I hear many claims but have never seen any evidence that the claims are true…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvQ-BTwI_II

As far a Elon and SpaceX go he is no more than a rent seeker. I hear many claims but have never seen any evidence that the claims are true…

The electric vehicles I can’t speak to, but when it comes to the rockets a lot of what SpaceX has done has been to grab many of the paper and experimental-but-not-production ideas that have been floating around for decades and actually render them in metal. SpaceX’s production design is also substantially different from that of their competitors.

The reason no one’s done it before is because there was no strong incentive to do so. The launch market is small (in terms of numbers of launches), so there’s a point before which making your rockets cheaper does nothing but eat into your profits.

Musk is making a bet that the demand is elastic and that if he can provide more and cheaper rocket launches, business and government will find more things to put in space. He’s probably right, at least to some extent. The question is whether he’s right that there’s the potential for orders of magnitude of growth.

I certainly hope so. I think we’ll get to see, which is certainly not something I could have said 10 years ago.

Yet, no one made a usable electric car before Tesla, and no one can make disposable rockets as cheaply as SpaceX — and they’re close to making them significantly less disposable. Why did no one else do this before Musk?

Like it was said in this Model S production documentary, “Teslas solution to improving battery life appears startlingly simple,” disappointing even! The magic sauce is simply thousands of Panasonic 18650 3400mAh lithium-ion cells, which look almost like regular heavy duty AA batteries. The motor is nothing special either; it’s a standard three-phase alternating-current (AC) induction motor.

Now who wants a monorail, I mean hyperloop?