but it’s MUCH cheaper, so keeping with every other shitty idea he’s ever had, Musk was REALLY banking on Tesla engineers to make a crazy breakthrough so he could reap billions in reward.

It worked at SpaceX because of a perfect concoction of all the best rocket scientists and engineers wanting to work at SpaceX, since it was one of the only space programs not owned by a government and could push the boundaries, the technology being possible and wildly practical to implement, and massive government subsidies.

Tesla is in the car market, which is notoriously competitive and, while they do have massive government subsidies, they don’t have the best engineers and musk’s insistence that they “figure out” how to shove autonomous driving into a medium that simply doesn’t provide enough information drives even the better engineers away.

I really wish my government would stop funding his ego and let his fantasy projects die already.