In 30 years when people are going to watch documentaries about Tesla, they will think that people today were all mindboggling stupid because it must have been obvious that selling Full Self Driving that does not drive itself might be a fraud?
It has already started and hopefully will be on full display within months. Also the recent lawsuit finally opened the gates and Tesla will be buried in liabilities. They sold milions of cars that were supposedly becoming a Robotaxi with an OTA update. Oh how times have changed.
I believe launching the Robotaxi is his biggest mistake. He could have continued the grift for some time, but now there is an official service and the clock is ticking.
2 months in, it's still not open to the public, there is a safety driver in the car, and even the influencers notice that something is very fishy as there are still only ~10 cars in the fleet and they are not all available at the same time.
But yeah, once the house of cards collapse it will be pretty fun. "Hey, how anybody believed they actually have real world Robotaxis if the launch party was on a movie set with remotely operated cars ?". "10 straight years of FSD by the end of the year". "Robotaxi with a safety driver"
If you look at top US companies, half of top 10 is investing tens of billions $ trying to get people addicted to screens. That's reflected in the metrics you're seeing. It's an unfair game. Hell, even the richest guy in the world got his brain rotten recently (arguably with a solid help from drugs) and is spending his days posting soft anime porn AI generated images and videos.
It's just really all about the incentives. Everybody would like the world to be a better place, but who among top technologist, which are in big numbers here, are willing to work for 1/10 of what he can make at a big co, to make it happen ?