If they're selling below cost, who's the "we" that should buy them all up? Because if it's US consumers, then the domestic auto companies could fail in the while that's happening. If it's the US government - isn't that kind of what the tariff accomplishes, without having to take ownership of a bunch of inventory?
I think we can confidently call stupid actions stupid actions. Inertia from prior success can keep them from being company-ending actions, especially if they can be corrected once they are recognized as stupid (or once the people who knew they were stupid from the beginning can gather enough political clout).
Tesla has smart people, just like any tech company, but they're not uniquely smart and they're not immune to the same short-sighted thinking that plagues other tech companies.
Note that I think this particular idea is not necessarily bad for the company, it's just not anything special. It's basically Folding@Home, monetized. If you can convince enough people to leave it on (or force it on and somehow avoid legal/PR issues) then I guess you can save a tiny bit of money on certain kinds of workloads.
Characters in a string can be thought of as digits in a base-256 number. Call counting sort recursively on each bucket, looking at the next character in the string. Can you not see the similarity?
As someone who also bounced off it initially - I would recommend getting through the tutorial area and flying out somewhere in the ship before you put it down for good. Once I started going out there and visiting places, it really grabbed me. The more stuff you scan and read, the more intrigued it made me, and eventually I couldn't stop until I'd unraveled every story thread and mystery the game had to offer.