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> Honestly enterprise is enterprise.
What I like about Tesla and SpaceX is that they're honest, plain companies. They exist as means to an end. Vehicles to achieve material goals - in this case, sustainable transport and making humanity multiplanetary. This is how all companies should work, and yet somehow we got lost on the way and most companies exist to make money, without giving much shit about how exactly they're making this money.
Elon Musk as a person, is a person. A single person. You say that he "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money to make it happen." According to whom? Interplanetary travel's possibility and practicality is questionable, let alone human chance of extraterrestrial survival. Some may well think that this is a waste of resources. Sustainable transport is nice -- and I love Tesla cars for being seemingly practical non-fossil cars -- but self-driving cars are a big change and actually requires moral adaptations. Would being killed by a self-operating machine equal to being killed by a manual car? Who is to blame if an accident happens? What do I do if my spouse goes under a self-driving car and it is not her fault? Do I sue the car? What happens if it is found guilty (i.e. it's AI is mistaken)? Do we jail the car? Is Tesla to pay me in indemnity? If my self-driving car hits another car's rear bumper, am I liable? Do I recompensate the other driver? Who is liable if an automatic vehicle breaks some traffic rule? What if it passes when it's red?
If all cars are electric, how we'll be affected by increased electric demand? This will mean increased CO2 production with geothermal production, and increased nuclear waste to be disposed off with nuclear production. Will we have to build more dams? Will we instead use the same dinosaur oil to to produce electricity, canceling out the gain?
We should think on these, and Musk being a SV angel figure is not an answer to these questions. We did not question anything till the end of the past century, and we are at the edge of a climate disaster. This tech (self-driving) means a great, big change to our daily lives, and it cannot happen because someone who "seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money" wanted it to.
The answers to those questions are simple if you care to look for them - or even listen to the "SV messiah". Sure increased electricity demand may mean upgrades to infrastructure, but this happens anyway as peoples' dependence on electrically-powered devices grow. Nuclear waste is an utter non-problem, it only seems so because of unfounded fears. The fact is we can manage it. As for using fossil fuels, even that outcome would be a huge win - power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines in cars, so even by just centralizing the burning of that oil you're saving lots of energy.
I'm not going to take a position on "statistics manipulation" - I haven't seen anything besides few HNers jumping to conclusions, and I recall that the actual outcome turned out to favour Tesla's position even more. But maybe I'm missing something, I'll happily read up if you could point me to a good source.
Circling back to the point about companies - what you described is the mechanism how companies work. What I was talking about is the reason to found them. As it is today, most companies are what I fondly call "toilet-paper companies" - ones that couldn't care less about what they're actually doing as long as it turns in profit, and would gladly switch to selling toilet paper if it was more profitable than their current operations. Tesla and SpaceX are the rare kind of companies for which their stated goal is the terminal value, not an instrumental one. That's why their decisions keep baffling people - because we're not used to see businesses actually driven by ideas (as opposed to saying so for PR benefit) very often.
