I think we can confidently call stupid actions stupid actions. Inertia from prior success can keep them from being company-ending actions, especially if they can be corrected once they are recognized as stupid (or once the people who knew they were stupid from the beginning can gather enough political clout).

Tesla has smart people, just like any tech company, but they're not uniquely smart and they're not immune to the same short-sighted thinking that plagues other tech companies.

Note that I think this particular idea is not necessarily bad for the company, it's just not anything special. It's basically Folding@Home, monetized. If you can convince enough people to leave it on (or force it on and somehow avoid legal/PR issues) then I guess you can save a tiny bit of money on certain kinds of workloads.

ridiculous. if personal success was locked to 'smarts' the world's landscape of rich would look vastly different.

here's an even more inconvenient truth for you, and this one is short enough to embroider on a pillow : "it's not what you know, it's who you know."

Could be. Even if few of Musk's decisions make sense to me, he has proven a lot of people wrong in the past, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The jury is out.

This also reliably works for people who are obscenely rich and well connected regardless of any other factor.

Anyway, there's nothing mysterious about the success potential of being a grifter. If it weren't so, the world would have far fewer grifters in it.

I mean, sometimes a stupid thing is just a stupid thing.