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Comment by klintcho | Hacker News Reader

It's quite interesting how people keep betting against Elon. The HN crowd should consist of mostly risk-tolerant personalities, but the majority of comments are negative. Regardless of what one might think of the feasibility, no other company in the world today are as ambitions as SpaceX and Tesla (+ Neuralink). Feels like what Apple used to be during the "one more thing"-era.

Both Tesla and SpaceX has been discounted so many times before, and despite proving time and time again that they will and can deliver, they keep getting discounted.

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"It's quite interesting how people keep betting against Elon."

Because he doesn't have superpowers.

Making a car that runs on batteries is a feat, ramping up production of an automobile is a feat, but within reason.

Making a humanoid robot, something that nobody else in the world has any clue how to do, and which Tesla has no background in ... well that's more than a feat.

So a better question - why do people continue to believe this guy when he makes such claims?

> Making a humanoid robot, something that nobody else in the world has any clue how to do, and which Tesla has no background in ... well that's more than a feat.

Boston Dynamics has shown robots capable of dancing. Can Tesla replicate? Maybe not in one year, but for such a project it doesn't really matter if it's late.

I'm betting against him selectively. For example I'm skeptical about Bot, Hyperloop, Neuralink or FSD happening within 5 to 10 years of the original timeline.

Not to take away from their brilliant engineering accomplishments, but SpaceX and Tesla were dealing with technically solved problems. We (as a species) have been to space, and we know how to build electric batteries and cars.

These were at the advanced engineering stage after enormous scientific progress of the last few hundred years and going all the way back to beginning of physics and math.

With AI we are at pre-science stage, hunting mammoths with flint arrowheads and wooden spears.

Or we had most figured out in the 50s but just not enough compute. Time will show.

We knew how to land rockets?

I mentioned in another comment that I think this has to do with the very human phenomenon of the narrative paradigm shift (a type of M. Night Shamalyn plot twist).

Goes something like this: The guy that took on the military industrial complex with his small little startup and actually won, with wild whacky ideas like landing rockets upright, and winning NASA contracts against the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, is actually not who you think he is.

He’s not?

Nope, even though he was one of the single strongest drivers of electric vehicles that is pretty much making the rest of the industry shift after the viability of electric was shown with Tesla cars. The truth is, he actually sucks.

Oh, what a plot twist. Wait, does this have a happy ending now that we know he’s a really a bad guy?

And then we fill in the redemption story.

It’s the creepiest thing, and I have no idea why we keep doing it.

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