The industry was right back in 2015-2016. The gigactory was supposed to have capacity 150Gwh/year by now. This is what they called a mistake and a waste. The current gigafactory operates at less than 40Gwh/year (as of August 2019), which is the reasonable quote. And a darker interpretation of this is that Tesla knowingly deceived the state about the size in order to be granted more incentives with no intention of ever achieving this size.

Source? From October 2014:

> The automaker says that by 2020, the factory will be shipping out 35GWh of cells and 50GWh of packs per year.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/panasonic-to-pour-billions-of-...

There seems to be contradictions on the Wiki article about Gigafactory 1...

"Its projected capacity for 2018 is 50 (GWh)/yr of battery packs, and its final capacity upon completion was, as of May 2016, planned to be 150 GWh/yr of battery packs.[39] This would enable Tesla to produce 1,500,000 cars per year."

But after this quote, they failed to verify the initial numbers, so maybe there is some whitewashing of those facts?

Well the numbers changed at the 2016 shareholder meeting https://www.visualcapitalist.com/9-slides-put-new-tesla-giga... to align with the model 3 projections.

In 2018 the numbers changed to 100GWh, but it wasn't clear if it was only for cars or all. And now nobody knows. But the point is that the outrage came with the 150Gwh quote from 2016.

Just the shorts, maybe.

At the very beginning it was still a wild bet about timing. Nothing was aligned, so surely a lot of long were not tempted.

Tesla had to create the gigafactory. They had no choice. There was no where to buy the batteries otherwise.

Even before the GF they were still seen as fighting a too steep battle.