Cory seems to be unwilling to consider a third explanation. Both money and vision are useful. To say it’s mostly money means that most venture capital would be

Cory seems to be unwilling to consider a third explanation. Both money and vision are useful. To say it’s mostly money means that most venture capital would be deployed successfully. It is not. You need some combination of smart people, money, timing, vision, and luck. Criticizing investors because they toyed with what to us are vast sums of money is perhaps disingenuous. I’m sure he talks to his friends the same way about a $100 dinner check, but there are plenty of poor people who would regard that as unimaginably decadent and corrupt. Sorry, but a quarter billion dollars isn’t that much to those investors, and they know Elon Musk well. They understand intuitively that he’s a good person to risk the money on.