Despite all that he clearly has a pretty good handle on engineering and is definitely involved. He’s not just a figurehead.
as far as I’ve read he actually doesn’t, he just pretends to. You can see this in a lot of his interactions with his employees and the public. but yes, people are multidimensional. musk is a good salesman.
tl;dr: you don’t want it directly in the front-center (like the Nissan Leaf) because a minor fender bender will ruin it. Front-driver’s side is a good choice that a lot of other manufactures are going to. Elon didn’t want that, because it didn’t line up with his Bel Air garage. So they stuck it in back, but due to the way Tesla Superchargers are laid out, it now means Tesla drivers have to back into the parking space.
I don’t think that’s even true. He just had enough money that he could fail 99 times before succeeding once, and the return from that one was enough that he could fail 999 times before succeeding, and so on.
He just threw money around until enough other people succeeded in big enough ways, and then he claims credit.
as far as I’ve read he actually doesn’t, he just pretends to. You can see this in a lot of his interactions with his employees and the public. but yes, people are multidimensional. musk is a good salesman.
Along those lines, consider the decision for why the Model S charge port is where it is, according to Tesla’s former chief engineer:
https://electrek.co/2025/01/31/teslas-charge-port-location-is-due-to-elon-musks-garage-layout-says-lucid-ceo/
tl;dr: you don’t want it directly in the front-center (like the Nissan Leaf) because a minor fender bender will ruin it. Front-driver’s side is a good choice that a lot of other manufactures are going to. Elon didn’t want that, because it didn’t line up with his Bel Air garage. So they stuck it in back, but due to the way Tesla Superchargers are laid out, it now means Tesla drivers have to back into the parking space.
ftfy
I don’t think that’s even true. He just had enough money that he could fail 99 times before succeeding once, and the return from that one was enough that he could fail 999 times before succeeding, and so on.
He just threw money around until enough other people succeeded in big enough ways, and then he claims credit.