He argued the case in 2016 iirc.
The position against lidar was that it traps you in a local max, that humans use vision, that roads and signs are designed for vision so you're going to ultimately have to solve that problem and when you do lidar becomes a redundant waste. The investment in lidar wastes time from training vision and may make it harder to do so. That's still the case.
I love Waymo, but it's doomed to be localized to populated areas with high-res mapping - that's a great business, but it doesn't solve the general problem.
If Tesla keeps jumping on the vision lever and solves it they'll win it all. There's nothing in physics that makes that impossible so I think they'll pull it off. His model is all this sort of first principles thinking, it's why his companies pull off things like starship. I wouldn't bet against it.
