Lots of brains and lots of cash does not equal success. It helps, sure.
Tesla will certainly be the first to claim something, but they won't be the first to achieve anything special in self-driving other than pushing a product to market far too early.
But the thing is, Tesla is behind all the other major players. Why? Everyone else has better strategies to get to L4 and beyond. Tesla was ahead early on, getting the basics of staying in the lane and following at an appropriate distance while on the freeway. Tesla took the low hanging fruit, and good for them. However, the system is just awful at pretty much everything else. From Guidehouse:
I think Guidehouse probably got it right.
2045 is an optimistic timeframe for L4 or L5 from Waymo and similar, with Tesla far behind.
Speech to text is still mediocre to awful across the board. Oh, if you speak slowly and enunciate, it's OK until there's a homophone. Then it's a clustercluck. How about two homophones in a row? Oh dear. Now try speaking at a normal speed, without extra enunciation.
And speech to text is a far easier problem than computer vision and decision-making in a car.
Tesla tries to solve the problem with cheap sensors and semi-expensive processing, essentially believing in the religion of neural nets. Actual L5 self-driving cars are likely going to take not only a lot more sensors, and some expensive ones at that, but also a several orders of magnitude increase in processing power. No relatively simple algorithm is going to solve this multi-faceted puzzle.
Either there's going to be some genius AI breakthrough from somebody, which is possible but unlikely, or there's just going to need to be oodles and oodles of processing, with the problem broken down into countless tiny steps and sensors, all orchestrated together.