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Comment by nlowell | Hacker News Reader

This twitter thread has some additional information from Wochos vs Tesla in which twelve different former employees told either Musk or Ahuja (CFO) that their production plans were impossible. https://twitter.com/orthereaboot/status/1046754488353271808?...

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I’ve been in plenty of meetings where engineering says something isn’t possible. We (I’m one of the engineers) aren’t always right. It’s a defense mechanism so we don’t agree to something we think will _probably_ fail and thus sacrifice credibility.

What should Musk argue in his defense then? "My engineers are too modest about their abilities, so I took their estimations and multiplied them by 1,000, because I truly believed they could do it?"

Yeah, 1000x seems a little out there. What if it was 2x? What about 5x? How accurate are the projections required to be? If Musk truly believed they could do it and the multiplier was 2x, who is at fault? I'm not sure it would be a crime if Musk believed there was possibility (lacking intent to deceive, also I'm definitely not a lawyer...).

And is it production estimate, or a production goal? If someone gives you a goal of 1000x the current production, assuming you can request/specify whatever you need to get there, that's very different than if they say, given the exact production line we have now, what is the estimate of what we can produce. Tesla was somewhere in between given they were at the stage of thinking about setting up the production lines and going to setup them up simultaneously.

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