The irony is not lost on many.

Elon Musk, who believes humanity needs the planet Mars as a Plan B for survival, is having trouble--big trouble--with investors, regulators, and numerous guardians of "other-people's-money" on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Musk's August 7th nine-word, 61-character tweet-heard-round-the-world--"Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."--is lead-story global news, subject of one of at least two Securities and Exchange Commission probes of Tesla, and, currently the biggest spectator sport since the recently concluded World Cup.

The 47-year-old no-longer boy genius, whose inventiveness and business impetus have built, sold, started anew, sold, and created value in and among the rarest echelon of individuals in humanity's history, is--by his own doing--in existential straits.

As noble as are the mission and purpose of Musk's goals--saving the planet earth, and barring that, giving human beings an exit option to another planet--he's finding out in real time that the means to those ends count. Right now, there are probably far more people--especially institutional investor representatives, even Tesla team members, media reporters, etc.--who believe these goals to be the irrational ravings of a man living the life quixotic. Still, they're willing to ride the wave of his ability to create value and wealth as long as they can tolerate the roller-coaster ride of risk and reward.

How this will turn out, one can only guess. Elon Musk may parlay a well-earned reserve of goodwill and an equally well-deserved pragmatic vote of confidence based on his track record of enormous value-generating skill, into a reprieve.

Or not.

When you're trying to disrupt both the auto industry (including U.S. oil companies vested in gas-fueled transportation) and the power grid, you're asking for it. Elon Musk must be well aware of the challenges associated with taking on such challenges, but probably considers them subordinate to the bigger challenge and bigger mission: saving people from themselves.

However, he's learning--in humbling fashion--that one person he may need to save from himself is Elon Musk.

So, here's another irony.

Tesla's namesake, Nikola Tesla, a giant among serial innovators, may serve as more of a model for understanding Elon Musk than is commonly recognized.

Check out this passage from Melissa A. Schilling's fascinating book, "Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World," which considers both Musk and Tesla in many ways under the same illuminating lens.

"Nikola Tesla's story provides ample evidence of the separateness and self-efficacy discussed [earlier]; he was a loner who fearlessly asserted his ambitions and theories, taking on tasks that others would have deemed impossible. However, Tesla's story also highlights something else quite distinct: the potential for atypical mental faculties and psycho-pathologies to influence creativity. Tesla had an interesting combination of exceptional intellectual ability, extraordinary working memory, and probable neurotransmitter irregularities that gave rise to symptoms of mania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and oversensitivity to sensory stimuli... Tesla was an astonishingly brilliant and unusual man who, in his life, would invent AC electricity, many systems of fluorescent lighting, the first remote-control devices, wireless communication, and much more..."

Tesla, too, was driven by a sense of purpose and mission most other human beings considered to be chimerical, existing only in an unchecked imagination.

Time--and, an all-too-short amount of it--may tell on whether Elon Musk's story and that of Nikola Tesla, who wound up not getting due credit for many of his most important innovations and inventions and seemed not to care that he wasn't getting rich off them, bear more and more resemblance.

What's interesting, however, and perhaps lost in the public spectacle of Musk's self-inflicted troubles, is one of the more important take-aways around the kind and the motivation of innovation Musk is trying to bring to the world, that which is unimaginable to most of us.

To grasp the importance of Musk's intentions, his ambitions, his mission, and his strategy, we might best look to another former boy-wonder's sage take on fundamental changes to how value gets created now, and how that in turn alters how we need to look at the cost to generate that value, and what role supply and demand play in measuring cost and value.

Here's Bill Gates' take in a review of a new book on the subject by economists by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake called "Capitalism Without Capital."

There are two assumptions you can make based on this chart. The first is still more or less true today: as demand for a product goes up, supply increases, and price goes down. If the price gets too high, demand falls. The sweet spot where the two lines intersect is called equilibrium. Equilibrium is magical, because it maximizes value to society. Goods are affordable, plentiful, and profitable. Everyone wins.

The second assumption this chart makes is that the total cost of production increases as supply increases. Imagine Ford releasing a new model of car. The first car costs a bit more to create, because you have to spend money designing and testing it. But each vehicle after that requires a certain amount of materials and labor. The tenth car you build costs the same to make as the 1000th car. The same is true for the other things that dominated the world’s economy for most of the 20th century, including agricultural products and property.

Software doesn’t work like this. Microsoft might spend a lot of money to develop the first unit of a new program, but every unit after that is virtually free to produce. Unlike the goods that powered our economy in the past, software is an intangible asset. And software isn’t the only example: data, insurance, e-books, even movies work in similar ways.

The portion of the world's economy that doesn't fit the old model just keeps getting larger. That has major implications for everything from tax law to economic policy to which cities thrive and which cities fall behind, but in general, the rules that govern the economy haven’t kept up. This is one of the biggest trends in the global economy that isn’t getting enough attention.

If you want to understand why this matters, the brilliant new book Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake is about a good an explanation as I’ve seen. They start by defining intangible assets as “something you can’t touch.” It sounds obvious, but it’s an important distinction because intangible industries work differently than tangible industries. Products you can’t touch have a very different set of dynamics in terms of competition and risk and how you value the companies that make them.

Some of the trouble Musk is in comes by virtue of his focus on intangible asset value generation--which may ultimately be what it takes to save the world and people living in it. But quarter-to-quarter near-termism has no way to measure that appropriately.

And that has a lot to do with why innovation is so hard to fully embrace in the business of housing.