| Hey y'all, it's Austin. On Jan. 7, Elon Musk hit a stunning milestone. Thanks to an unprecedented surge in Tesla Inc.'s share price, the electric-vehicle maker chief's wealth soared past that of Jeff Bezos, making Musk the richest person on the planet. "How strange," Musk tweeted in reaction. It wasn't the only milestone Musk reached in recent days. A few years back, he set a seemingly absurd (and since mostly forgotten) goal for Tesla on an earnings call: to match Apple Inc.'s market cap. An analyst asked if that was realistic in May 2017, when Apple was valued at $772 billion, more than 15 times as much as Tesla. "Well, now I may want to preface this by, of course, I could be completely delusional," Musk responded. "But I think I see a clear path to that outcome." Tesla finally zoomed by that target last week, surpassing an $800 billion valuation. How strange, indeed. To be sure, the company is still far off from Apple's current $2.2 trillion market cap, and its recent rally is partly thanks to a market-wide rush to tech stocks that has some analysts screaming, "Bubble." (The carmaker's stock shot up a whopping 743% in 2020 alone.) But it's still fascinating to reflect on how wild his auguring sounded that spring of 2017. At the time, the Model 3 hadn't launched. Musk faced intense scrutiny over a controversial acquisition of his cousins' solar company. Plus, he was fast burning through cash and about to enter "production hell." Bears and short sellers piled on. Famed investor Jim Chanos said the company was worthless. According to Musk, when he reached out to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook during those "darkest days" to explore a sale of Tesla, Cook refused to take the meeting. Fast forward and those darkest days seem to be in the Model 3's rear-view mirror. Tesla almost met its goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles last year and has hit five consecutive quarters of profit. A string of skeptics have since acknowledged they misjudged the company, including Chanos, who even said he'd tell Musk "job well done" if they ever met. Apple, meanwhile, is still trying to find its footing in the auto space. Bloomberg reported last week that Apple is at least a half-decade away from launching its own autonomous electric vehicle. Still, significant questions remain about whether Tesla can sustain the growth necessary to justify its rocketing share price, especially as behemoths such as General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG dive further into the electric-car market. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kevin Tynan noted that Tesla is "about the size of Isuzu globally, even as it eclipses the combined market cap of 10 automakers that deliver more than 50 million units annually." In true Musk fashion, he's only continued to up the ante in recent years, from committing to expanding Tesla's manufacturing footprint in China and Europe, to promises to get the company's electric Semi, Cybertruck and next-generation Roadster into production. In many ways, his success rides on going after goals that at first usually sound "completely delusional," as he phrased it in 2017. It's key to the Musk hype cycle, which we once summarized as follows: "Start with wild promises, followed by product delays, production hell, shareholder anger, and finally, hopefully, redemption." Tesla's very existence serves as evidence of this boom-bust-boom trajectory. In congratulating his team on their recent success, Musk tweeted earlier this month, "At the start of Tesla, I thought we had (optimistically) a 10% chance of surviving at all." —Austin Carr | 
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