This is absurd to the point I almost want to click the flag button. I&#x27;ll bite, however, and share some of my feedback.<p>&gt; Tesla leveraged itself to the hilt on batteries in a prediction of rising gas costs forcing a switch to electric vehicles, but fracking and shale oil drove crude prices from $146 from their peak in June of 2008 to pretty consistently under $50 these days. Oil might drop even further.<p>If cars were just about gasoline pump prices, there would be no SUVs. Tesla&#x27;s model X is the first car I&#x27;ve ever <i>wanted</i> in life. I&#x27;ve owned cars, and I currently own a car, but this is the first one I&#x27;ve <i>wanted</i>, wanted. Similarly, I have other more-technology-able friends that are simply waiting for Tesla&#x27;s first truck to buy one. BMW announced they&#x27;re building more and more electric vehicles despite despite crude oil prices. That tipping point is done for. You can get it down to $10 a gallon and I&#x27;m not sure it would matter. You&#x27;re changing the prices on the cigarettes, not the fact they cause cancer.<p>&gt;why I believe that Musk got so defensive in a German newspaper when confronted with rumors of Apple’s self-driving car project and began to so aggressively attack them: “Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired.<p>This might be a bit of fear about competition, yes, but it is not all about Tesla. He was similarly pissed off when Blue Origin starting attracting workers away from him. I believe they even set up email alerts to monitor for Blue Origin email addresses, but I don&#x27;t know that part for sure.<p>&gt;and the government is the customer on a third of SpaceX’s launches and probably well over half its revenue.<p>True, but that&#x27;s a good thing, not a bad thing. It shows that they&#x27;re winning contracts away from organizations like United Launch Alliance, which is a Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boeing Defense partnership. Shouldn&#x27;t ULA be able to utterly push them out of contracts if they were just full of bullshit?<p>&gt;tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought.<p>This is fairly true from everything I know. The biggest example comes from the firing of his long-time assistant as talked about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-known-about-Elon-Musks-long-time-assistant-Mary-Beth-Brown" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-known-about-Elon-Musks-long-ti...</a> and other places.<p>&gt;His latest Hyperloop project reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Marge narrowly saves Springfield from being cheated out of all its money in a monorail-building scam.<p>The Hyperloop could eventually take some dollars from cities, but those cities are the type of cities already involved in plans for decade-long, billion-dollar rail projects. Elon isn&#x27;t so much the Mono rail guy in that sense, but the guy that comes in after and says, &quot;Holy crap, I can give you a monorail in less time and money than those current people&quot; Actually, I&#x27;m one to believe the rumors that he started it just to poke those companies, and then when people started taking it more seriously and giving it traction it was sort of a &quot;Oh? Really Okay let&#x27;s go with this&quot; situation. In other words, I think the hyperloop got more traction than Elon and his associates thought it would and so now they&#x27;re running with it.