March 1, 2014
On reading this article, many things come to mind; and not just how it screams "sensationalism" and "nay-sayer" out loud.
Musk is headed for a "stunning fail" - Edward Niedermeyer.
Mr. Nostradamus takes a series of arguments, adds layers of "if this then that" on top, and tries to create a straw man.
Even in my sleep I could smell oil on this article. Musk was a newcomer into the payments industry and he re-invented things with PayPal. SpaceX is the first private company in the world that has been able to successfully go farther than government agencies like NASA, and at a cheaper cost.
People said the idea that Tesla could begin shipping the Model S to customers in 2012 was absurd, that they were naive and didn't understand the complexities of building a vehicle like Detroit does.
Before that, everyone said nobody would buy electric vehicles because (a) you can't get them over 100 miles in range, and (b) because there is no charging infrastructure.
I would rather live in a world where a man like Musk is pushing the realm of possibilities to the next level as opposed to one in which he joins the rest of us hoping for some miracle to come out of the behemoth car (or any other) industry which hasn't really done much to innovate in fields like energy.
Even if it happens to be a "stunning fail", it would be more glorious and would have changed the world more than most others in their entire lifetime.