He is just another con man using other people's money for self aggrandisement. Yesterday's article by Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk is an ample demonstration.

David

Entertaining - the factory being where it is indicates that Musk is not serious. As the writer notes, attracting good talent is hard enough if the factory is in, say, Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, but Reno? There does not seem to be a proper air connection. The man obviously has some long-term plan that's not about saving the world, but what is it?

Yes he is first and foremost a very smart businessman! What would any reasonable or sane person expect, he's a billionaire for heaven's sake.

I take it you didn't drive one of the new teslas? just went there on a professional skeptic's skeptical fact finding mission?

As for the south Australian battery? If he has them already, why wouldn't he be able to install them well inside 100 days?

Anyway, the free advertising would probably be more than worth it for a very shrewd businessman!?

If as you say he has a gas powered factory, he'd likely be more than interested in walk away safe, molten salt thorium, and the claim by eminent American scientist Kirk Sorensen, that he could build one for around 100,000USD?

And would a solar powered roof be of any real use during the hours of darkness? Maybe that is where the battery was intended?

Gas power may well be the most economical, with the smallest available carbon footprint? Moreover, car manufacture is very energy dependant and uses lots of it! Why do you think ours are heading elsewhere!?

Perhaps our extremely expensive and largely privatised or corporatised coal fired power provision has something to do with that? Or maybe even more expensive renewables were the last nail in the green draped coffin?

And abundant, clean, cheap, walk away safe, our energy future, surely?

Especially if someone as forward thinking and shrewd as Elon Musk got behind it with some development dollars, particularly if that would also enable him to write off most if not all his tax liabilities?

Meaning, we taxpayers will ultimately pay in any event! Makes you wonder why our erstwhile leaders don't just crack on and get it done now, while we will be the ones making the demonstrably huge potential profits!

Would Elon come down here, where energy prices may well exceed the labor bill? I think not! And a shame, given we need his forward thinking much much more than the professional skepticism that features so prominently in our, unusually asinine, decision making process?
Alan B.

The man is a doer. To persevere with returnable rockets for reuse is paying dividends.
Use other people's money. That is smart. You could say the man is a business man.