> Telsa is not — nor was ever intended to be — a car company. Tesla is fundamentally an "energy generation and storage" (battery/supercapacitor) company.

> The cars were always a B2C bootstrap play for Tesla, to build out the factories it needed to sell grid-scale batteries

This seems like revisionist history. They called their company Tesla Motors, not Tesla Energy, after all.

This is a blog post from the founder and CEO about their first energy play. It seems clear that their first energy product was an unintended byproduct of the Roadster, they worried about it being a distraction from their core car business, but they decided to go ahead with it because they saw it as a way to strengthen their car business.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090814225814/http://www.teslam...

I think that blog talks about selling their batteries to other car manufacturers.

But, to support your wider point, there's some reporting that the initial grid BESS Megapack batteries had a test setup in the car park at Tesla and Elon was unaware they existed until they got mentioned to him in a meeting and someone pointed out the window to explain.

He immediately wanted to shut that project down to focus on cars.