[dagw]

If Tesla never rose, the world EV market outside of Tesla would have seen precisely the same rise.

would have seen the same rise _eventually_. I know from a friend that worked R&D at a major car company that Tesla really lit a fire under then and 'forced' them to push their own EV experiments from proof of concepts to commercial product much faster than they where originally thinking about doing it.

[llm_nerd]

The EV ventures of most automakers are massive money losers (just as it always has been for Tesla outside of selling green credits and subsidies). But for sure they all rushed to get there not because the EVs themselves were valuable, but because of the insanity of the capital markets where Tesla is valued at a trillion dollars at a 200x P/E, while the rest of the market is at like a 7-14x ratio. Everyone wanted some of that irrational hype.