Most things Tesla seem to come down to SpaceX and Mars. When I have a conversation about a car company and it ends up veering off to Mars, I realize that it was never really a conversation about cars to begin with. Having said that, I don’t know how to cut through the mythology, some of which seems deserved. I was one of the people who thought that SpaceX was probably going to fail years ago, and I was quite wrong. Some of what you’re saying was part of my reasoning too, insofar as building and launching rockets wasn’t a new thing, but really quite an old one.

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?