I've not been tracking Musk's company as much as I've been tracking the personality an Elon Musk the man. I wonder how much and how well he has laid the groundwork for hiring the right people and building a functional base of a business.
As I recall Apple didn't get all these big gubermint hand outs initially that Tesla has. Steve built Apple from the ground (or shall I say garage) up with Steve W. from their own initiative and ingenuity (bringing in real investors rather than including the government.)
I guess this is the point where HOW the business foundation was built really starts to show in the stress fractures of growth.
As I'm not paying much attention to Tesla and how it grew, can others weigh in on my thoughts? From what I know, this is what I think has gone wrong. We from Musk a millenial dependency (thinking government and hand outs are good) that is showing that style (government intervention/handouts) of company building only goes so far.
As I recall Apple didn’t get all these big gubermint hand outs initially that Tesla has. Steve built Apple from the ground (or shall I say garage) up with Steve W. from their own initiative and ingenuity (bringing in real investors rather than including the government.)
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When Musk left home, he showed up in Canada with a high school diploma, and a phone number for a distant relative. He worked on their farm and got a dangerous job cleaning a boiler in a lumber yard because it paid the most money. He paid for his first couple of years of college by running a nightclub on the weekends in his rented home. He then got a scholarship to an Ivy League school and got a degree from Wharton like Donald Trump.
At his first startup company in Silicon Valley he slept on a bean bag chair in his office. He sold that company and used the proceeds to start an online bank that became Paypal. When he sold Paypal, he put most of the money into SpaceX and Tesla. When both companies neared bankruptcy he went all in with his money to save them.
Most of his money these days comes from borrowing against his stock holdings. He only gets paid minimum wage as a legal requirement, but doesn’t cash the checks.
I’d say he’s done at least as well as Jobs in the area of making his own way. If you don’t like the subsidies, then bitch and moan about the government providing them.
Apple bought the entire US educational market. Once he was in, the education establishment found his progressive policies lined up with theirs. An entire generation grew up with Macs in the classroom those kids gave Apple it’s original base. It wasn’t direct subsidies like Musk, but it was certainly a captive audience courtesy of government schools.