There are lots of people who can do that and all you need is decent credit & the ability to sign your name

http://www.zdnet.com/article/9...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/uc...

"Things happen when they happen, and no one is in a hurry to get anything done or to go anywhere"
I think that's symptomatic of many tropical places with good cheap food. There's little danger of starving or freezing to death so few are eager to join the rat race.

About 25 years ago, a few of my uncles got quite the dose of culture shock when they were trying to run a midscale restaurant and B&B in Barbados.
Getting fresh seafood delivered 3 days in a row would drive a hostage negotiator to suicide.

Forgot to mention, with a price range of $70 - 120k (P85D, fully loaded), there are a lot of folks on the lower end of the upper-middle class who can & do buy the Model S.

"He makes cars for the upper class"

Oh, for f*cks sake, his stated goal, as published on the Tesla Motors website in Aug 2006 is

"Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model."

He's taking longer than he thought and it'll take one or 2 more models to get to mass market affordable cars but he's making a lot of moves to make sure that happens, eg battery Gigafactory.

Sit tight. It takes a while to change the world.
The Apple Newton dates back to the late 80s, Philippe Kahn rigged the 1st camera phone in '97 and it still took until 2007 for the iPhone to debut. And that's for a $500 device.

Heh, no. It would be ADD if his companies never delivered on anything and, of course, there are a lot of smart, hardworking people behind him - one can hardly disregard the talent of JB Straubel.

But he is the front man and the one'll get the arrows in the back if his ventures fail.
In just the past 5 years, his resume is damned impressive with what has been accomplished at SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City, Silevo so for now, he's earned the badge of a highly successful multi-tasker, the only blemish is that his companies are not yet profitable.

I realize I forgot to mention Virgin Galactic which Branson founded 2 yrs after Musk started SpaceX.
They've been promising a maiden flight since 2009 but it seems that was more marketing than reality and they're not quite ready.
With the midair explosion of SpaceShipTwo last October, it remains to be seen what they do next.

Perhaps Elon will deign to present you with today's Godwin's Law prize.

Bitch, please, that's not even a contest.
Branson started off with a magazine & record stores before launching an airline; Elon sold a space shooter video game as a 12yr old and was studying physics & material science at Stanford, is invested in SOLAR energy, considers running SpaceX to be his primary job & still found time to put his thoughts on the Hyperloop on paper while showcasing the launch of the most kickass electric sedan ever made.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

It may be that there's someone more deserving of the title than Musk but it ain't Branson, not now, not ever.

I've lived long enough in places that get lots of snow, ice & freezing rain to know that people grossly overestimate what their driving capabilities are.
You can get away with a lot of stupid stuff on dry pavement but wet, slippery or icy roads make organ donors out of both wannabe Cannonball Runners & otherwise prudent folk just trying to get home.

"Speed limits have been proven......" - to decrease stopping distance and damage on impact.

"and the speeding tickets are even worse" - if the cops are getting the cash from tickets for their budgets, then they have a strong incentive to game the system.
But let's put the money into infrastructure instead, fixing roads, bridges, sidewalks, streetlights.

The point of a fine is supposed to be a deterrent. A below-average Joe may have trouble paying a fine of several hundred dollars while a rich guy has options.
The fine may be trivial, impounding his car may not work as he may have more than one or renting one long term isn't financially onerous - or he can just buy another new out of pocket. Or he can hire a chauffeur or even risk driving without a license.

It's not about taking from "the makers", it's about not allowing rich assholes to flout the law just because they have more money.

When will we learn not to confuse trolls with facts?

I've wondered for a long time why unregistered ECC hasn't become the default on desktops while reserving buffered DIMMs for servers.Mass production would likely erase any price advantage of non-ECC memory.

If intel hadn't fucked over USB 3.0 by delaying chipset support for it for almost 4 years, hardly anyone would care about Thunderbolt.