I do appreciate the sentiment, but this hyperbole isn't reasonable on any level. Tesla's margins aren't on an S-curve to 100%. I don't see 80% (software company scale margins) if for no other reason that Tesla's business will always contain more hardware and more Cap Ex than software companies.
Market share isn't on an S-curve to 100%. I do agree with the premise that Tesla is likely to hold very high market share in the light duty vehicle market as EVs take over that market. But the comparison we have today is around 10% for big market share. I like Tesla at around 30% (1/3rd) which is already outrageously high. I might even be talked into 50%, but neither are S-curves to 100%. At most that's an S-curve to 50%.
My primary constraint on market share by any 1 company in the automotive market, regardless of the company, are the number of countries in the world for whom car manufacturing is a big component of their economy. Big enough that national governments will bail out failing companies.
Bit of a sidebar: this is a reason why I consider building a factory in China and Germany to be so important - there are important import and logistics values for doing so. There is also a built-local component that is crucial. At some point down the road, when the current German car manufacturers are in worse and worse economic shape, Tesla might be US owned but it'll employ a big chunk of people in Germany, building made-in-Germany cars. To some extent Tesla will be taking over the local car manufacturing activity, rather than replacing it and shipping the work overseas.
I am in complete agreement with this notion.
In particular I've seen the idea that at any given point in human history, you can define our technological state and quality of life in terms of 3 technology vectors: communications, transportation, and energy.
As a point of comparison, I view the Internet as the manifestation of an important vector around communications: approximately zero marginal cost communications. It's become so cheap today to communicate, that for most of us we pay some sort of monthly access fee to send and receive on the communication network, and any incremental communication after the access fee is free.
Free and at such volume that we have businesses today that weren't being dreamed about in the '90s (Netflix; competition!?!). And the downloads of high MB / multi-GB data volumes is STILL approximately zero margin cost (the next episode of Smallville I watch won't cost me anything, after I've paid for the network access).
Consider the economic activity and benefits associated with approximately zero marginal cost communications. Not only are they huge and deflationary (in a good way), I claim that we're still scratching the surface of just what approximately zero marginal cost communications can/will be.
Costs for renewable energy are falling to the point that we have line of sight, today, to approximately zero marginal cost energy. At the retail level I expect that within 1 or 2 decades our electricity bill won't work as it works today. Instead of metering out kWh of energy consumption we'll pay a network access fee, and consume as much electricity as we want / need. That network access fee will probably be priced relative to the size of our network connection. 100a vs 200a service for example.
And within a pretty big budget you'll just use what you use. This will drive natural gas furnaces, cooking stoves, ... out of the market.
And most interesting to me - it'll drive the creation of new businesses and business models that we can't imagine today. What will we do, when energy is approximately zero cost? We see what it's meant in the communications industry - it certainly hasn't meant that the companies building communications equipment can't find people to buy their stuff. Turns out that there is a LOT of money to be made providing approximately zero marginal cost communications.
The reason we'll see this approximately zero cost energy is also discussed in the Energy Report — RethinkX report. To achieve roughly 100% renewable energy grids, the wind and solar assets will need to be built to significantly higher than a good day's generation. I believe they came up with about 4x - I've seen a similar idea out of Australia where they build the grid in a particular area to 7x.
What businesses can be built that have some ability to turn their energy consumption off and on at the hourly or daily level of detail, where that energy is practically free? An easy way to expand the businesses is for those businesses to build their own battery packs (or subscribe to 'cloud battery' services ), that accumulate charge when there is excess available, and then draw that charge down to bridge between times of surplus (most of the time) to times of deficit.
Approximately zero marginal cost energy is coming to a chunk of the worldwide economic activity that today is ~10% of GDP. The world is about to free up a big chunk of GDP for other uses, and the history of that happening is that the worldwide GDP expands a lot more than the savings would suggest.
Approximately zero marginal cost transportation comes closer with free energy, but its not here yet. Transporter technology though, with free and abundant energy ... that'd be the ticket.
While Tony has a great point about solar over production providing nearly free energy, intermittency makes it more difficult to utilize.
E.g. Some have speculated hydrolyzing to produce abundant hydrogen, but the costs of the hydrolyzers are then increased because they are not fully utilized.
It’s not that surplus energy won’t be great, it will just have fewer use cases than other energy. I believe Tony gave a couple of examples that wouldn’t work that well.