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I’ve observed a hard-to-overcome—-approaching mutual exclusivity—-set of trade-offs that exist between what I’ll call capability innovation and distribution innovation. Musk is a capability innovator first—-he designs things that are better than what we have—-and a distribution innovator second. Tesla is now dealing with a distribution innovation—-which is about how to get the newly improved thing out to as many people as want it—-problem, which is what our investor community focuses on most. But Musk keeps thinking first about how to make a better, faster, cheaper, more eco-friendly car, and second about how to get them produced at scale for as many people as want them.

I am so tired of distribution innovation thinkers calling for the firing of capability innovation CEOs.

Seems to me that distribution innovation has dominated the discussion of business for the last 100 years, and this leads to everyone eating shitty Big Macs and corporate scum who use obsolescence as a profit tactic. That’s Big 3. I say let Tesla stay focused on Capability Innovation and let the market wait. We’ll have self-driving cars for free in no time.

Better still, let’s treat capability innovation and distribution innovation as separate businesses, and let’s support Musk in driving the first while hiring someone else to do the second, with the assumption that Musk will soon build a better product built into the whole cycle.

Can anyone share a link to someone who is figuring that out?