A few points- From 1886 to 1907 The automobile was an expensive rich man's toy with little practicality. There was very little infrastructure to support it and you really couldn't go very far with it. In 1908 Henry Ford unveiled to the world his Model T that he not only redesigned the car in ways to make manufacturing the car cheaper and therefore more affordable to the masses, but he also invented the modern assembly line to bring costs down further. When the Model T hit the road, there was still very poor infrastructure to support cars, but that changed very quickly as people lined up to buy Model Ts.
And Congress held hearings to break up Henry's company and hand it to "better educated" businessmen and investors of the time. Ford had to fight his government to keep his company back then. Read up on it, it's fascinating. Like today, Congress had their pet oligarchs and Henry threatened all of them. "Entrepreneur" wasn't a commonly used word and nobody thought of them as special in any way.
Ford squeaked by, by the skin of his teeth, because he was savvy and owned -- a telephone. When pressed by Congress that believed he "wasn't smart enough" (read: Not bred into the oligarchy of the day and not willing to share his profits with them, including being one of the first companies to self-fund large loans direct to the public, boy the central bankers didn't like that...) to run his own company, he exclaimed that he didn't need to be. He had this new thing called a telephone on his desk and he could call and talk directly to the country's leading experts on any topic by asking for them and waiting until they transported themselves to the town telephone operator's office for a long distance phone call.
Congress was seriously ****ed at him for that.
The generally re-written history books like to make it out like his entrepreneurial spirit and wonderful product were all that brought about the Ford Motor Company empire. Actually he was a stubborn prick (not unlike Jobs or Musk) who had to fight his own government to keep solitary control of his company (very unlike Jobs or Musk).
You see, in the case of Musk, he had the foresight to buy off the politicians early. Tie his product to a populist tax and watch the giddy politicians line up begging him to make products that can loosely be associated with "green" mentality. VERY loosely when you look hard.
The Tesla Model S has proven that performance isn't what's keeping electric cars from mass adoption. It is the safest car ever built, it is the fastest production sedan ever built, it can carry 5 adults and two children 265 miles at normal freeway speeds. It is regarded by many car experts to be the best sedan ever built. In short, the Model S shows what is possible. The big stumbling block is price.
Well you got there eventually. It never was performance. All sorts of electric enthusiasts were building screamer little conversion cars before Musk. It was hob-nobbing the politicians at dinner parties and buying their loyalty, as well as buying the tax breaks with favors. It was ALWAYS the PRICE that was the back-breaker of a production electric car, and it still is.
He also knows how to strategically play the press. People signed up for the thing before it's released because they get a government DISCOUNT on them if they get a low production number. They get all the other citizens to add to our national debt for their toy.
Who wouldn't sign up if they had an interest in electrics and an electric met their niche driving mode?
It's great to have the guy who needs a pickup truck and lives on a dirt road and his kids and his grandkids pay for your toy! Sweet deal. Only available if you pretend convincingly it's about being "green" or whatever lies are necessary to get the government to hand out wads of cash.
There's no legitimate scientific reason We The People should be subsidizing a Tesla. Other than making existing battery technology more physically dense, it won't return anything back to society that wasn't already do-able without subsidization.
Musk hasn't produced much in terms of real innovation. He's just packaged up things that already existed really well and convinced John Q Public he's building the next "Flying Car".
Preempting numerous problems by playing to populist rhetoric saved him from both following in Henry's footsteps and having to fight government regulators over "safety" and "distribution" issues, as well as helped him avoid having Ford's modern company and brethren from turning him into that guy they made the movie about that made a better car decades before the big three did, and they killed him off with regulations. Umm, Tucker. That's him.
It's rarely the person who makes something truly new or useful who wins in our society anymore. Jobs did it, making new things that nobody had seen, but Musk is quite a different animal.
He made sure to get the political ducks in a row first and a significant portion of the purchase price of his products covered by Uncle Sam, before he made them. He's the new breed of robber baron, business-wise.
He had a great starting point with the nuts in overcrowded California mandating X number of electrics for no particularly scientific reason. Notice where his company is headquartered? Political kickbacks galore. It's nearly a lifestyle in California. He could have put the company anywhere. Literally anywhere. He put it in the heart of the political territory demanding the product.
"Come to the pahhh-tay dahhhh-ling. The Senator will be there. You've met the Senator haven't you? Let's work out how we'll get the votes to pay for my next venture. Good gub'mint jobs await for your constituents all paid for by the entire country. We just won't call them that though. We'll work it through a corporation that without the rebates to individuals would be a niche toy for rich people. Cool, huh? We'll get the Senator to keep voting in more requirements for the product to be made, and for the tax kickbacks, and we will build what his laws mandate for the People who will pay partially via direct payments and partially through hidden payments taken out for them in the form of socialized debt load by the Senator..."
. But just a general comment on this often voiced sentiment:
