CHALLENGE

The hardest part isn't the technology. It's convincing a 55-year-old dentist who's used the same lab since 1998 to try something new. Behavior change is the real product.

Making cars is really, really hard. Everyone says that, and nobody understands it until they try. The supply chain alone has 10,000 parts that all have to show up at the right place at the right time. Every. Single. Day.

Building a car company from scratch is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I engineered the Model S. The difference between engineering a car and manufacturing 10,000 of them is like the difference between writing a song and running a record label.

We raised $15 billion. We had $55 billion in orders from BMW, VW, and Volvo. And we still couldn't make it work fast enough. Battery manufacturing is the hardest industrial challenge on Earth.

Going from a lab sample to a million production cells is the hardest scaling challenge in materials science. We know that. Everyone who has failed before us knew that. The difference is our ceramic separator survives the journey.

The hardest part of running Signal is not the technology. It is the fundraising. Servers cost money and we refuse to sell data.

The FAA process was harder than building the drone. Regulation is the real engineering challenge.

Cell-cultivated meat at $20/lb versus $3/lb for conventional. That gap is the engineering challenge of our generation.

Every city has different building codes. Customizing factory panels for each jurisdiction killed our margins.

Building a social media platform while Congress debates banning your parent company. That's our reality.

COVID made us essential. Then students went back to classrooms. Online-only edtech lost its urgency.