Why Betting Against Visionary Leaders is a Losing Game

In 1908, the United States moved at the speed of a horse. The clatter of hooves echoed through every city, wagons jammed the roads, and farmers rose each morning to hitch teams of draft animals to their plows. Railroads handled long-distance travel, but outside the reach of a station, most people rarely ventured far from home. Dust, manure, and mud were constants of daily life, and the rhythm of work and commerce bent entirely to the limitations of animal power.

Automobiles technically existed, but they were far from practical. Early cars cost more than the average family earned in a year, broke down constantly on rough roads, and required owners to be part mechanic, part adventurer. They were status symbols for the wealthy, paraded through cities for spectacle rather than utility.

For the vast majority of Americans, the idea that a car could ever replace the horse was laughable.

Henry Ford saw opportunity where others saw folly. He knew building a car was only part of the challenge. The real breakthrough would come from transforming the way cars were produced—driving costs down until ownership was within reach of ordinary families. When he introduced the Model T in October 1908, it wasn’t the first automobile on the market, but it was the first designed for the average household.

Ford priced it at $850—less than half the cost of many competitors—then spent the next years slashing costs further by refining his greatest innovation: the moving assembly line.

By streamlining production and standardizing parts, Ford cut assembly time from more than twelve hours to less than two. Each year the price of a Model T fell, eventually dropping to under $300, a sum within reach of the American middle class. The gamble worked with astonishing speed. By 1918, half of all cars in the United States were Fords. Roads were paved, new businesses sprouted to service the machines, and families began to think about travel in ways that had once been unimaginable.

Ford’s achievement wasn’t responding to consumer demand. It was creating an entirely new one. He famously remarked, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” 

True visionaries build the future and bring the world along with them.

Elon Musk is perhaps the best example of this in our generation.

A decade ago, if you told people cars would one day drive themselves, they would have laughed. Now there is a very real possibility that children born today may never need to learn how to drive — except for fun, that is.

From the start, Musk’s vision was about more than building expensive cars for a niche audience. He wanted to make the electric vehicle mainstream. The Model S proved an EV could be powerful and sleek, capable of competing with gas cars on performance. The Model 3 pushed the idea further, offering a car designed to be affordable for millions. Scaling it nearly destroyed the company, with production delays, cash shortages, and critics circling like vultures. Musk himself called it “production hell.”

Doubts piled up.

In 2010, the New York Times dismissed Tesla as an unproven carmaker that has never built anything at scale and may never survive.

In 2017, short seller Jim Chanos declared the company was “headed for a brick wall.”

These were mainstream voices, and they captured the widespread belief that Tesla would fail. Instead, Tesla forced the industry to respond.

The Model 3 became the world’s best-selling EV (only to later be surpassed by the Model Y), charging stations spread across continents, and automakers that once mocked the company scrambled to follow its lead.

Even as EV adoption grew, Musk turned to autonomy.

He promised Teslas would eventually drive themselves using cameras and software, without the expensive lidar and mapping systems other companies relied on.

The backlash was immediate. John Krafcik, then CEO of Waymo, said Tesla had “failed utterly and completely” at autonomy. Lawyers argued in court that Tesla was “selling a product that doesn’t exist.” Regulators launched investigations, newspapers ran exposés, and skeptics warned that Musk was overpromising once again.

Still he pressed ahead, deploying software to millions of cars, gathering more driving data than any competitor, and positioning Tesla for a future where autonomous ride-hailing could be cheaper and safer than human drivers.

Whether critics accept it or not, Musk has moved autonomy from science fiction into a live commercial race.

And he’s committed to his vision and his team.

For the first time since 2020, he bought Tesla shares on the open market.

The stock already trades near all-time highs, yet Musk is doubling down. He is making clear that the next stage of Tesla’s evolution, mass adoption of autonomy layered on top of EV leadership, is close at hand.

Musk has been doubted at every turn.

He has been called reckless, overhyped, and doomed. But the record is clear. Each time the world predicted Tesla’s failure, the company expanded its lead.

That is why his latest bet matters. When a visionary leader commits hundreds of millions of his own dollars, it confirms belief in what comes next.

On our end, the data is extremely telling: