Who said it has to? I didn't.
What I said was that Silicon-Valley-type people often display a certain amount of hubris in believing that nobody else has ever done what they're trying to do, and therefore disregard free knowledge that others obtained at great expense.
Musk is attempting the revolutionary, never-before-heard-of, herculean task of... building a factory to make cars. Strip away all the PR-speak from Musk's and Tesla's public announcements and statements, and that's what you find underneath. "Build a car factory" is not a new problem. We have over a century of prior art on things people have tried, what succeeded and what failed. It's the willful ignoring of this prior art that I'm complaining about; other companies have learned about the advantages and disadvantages of automation, for example, but the whole enterprise of Tesla is wrapped up in so much mythology around breaking new ground and being completely new that they were constitutionally incapable of admitting "yeah, this is a thing other people have done, too, maybe we should study how it went for them and learn from that".
Even still, I find it hard to see the future for Tesla that real fans seem to perceive. SpaceX has literally and figuratively taken off, but Tesla just seems stuck. I’m especially leery of how willing they seem to be to beta test software that can cause loss of life and limb. I also don’t see how existing Titans in the automotive space can’t just eat Tesla’s lunch, given that they can crank out a couple orders of magnitude more cars per year than Tesla. What is Tesla doing that they can’t copy, given that Tesla is still trying to figure out the assembly line?
Is that the same arrogance of the opposite party saying "I told you so, son"?
I have never been in the Silicon Valley, so I won't talk about that. Yet, I think that this mentality creates at least 1 good thing after trying 99 times.
I have to be honest, I may be a bit biased here, because I am bit frustrated by this mentality that innovation needs to follow a specific path, that you need to always follow what your "parents" have been telling you, etc - and this is due to the environment I live in, unfortunately.
If Musk had been able to achieve what he had envisioned, now we would be talking about something totally different - OMG, what a genius, how come we didn't come up with that earlier? How come this young man made something we thought impossible, despite all the studies, etc.? And so forth. That's the same cowardice that doesn't allow us to think further, to think bigger. He does, he fails, he tries, he fails again, and who knows, maybe he makes it. If he doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. Without that way of thinking, we wouldn't have put our foot on the Moon.