It’s fascinating to me to watch how pre-BEVs-being-normal they were supposedly impossible to build because Big Auto was lobbying the government and buying the tech and shutting it down. I remember how Reddit would talk about this: GM doesn’t want any competition because they collude with oil companies and so on.
After BEVs became normal, the guys who made them common are supposedly just idiots who got lucky. Presumably history will write LLM inventors as lucky morons as well. And space rocket manufacturers and GLP-1 (and associated) drug makers.
Everything is impossible because of lizard men until one day someone does it and then they were just lucky.
Inflation from December 1996 to today makes the $500/mo equivalent to $1000/mo.