 Elon made it sound like a breeze. It started on March 18th with a casual tweet to a fan promising that Tesla would make ventilators if there is a shortage, setting off an avalanche of replies educating him that there was, already, a shortage. Within hours, Bill de Blasio tweeted New York is buying!; within a week, Musks dim Twitter-sourced awareness had manifested into a full-fledged promise to open a Buffalo solar cell factory for ventilator production as soon as humanly possible. In the interim, GM and Ford announced partnerships with ventilator manufacturers, and Trump invoked wartime powers to order GM to make ventilators blaming GM for dragging its heels, oddly. Many optimistic forecasters likened the industry-spanning coalition to Americas victorious World War II weapons manufacturing spree. Surely people who make rockets and cars can make air-pumping boxes. A widget is a widget. How hard could it be? 