything they do gets a lot of support, as everyone tries to get rich off everyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality#Business

This is an exercise in painting the bull's-eye around the arrow. What were we going to see this year is that Musk is capable of destroying the car company that he, against all odds, was able to scale up into a real new competitor. That's a transition that very very few have ever succeeded in making.

We may even see that his wrong size rocket is the cybertruck of space.

Madman Musk [1,2]'s "algorithm" works well for beating up on incompetent and/or lazy incumbents, for dominating markets that nobody else cares to compete in, and for cutting costs on products where performance doesn't matter. Semiconductor manufacturing is none of those.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz , who pioneered the "Remove parts until it stops working, then put the last one back in" methodology

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing