Wow you’re very passionate in your dislike of Musk and have clearly put far more thought into him than I have. I really don’t study the guy, I was just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ll let ya carry on with your anti-Musk crusade. Good luck!
I'm just working with your argument here. On your own terms, your claimed desire to allocate funds toward big risks and human improvement, Musk falls woefully short.
I'm not particularly anti-Musk. I'd like somebody to succeed in the some of the fields he's hyping. I'm just not convinced he's doing it, and I'm concerned his taste for self-aggrandizement will be the cause of landmark failures in some areas where I think we need progress.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1115487_xl-hybrids-adds...
And which will be made by Toyota in volume:
https://www.equipmentworld.com/toyota-to-offer-electric-powe...
Moreover, even if you were right, that Tesla's real innovation is marketing electric vehicles to non-Prius audiences, there's no particular reason to think he had to spend $15 billion of other people's money building (and rebuilding) factories to conduct some marketing experiments. It would have been much easier to go the add-on/rebuild route, which has been going on in the auto world for decades. Or he could have just done a design/marketing partnership with some carmaker. It would have cost far less and achieved just as much.
The reason he didn't is his enormous vanity. I think it would have been much better to spend $1-5 billion on an approach like that so we could spend another $10-14 billion on other long-term, longshot projects.