18650’s existed. But nobody was putting them in cars. All the prototype cars automakers were showing off used large format pouch cells. These had various issues with heat and longevity and safety and thermal expansion. Using 18650’s in a car was a Tesla invention.

Teslas today no longer use 18650s, they use 2170s and 4680s, both cell formats brought into mainstream by Tesla.

The bigger issue is nobody was building electric cars!! All the pieces of tech existed but nobody was bothering to put them together. A big part of Tesla’s mission (which they accomplished) was basically to embarrass mainstream automakers into building EVs. That’s worked.

That’s what I credit Tesla/Elon with doing- actually building a damn EV and selling it.

Actually I suspect I know more about him than you do.

I didn’t know of him in the PayPal days. I did know of Tesla though. I was reading their blog as their then-CEO Martin Eberhard was trying to make the original Roadster into a reality. Eberhard was focused on a design that involved a two-speed gearbox, you could select gear 1 for more power or gear 2 for more range/higher speed, and switch between the two at any time (including while driving). The problem is, making a gearbox and synchromesh that will reliably shift under load at 16,000 RPM is tough. Making it last the life of the car, and be cheap enough to put in a car, is double-tough.
So I watched that blog as they tried for about two years, going through different transmission vendors and designs.
That was when I first heard of Elon. He was one of the initial founders of Tesla, one of the largest investors. And after a year or two he stepped in and started throwing his weight around. He pushed Eberhard out and stepped in as CEO. And his first choice was to dump the transmission entirely, focus on engineering a larger / more powerful / more efficient electric motor that could deliver good acceleration through a single-speed reduction gear.
That got the Roadster out the door.

Point is- while he may have stepped into the big chair like a bull in a china shop, he was right. He quickly identified the objectively correct engineering decisions and started Tesla on the right path.

Look at SpaceX. Elon basically built SpaceX from the ground up. Him and Tom Mueller (designer of the Merlin rocket engine) were the first two employees.

I’m not claiming he’s a saint. I personally know people who have worked directly for him. Everyone inside and outside his companies agrees he’s kind of an asshole sometimes and he rides his people absurdly hard with no concept of work life balance. And lately he’s gone a bit off the rails with his politics.

But I am claiming, and I think objective history shows, that he is effective. Being an asshole doesn’t invalidate that.