As some point you have to look beyond the company owner, hype men, and whatever public figures represent a company. SpaceX has a lot of engineers who will matter far more in this world than their media whore of an owner ever will. If they weren't at SpaceX, they'd be at some other company doing similar things. Aerojet Rocketdyne being one of the most important, but mostly forgotten ones that's keeping various space programs going. On the subject of electric cars, there were certainly a LOT of companies doing research on hybrids for a long long time. Mostly for municipal transport, trains, heavy vehicles where you could mount 1200 pounds of electric motors, 500 pounds of batteries, and its not gonna make a big difference. For passenger vehicles, you had the GM electric which they were more or less forced at gunpoint to make by California emissions standards. This thing was NOT ready for prime time. The charge controllers and the batteries alone were probably $30k. And when they phased out their EV, that was the first thing they yanked form the cars. Everything else was just cheap junk and aluminum. The whole project was a money sink of several hundred million easy. Same issue today, the charge controllers and batteries are the biggest reliability issue. The electric motors, General Electric did most of the heavy lifting there over a century. But Tesla got something out there that's "good enough", yeah, maybe 1 car in 100 might catch fire. But fire suppression systems and fuses are cheap, and they can work out the reliability issues over time. Just like the Big Three car companies did over a century. Hell, they were selling death traps from day 1. Only by the 90s were you getting cars where you didn't need a ton of steel between you and other traffic to reliably survive. The only thing Elon did was gamble that he could put the not ready for prime time designs out there, cash in, and sway the market. A decade later, you had something electric and reliable out there. Called a Chevy Volt. lol! It's got what is essentially an APU as a battery charger and range extender, but its essentially electric. Biggest problem is, most of the wrench turners out there have not a fucking clue as to how to repair anything on the Volt. Friends who own them invariably have to escalate things back to Detroit, contact someone who can find their ass with both hands, rain fire on the service centers, and then maybe get something done correctly. lol! Yeah... So figure another two decades before you can retrain some appliance service people to be mechanics, because the ICE era mechanics ain't making the adjustment worth a damn.

Once the genie is out of the bottle, that's it. There will be covert experiments, and in 10-15 years, you'll end up with super smart kids in rural nowhere showing essential tremor and parkinsonism because some geek spliced in too many copies of LRRK. So instead of a 30% boost in IQ, the kids got a boost up to 140-170 land, and a crippling disease as part of the bargain. But only 1 out of 16 times. So they'll keep that up, because even a cripple can be a good engineer. And then what else, CCR5 Delta 32, good against HIV, black plague, etc. Not so good against west nile. You can also culture tumors called pheochromocytomas which are non malignant tumors, and these can be stimulated to produce any number of things. Like a mini organ, need more adrenaline, steroids, graft on onto an adrenal gland. Thyroid is sickly, graft one on there. Pancreas or islets are not doing so well.. Well, um, no. Graft one there and you'll kill someone pretty fast. Rogue gene mods and cell mods are a reality now. What the future holds, is much more of what the past held for those with familiar rare diseases.