I’m pretty sure almost everyone who buys a Model 3 thinks that a Model S is “for them”, they just can’t afford it. When the Model S came out, it was clear what it would be good for, and all that needed to change was to get the price down and the scale up.

And if someone was like “What’s the big deal with the Tesla Model S?” I could say things like “This car runs on electricity, so it will help reduce our carbon footprint. It’s also really fast, really quiet, has more storage space than other cars, has better software than other cars.” and the person asking the question would have an answer.

What I wouldn’t do is say “Whatever, when this is the only kind of car you can buy, you’ll understand.” Which is the answer I get a lot when I ask questions about crypto and NFTs.

Well sure... but plenty of people did criticise the model S as being out of the price range of so many people that it wouldn't have an appreciable effect on carbon footprint. To which the response 'it's targeting a small number of people that are willing to pay high prices for something that still has technical glitches, which will subsidise a more widely appealing product later' seems pretty valid. What's the alternative, tell people at that stage about the Model 3, which even Elon thought had low odds of being built by Tesla Motors? There are too many lessons learned between the Model S days and the Model 3 days to offer a realistic vision of those days, the proof was more in who was excited by the S than a carefully laid out roadmap between exciting the early adopters and appealing to a mass market.

> Either this is revolutionary or it’s a niche thing, but it can’t be both.

My reading of this is that it's describing something at a single point of time. So to use your example, the Tesla S was niche, _then_ the 3 evolved the idea to become revolutionary.

Some niches eventually become revolutionary, but they're not both niche and revolutionary at the same time.

> doesn't every revolution start out with a niche of early adopters

So does every obvious scam.