Why it's so hard to disrupt an auto sector that keeps raising the bar

Disrupting auto manufacturing is hard - and so is disrupting consumer preference

On Wednesday, Tesla Inc. announced its second-quarter results. Those results, along with Elon Musk’s apologies to analysts for his rudeness three months earlier, pushed its stock price up and 2025 bond yields down. During the earnings call, Musk and his colleagues said “improve” or “improvements” 14 times in describing everything from Tesla’s production lines to its in-car computing to its gross margins.

Improvements, be they in manufacturing or in margins, brought to mind comments from New York University professor Scott Galloway, speaking on German marketing podcast OMR in April about the auto industry and disruption. Galloway applied his “general test” to