In a phone call with highly prominent investor Richard Strong about fourteen months ago, he asked me my thoughts on Elon Musk. While I didn’t have deep or detailed opinions on the entrepreneur, I’d written a few opinion pieces making a case that Musk had achieved on a breathtaking level and that the subsidies that have distracted too many wise people for too long had blinded them to his genius. Love or hate the $7,500 federal tax credit that only applies to the first 300,000 or so automobiles sold by electric vehicle makers, no reasonable person would ascribe Tesla’s valuation to purchases made by people way too rich to care about $7,500.
Strong didn’t disagree, only for him to tell me his own Musk story. He’d been short Tesla shares only to come across Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography of the iconoclastic billionaire (A redundancy? Yes is the answer here), Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. He soon closed his short position.
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