Elon Musk Made this Inconvenience Feel Worth It

On the PBD Podcast, the Home Team discusses how Elon Musk helped reposition electric vehicles by making Tesla desirable before making it mainstream. Tesla’s first production vehicle was the Roadster, a premium electric sports car that entered production in 2008.
Musk laid out the strategy publicly in 2006: start with an expensive, high-performance Roadster, reinvest the proceeds into a lower-priced sporty sedan, then move toward increasingly affordable vehicles. Tesla described the Roadster’s initial price point at roughly $89,000.
The strategy challenged the idea that an EV had to be purchased primarily for efficiency or environmental reasons. Musk wrote that Tesla designed the Roadster to compete with Porsche and Ferrari performance, using a premium sports car to establish the technology before moving down-market. The panel makes a similar argument about Musk and DOGE. Thousands expressed interest in the government-efficiency project, while Vivek Ramaswamy said success could encourage more ambitious graduates to spend part of their careers working in government instead of automatically choosing Silicon Valley or Wall Street.