For all the hate Elon Musk gets—especially post his Twitter acquisition—there are some real, tangible benefits that he has given to the world. Quentin Stafford-Fraser talks about how he changed the EV space.
Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet. I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen. It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level. I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact. He changed the world.