ujm,
The claim to musk being a business genius is by your own admission based on his net worth. But approximately 2/3 of his net worth is either Tesla stock or Tesla options. His net worth is intrinsically tied to Tesla stock. And Tesla stock is absurdly overvalued at the moment. Yes Tesla sales are growing. But it is priced as if it is growing much faster than it actually is. Tesla is on track to sell approximately 1.3 million cars this year worldwide. Toyota will sell approximately 9.5 million. VW will sell around 8.7 million. So Tesla is still a relatively small player. Electric vehicles were unprofitable until the last couple of years when batteries got cheaper and new subsidies for electric cars started and restrictions on ICE cars got stricter in Europe and China. And the big auto manufacturers with a lot more production capacity and experience than Tesla were sitting around waiting for this. Now they are increasing production by a lot which also has the secondary effect of taking away Tesla’s emissions credit sales.
VW will likely produce more EV’s than Tesla worldwide in 2024. Stellantis in 2026. Toyota concentrates on Hybrids and PHEV’s rather than pure EV’s but including those (and for emissions credit and ICE restrictions they are mostly classified like electric) Toyota already produced almost 2 million in 2020 and increased that to 2.6 million in 2021. Ford F-150 Lightning easily beat Cybertruck to market. Same goes for Daimler/Freightliner eCascadia series vs Tesla Semi.
Now as to Twitter, I don’t know if Musk will drive it into the ground or not. And I suspect not but he agreed to a badly inflated price for a company worth nowhere near that much in what appears to have been an overconfident snap decision.
And the “why don’t you start a competing company” argument is completely silly. Auto manufacturing is a capital intensive business. Musk had money from his sale of his shares of Paypal when it went public.