Tesla: Insane or Clever

Jean-Louis Gassée, like many of us, is bewildered by Tesla:

But, if we make a patient effort to see through the PR excesses, we see an interesting image come into focus, a picture of Tesla winning the war with its software weapons and its vertical integration.

Tesla is a company that would seem to have all the ingredients to be truly transformational. And in many respects, they have been! And yet. I’m not sure there has ever been a company that has been more frustrating. They — and by ‘they’, I mainly mean Elon Musk, of course — keep shooting themselves in the foot. Or worse. They’ve almost made an art of the corporate self-own.

You can only over-promise and under-deliver for so long, right? Right?!