EM is an interesting guy. He almost has a Howard Hughes approach to his business but I think it's paying off for him in the long run. He doesn't seem to be the best public speaker in the world but he gets his people motivated and hyped about everything. How many "normal" launches do the control center crowds cheer wildly at everything that happens on a mission? Those guys cheer at everything even 85 launches in when a successful launch should be "routine". That's leadership getting them excited and motivated to do their best. SpaceX certainly has broken the mold on launch services. Their goal of Mars is being fast tracked and I wouldn't doubt it if the first humans on Mars come from a commercial spacecraft instead of a government funded one. If SpaceX, Blue Origin and a couple of the smaller companies ever threw in their talents together, NASA is done as an manned exploration agency.
Tesla is starting to pick up tho I think that truck he created is doomed to failure before the start. I think they can be competitive even with the Detroit 3 and Japanese if they ever get their recharging infrastructure down. Like someone else said, when you start seeing Tesla charging stations at the nearest Loves or Pilot, I think they will explode in popularity. I don't know why they haven't tried that partnership with one of the large national chains yet but it could be because the battery and vehicle manufacturing wasn't down pat yet. Americans like convenience and when a battery swap or recharging gets down to the same 5-10 minutes of a normal gas stop, I think Tesla could become as mainstream as Ford or Toyota.
Musk certainly seems to have had some off the wall ideas that he chased thru to fruition by building companies of workaholics that don't seem to know what "can't" means. To his credit, he's chased his dreams so far and done better than most people thought he could have. I think some of that is the attraction of him and his company in social media and his appeal to the younger generation that they aren't being constrained by a stodgy old board of directors that learned to get fat off government contracts and being the only game in town. There isn't an "we can't" or "we shouldn't" attitude in SpaceX in particular. They have a goal, they go for it.
