[Hack&Lube]

Can't he be a visionary rent-seeker? I'm convinced from his interviews and writings he's not in it for the money. He's doing whatever he can to subsidize and pay for these ventures because he's trying to achieve his multiple visions.

If my goal was to encourage society to view electric vehicles as viable and can adopted en masse to change the paradigm of the industry, I would do whatever it took (including leveraging government handouts) to do it.

If my goal was to jump start private space exploration, at a fraction of the cost of government launches, I would take every hand-out and exploit every loophole I could to keep funding it as well. Space-X was on the brink of folding multiple times. It's barely hanging on and yet every launch inspires people to believe it's possible.

The point of these ventures isn't so that they are beastly commercial successes out of the gate, but to serve that vision and to inspire and motivate progress away from traditional models. For a small start-up to make a dent in both of these areas, and to keep funding R&D into new technologies means you have to get your hands dirty sometimes.

He may be losing money on every car sold, but the traditional model puts the new technology and features in the Halo cars and thus, out of reach of the ordinary person. (see airbags and anti-lock brakes). Time and economies of scale slowly cause those features to trickle down to the mass-market models. He's turning this around and subsidizing his cars so people can afford these cars in order to build up the customer base and fund those economies of scale.