I Bet on the Team. That's Why I'd Always Bet on Elon.

By Win Jeanfreau, Serial Entrepreneur · October 29, 2026

I've been starting companies since 1986, when I opened Pacific Rim Computers. Since then I've built Aperion Audio, and today I'm on my next adventure with EverForged. Over those years I've settled on one rule that I trust more than any spreadsheet: when I invest in a company, I invest in the team.

Markets shift. Products change. Plans almost never survive contact with customers. The one thing that carries a company through all of that is the people at the top and their ability to identify opportunity, marshal the right resources, and get it done.

That rule is why, if you asked me where I'd place a bet, I'd put it on Elon Musk. Every time.

A once-in-a-species kind of mind

Look at the record, in order, and try to imagine one person conceiving all of it.

In 1995 Musk co-founded Zip2, which Compaq bought in 1999. That year he co-founded X.com, which merged with Confinity, the company behind PayPal, in March 2000. eBay bought PayPal in 2002. In May 2002 he founded SpaceX. Tesla came next, and Musk didn't found it: Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated it in July 2003, and Musk led its Series A in February 2004 and became chairman. He took over as CEO in 2008. He provided the concept and early capital for SolarCity in 2006, co-founded OpenAI in 2015 (he later left), co-founded Neuralink in 2016, founded The Boring Company in 2017, acquired Twitter in 2022 (renamed X in 2023), and launched xAI in 2023.

Plenty of capable entrepreneurs build one great company in a career. I've spent four decades in this business, and I know how hard one is. Musk keeps conceiving whole industries.

It's one machine, not a dozen companies

What I find most remarkable isn't the list. It's how the pieces now lock together.

Self-driving is its own business, not a car feature. Tesla sells electric cars, but its bigger bet is autonomy. FSD (Supervised) still requires an attentive driver. Its Robotaxi service began using the steering-wheel-free Cybercab in Austin on September 3, and Tesla says it plans to start selling Cybercabs by the end of this year.

Robots. In October Tesla started early production of its Optimus humanoid robot in Fremont. Musk calls the ramp slow and "bumpy."

AI and compute. SpaceX acquired xAI in February. Its Colossus supercomputers in Memphis run on Tesla Megapacks plus turbine power.

Chips. All of that needs silicon. Terafab, a chip-manufacturing venture between Tesla and SpaceX with Intel licensing its 14A process, aims to make AI chips for Musk's own companies in Texas. On October 20 Musk said it's targeting volume production in late 2028, and he put "big error bars" on that date.

Rockets that come back. SpaceX's breakthrough was reuse. Falcon 9 boosters land and fly again, and SpaceX recovers and reflies the payload fairings. Musk has said each fairing cost about $6 million and that the first stage made up about 60 percent of a launch's cost. In 2018 a launch on a reused booster cost about $50 million, down from roughly $60 million. Throwing away the most expensive hardware after every flight used to be normal for the industry. SpaceX ended that.

The biggest rocket ever built. Starship, with its Super Heavy booster, is the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown. Guinness credits it with about 74,000 kN (roughly 16.7 million pounds) of thrust at liftoff. It runs on SpaceX's Raptor engines, full-flow staged-combustion methane engines. SpaceX rates the current Raptor 3 at about 250 tonnes of sea-level thrust. That's not the most powerful single engine ever built, but Raptor has one of the highest chamber pressures of any operational rocket engine.

People and connectivity. Since 2020, Crew Dragon has carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, making SpaceX the first private company to do that. Starlink reported 13.6 million consumer subscribers in 174 markets at the end of September.

Power in space. Starlink doesn't beam power to Earth, and no source I found says it does. The real plan is bigger. In January SpaceX asked the FCC for approval to launch up to 1 million solar-powered satellites that would serve as AI data centers in orbit, connected over Starlink's laser links. SpaceX is aiming for demonstrations by late 2027. Its own IPO filing warns the concept is unproven and may not become commercially viable. It's a plan, not a product yet.

And more. Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface in more than 20 trial participants. The Boring Company runs a tunnel system under the Las Vegas Convention Center. Tesla's Megapack batteries are now made in California, Shanghai, and Texas.

Energy, Starlink, and rockets tie it together: batteries power the data centers, Starlink connects them, and SpaceX launches them, and someday it may launch solar-powered data centers too.

The cars drive themselves, the robots need the same AI, the AI needs the chips, and everything needs energy and connectivity. Each piece makes the others more valuable. Tesla and SpaceX engineers working on the same product would have sounded like science fiction twenty years ago.

I don't use the word "genius" lightly. But this may be a once-in-a-species kind of mind.

Yes, he misses the calendar

Let's be honest about the knock on Elon, because everyone already knows it. He doesn't keep his timelines.

The next-generation Tesla Roadster is the textbook case. Tesla showed the concept in 2017 and said deliveries would start in 2020. That date came and went, and then several more did. Customers who put down deposits waited the better part of a decade.

If you judge a leader purely on whether he hits his dates, Musk fails that test often. But I've never invested in a calendar. I invest in what the team ultimately delivers. Say "it'll be ready next year," but deliver something nobody else on earth could build? I'll take that trade.

The Roadster was worth the wait

On October 15, Tesla finally unveiled the new Roadster at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, and it was crazy amazing.

The white two-seater drove up a curved ramp, clung to it upside down using a suction system, vaulted off, flipped in mid-air, and used SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters to hover and land. Later in the show it jumped over a truck. On Tesla's timer it ran 0 to 60 mph in under one second. Tesla says it will come in three versions: Performance, Thrust, and an invite-only, single-seat Rocket that, in Tesla's words, "can fly."

To be precise about where things stand, this was an unveiling, not a delivery. Musk says production starts in 2028, pricing hasn't been announced, and Tesla notes the flying Rocket version isn't approved for public roads. So the calendar story isn't over.

Even so, what they showed more than makes up for the long wait, in my view. Nobody else is putting rocket hardware in a sports car. That only happens when a car company and a rocket company share one leader and one way of thinking.

What this means for how you invest

I'm not telling you to ignore deadlines. In my own companies, execution discipline is everything, and I hold my teams to their commitments. If you're running a business that lives on monthly cash flow, a missed date can be a limiting factor to growth that sinks you.

The lesson is about what you're actually betting on when you back a founder:

Capacity, not promises. A timetable is a forecast. The team's ability to solve problems no one else can solve is the asset.
Track record over time. Musk's companies have been late, and they've also repeatedly done things the experts said couldn't be done. Judge the whole body of work, not the latest delay.
Ambition sized to the team. Aim at the impossible and land somewhere remarkable.

When I'm looking at a company, I ask a simple question: if the plan falls apart tomorrow, will these people find another way to win? With Elon, I've watched the answer be yes for more than twenty-five years.

That's why I bet on the team. And that's why I'd always bet on Elon.

About the author: Win Jeanfreau is a serial entrepreneur based in American Fork, Utah.