I'm really confused how you're confused. What is a better way to become the richest person than by owning and growing a series of hugely successful companies that provide products and services to people?
To my knowledge, none of these companies were run at a profit during Musk's involvement. While this is a normal part of growing a business, it leads to a bias on what people think could happen - rather than what does happen.
How much money did musk really make? how much of it is an artifact of monetary policy.
80% of Musk's wealth is either confidence in Tesla's future, or memes, depnding on your perspective. It's not even pretending to be about completed work.
It's on free fall.
Btw I just did an overview of the current EV market and there isn't even one car maker that is able to make them under ~35K$
VW and a few others will sell in huge volume next year (VW 1.2 million in 2023 actually, much more than tesla) but I see currently no validation from the car makers that they will reduce the costs. The main bottleneck is apparently the price of the materials and I don't see why they would get lower considering demand is exploding.
That's why I studied the hydrogen market and it looks like a lot of hydrogen cars are coming in the next two years, they will have greater range than EV and to be seen but are likely to be cheaper to significantly cheaper.
It's true that the availability of hydrogen is an issue but it will progressively be solved, California is already covered for example.
So yeah current bet is the démocratisation of carbon neutral cars in massive volume will be via hydrogen, unless EV materials price find a solution.
I think that's the big difference that causes confusion here: Musk is wealthy, not rich. The companies are worth a lot, but generally not producing dollar bills for him. His ownership in companies worth a lot is why he's valued so high, rather than strictly how much money or cash leverage he has.
