Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's not SV Messiah, he seems to be simply the lucky combination of right perspective on the world and enough money to make it happen. The only bad thing about this is that it is so rare. > 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 huma…
Companies are in the business of selling things for profit. That's essential to them, because they have to pay taxes, create capital and produce, which are all results of commerce. For this they need to maintain an image. And with the first danger to its image, we've seen how Tesla reacted: statistics manipulation and aggression, instead of admitting its their fault and promising to work for better. So we can't bet o…
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.