

Not true. The company did well because of well meaning people who wanted to move away from gas cars. There was literally a documentary “who killed the electric car” before Tesla. It showcased a well loved electric car that was only allowed to be leased and when the lease was up, no one was allowed to buy them. They destroyed them all.
Tesla got to where it is not because of Musk, but because it was a way to rise against the legacy manufacturers forcing us to stay on gas cars.
Musk stirred up some major stupidity, and did not care for quality control when it came to things like panel alignment, but the fact was that was the only option out there. They also added cool things like your phone being a key, or the key card. Lots of little quality of life improvements were brought in. Also I think they had to make a special gel and position for the batteries to not cause fires from a single battery failure. Lots of important (yet likely relatively simple) improvements that all the other manufacturers refused to do. Best we had was a Prius, and other cars that were for some reason made to look ugly and still needed gas anyways.
But they have stagnated. Musk has done all his tricks and they stopped improving. Literally letting the competitors make better batteries soon, which would kill them entirely if solid state batteries come about. I don’t know that Tesla can or needs to come back to the forefront, but without them we probably still would not have electric cars.
Oh sorry I wasn’t trying to say that shouldn’t happen. The cars should be worth a bit less than they sell for, and the stock should be worth maybe 1/10th of it’s current value… Or less. I don’t care about that.
We still needed SOMETHING to get us out of the rut from legacy manufacturers. Now if they get rid of Elon then hopefully the engineers who helped pioneer the current EVs can get back to moving things forward. Or maybe they work for Rivian or others already.