Just watched The Inventor: out for blood about Theranos. A good watch for all.
Which made me appreciate how Elon didn't spend on traditional marketing (less faking). And the fact that autopilot has a high likelyhood to go the way of Theranos. A good thing about Tesla is that its mission is about EV and not autopilot. So the main source of income is not dependent on autopilot success.
How I believed Theranos could've turned out differently is if they didn't sell the promise of the Edison at first. Instead just automate the labwork and focus on providing cost effective bloodworks for everyone. I wonder if they could've undercut their competitors if they managed to automate all the labworks using traditional machines first. This is more akin to what Tesla is doing. Focus on the traditional money maker first and then use the spare money on R&D to fund the AI/Edison research. As I believe both tech can come to fruition if given enough time... just not the typical 3 years to exit timeline that Silicon Valley usually work on.
The "Fake it till you make it" problem might've worked for the purely digital products. But once your tech crosses over to the physical world this model has a higher chance to fail because things happens a lot slower in the real world.
I don't understand why people keep bringing up Theranos as if Tesla is a similar company. It's not fraud or fake to have aspiration for a tech, then demonstrate it with hundreds of thousands of customers, and then see it improve months after months.
7 Months ago my EAP fail at 90 degree turns, cannot merge on and off ramp, and definitely cannot navigate in a parking lot without anyone in the car. We now see FSD computer picking up street lights which was not present 7 months ago. This is REAL progress we can see and try out. Elon didn't hide the result of FSD, then show us a computer generated car navigating in FSD mode and call it a real car. The CEO of Theranos had intention to fraud by using systems desiged by other companies, lie about it, and also spit out entirely wrong lab results. Elon never lied to anyone about FSD. He's pretty clear at what progress he has made because a few months later, he'll upload it into hundreds of thousands of car for people to try it out. "But he lied about having FSD at X time and didn't!". Yeah, it's called not hitting deadlines. Every car company right now are having difficulty hitting their EV deadline they made up years ago.
So unless I'm driving a fake car that can make fake 90 degree turns and I'm somehow imagining the entire thing because Tesla pays me secretly under the table, Tesla/FSD is NOT Theranos.