Was Google's 20 percent time a waste of its talent?

This looks like a genuinely fun project to have worked on. That can be the difference between a top engineer burning out and staying motivated.

Tesla's marketing budget is something close to $0. Stuff like this is why.

Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and accept your statement as true, who cares?

Telsa board doesn’t, they need moonshots to justify their valuation. Elon doesn’t care, the engineers sure as shit don’t.

Maybe a midline quality control and reliability person? That’s not likely where many of the engineers for this project came from though.

the pursuit of perfection should not always require justification :)

I don't think so. The engineering behind an F1 car is not relevant to those buying consumer cars, but it helps sell them regardless.

Yeah, wouldn’t they rather be doing real impactful engineering work, like figuring out means to display even more ads on personal user devices, maximizing the number of hours kids spend doom-scrolling per day, or making robots that are deliberately designed to take jobs away from as many workers as possible?

But, imagine instead being an engineer of any kind today and you’re only getting paid to work on boring things like advanced automotive technology and building cars that can maneuver themselves in midair and might possibly fly in the future? Ridiculous.

(This message should not be taken as support for Musk or any of his views or business ventures.)

You must be miserable in your job. All the good engineers I know would gladly take some pay cut to be able to do projects like this.

They learned a lot, and pushed their tools further, in ways that left them with new insights and possible engineering paths for more practical work.

“Play” “fun”, curiosity” and “challenge for challenges sake” are adaptive strategies for learning unexpectedly useful things.