I read the linked article.
As somebody that has followed the company for over a decade, I see so many glaring omissions and missed emphasis, its just painful.
In this case I suspect that there is no malicious intent - its being written by a journalist that doesn't have any history, so they are making a surface level observation about the industry as it exists today, and just barely being aware of how we have arrived at today.
No - Tesla did not set out to establish their own standard as the standard by which all EV charging in the US would happen. Actually Tesla set out to build a functional EV charging network for Tesla vehicles, because the standards bodies were dragging their feet quite effectively, and publishing standards for unreliable stations. And there was no public charging network available that could be relied on (unless you call the ability to rely on it not working to be "relied on"), and charging is important. What existed outside of Tesla didn't work, wouldn't scale, and the standards body members (other car companies) weren't all that motivated to make it work, NOW.
No - Tesla charging stations are not reliable and ubiquitous because Tesla is well capitalized. The network is -now- backed by a well capitalized company because back when charging station network was just another long winded way of saying "let's go bankrupt!", Tesla was spending a lot of their cash flow building the network, and making it denser, and building bigger stations with more chargers. Back when bankruptcy was still something talked about in relation to Tesla. So Tesla vehicles wouldn't have the charging anxiety and trouble, whether at home or on the road, that everybody else faces. As a result, that charging network is (indeed) now backed by a well capitalized company.
Because the charging network was the best place to spend advertising and marketing dollars that everybody else has been spending on Super Bowl ads, in establishing the market and persuading consumers to buy.
I could go on.
I am starting to see my Tesla share ownership as a free call option on a new business - Standard Oil of the 21st century. I like free call options on the disruption of trillion dollar industries, with an open ended days to expiration
