First time I have come across /e/ and I love their vision, goals and early execution. They will need a business model to fund the type of execution which they will need to win at scale, or even to win in a niche. What are some possibilities?

Eh, this isn't really leaving Google though. They have a hard dependency on Android, and Google not trashing up AOSP. Google has already started to abandon projects in AOSP to push users/OEMs towards their proprietary spy apps.