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Comment by NotHim | Hacker News Reader

Elon almost always overpromises and under delivers. The majority of his projects never really come to fruition.

I'm kinda biased since I like his balls but I find people kinda set Elon's bar way too high. From what I see he's just a workaholic chasing his interests/dreams although at times naively.

That doesn't excuse the generic assholenes he exudes ( remember the "pedo guy" insults?) nor the arrogance ( submarine for that cave?!) nor his tunnel vision ( let's build a lot of tunnels for my Teslas, that will fix traffic congestion!). He speaks too much, and way too often it's complete bullshit. If he didn't talk publicly, he'd be a commendable workaholic chasing wild dreams and achieving some of them.

A marketer's trick. But he has at least one big win - SpaceX.

Tesla is also one (a lot less so than SpaceX). They kinda reached their claims and stayed alive longer than expected.

Is SpaceX a win? So far they seem to only be able to spend many billions of dollars. Are they just doing something that is so expensive that it loses tons of money and that companies that need to make money are unwilling to do?

Irrespective of one's feelings about Elon himself, SpaceX is pretty special, and few people who know about this sector would disagree.

They've revolutionised launching things (now including humans) into space through building cheaper rockets and then pioneering landable and reusable rockets. They've done this for a relatively low cost and pretty quickly, vs. their competitors who spend more money and time doing less impressive things. They've probably reduced the cost to orbit per kg by ~10x.

Regarding spending (and as with Tesla) don't confuse the cost of ongoing R&D with general running costs. Their launch business with Falcon 9/Heavy is profitable; but the R&D to get to where they are (with those reusable landing rockets, engine improvements, Dragon, Crew Dragon, drone ships, etc.) cost a lot. And they're now spending even more to develop Starship and a new generation of engines (Raptor) which will probably drop the cost to orbit by at least another order of magnitude.

I wish we had more people who under-deliver the way Elon Musk does.

So far he's...

- planning to dig tiny tunnels with no ventilation or emergency egress for cars instead of, you know, trains [1] - [edit](as if the only reason we have traffic is because lanes are uncovered? maybe just put a roof over the highway as a beta test?)

- he's walked back the whole hyperloop thing almost entirely [2]

- some electric cars where he tried to overthrow the government of Bolivia to source lithium [3] - at a company which produces a single digit percentage as many cars as say Toyota, but is valued at the entire rest of the car industry put together

- [edit] and a publicly available beta of an autopilot system that seems hell-bent on murder (including having tried to off me, a few times - btw, super fun when it's not)

- some very expensive space internet [4] cat heaters [5] (although after reading this article I assume the cats are being slowly roasted in some sort of bandwidth trial)

- built rockets that aren't actually less expensive than competitors - they hope to be, but presently are not, and tbh, I don't see a path (but would be happily proven wrong) [6]

- and tortured a bunch of monkeys to death.

11/10. Nailed it.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/review-of-elon-musks-dc-to...

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-dreams-sla...

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/video/elon-musk-becomes-twitter-laughi...

[4] https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlinks-new-premium-tier-is-fas...

[5] https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/cozy-kitties-spacexs-sel...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxkE_oYrjU

I think that you'll learn that besides haters, nobody cares about the failures. Or hit rate. Only about the successes. And Elon's had such huge ones that he can keep trying for more.

He made some electric cars. They're pretty cool when they're not trying to murder. And some low-orbit satellite internet that should help connect some remote areas. The successes are genuinely massively overstated.

He's a marketer, and a good one. A P.T. Barnum type.

“Some” electric cars? They made roughly 1 million of them this past year, 80% more than the previous year.

Wasn't most of the hard work done by the two actual founders of Tesla?

They achieved something almost equivalent to the modern day Tesla before Elon contributed anything (funding excluded).

No. They hadn’t even gotten the hand-built roadster working properly before he took over (iirc the two speed transmission was still shredding itself before they switched to single speed), let alone launching the Model S, X, 3, Y, and then scaling up the manufacturing (the real hard part). Credit to them for the idea and the initial prototypes - the idea that EVs could not only be decent cars that people could stomach, but actually lustworthy sports cars that hold their own with the best ICE cars was key to their success, and it was the founders’. But the company building and keeping it alive was solidly Musk.

Easy to build a company out of a genius product/IP some other intelligent team built. I grant that Elon is a decent salesman (even though all the false promises are chipping away at that title), I haven't seen proof of much else.

>Easy to build a company out of a genius product/IP some other intelligent team built.

Not at all true, especially when it comes to heavy manufacturing in a very well established industry. And the vast majority of the significant R&D came after Musk took over.

You can give him credit for pulling off some amazing feats and still think he's an asshole, those aren't mutually exclusive.

>And the vast majority of the significant R&D came after Musk took over.

I dont agree with this opinion. I think the most "significant" R&D was done by the original founders judging by their claimed timeline of how the product was developed.

We can agree to disagree.

Absolutely, about 10% of the number that Toyota makes every year - a company valued at $300B (vs. Tesla's $900B). They're cool cars, when they're not trying to murder. Electric cars aren't a step-change for humanity. They're an incremental improvement.

Especially at the moment when a $20,000 battery replacement awaits Tesla owners at the 8 year mark - and in places that are primarily coal-powered, the CO2 break-even is around year 6. [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

Good thing power isn’t primarily coal powered in most of the US ;-) In CA, that’s a total non-issue, for example.

No argument that their valuation has gotten way ahead of where they are, but the thesis is probably that it doesn’t take too many years of doublings to 10x, and companies that appear likely to decline take a significant discount to even what their current production would imply, because shareholdings are a claim on future earnings, not just where they are. Toyota really whiffed with its focus on hydrogen, frankly.

What are his huge successes in your view?

giving employment to ~110,000 people and counting and inspiring people around the world

Reusable rocket is a pretty huge game-changer. It is something that was quite already possible in earlier decades, but there was no appetite to do that because of economics (from '80s to 2010, Soviet Union fell and American Space sector was gutted into cost-plus pork barrel grant of jobs to various states).

SpaceX is the first success of NewSpace, and the revolutionary cost-saving of Falcon 9 seems to continue with Starship, which is 100% reusable, unlike F9.

Not really. You don't actually get much benefit by re-using the entirety of the rocket, which is why it's a non-goal for most programs. Even according to their own numbers, they expect fully reusable rockets to end up being about 10% less expensive than disposable rockets. ... if they actually manage to get there because so far, they're more expensive. Despite Elon's claims of 100X improvements.

What hits? Most hits attributed to Musk aren't his.

And made billions doing all of it.

Perhaps his success is as a salesman.

Can you tldr #6? Because readability very clearly makes things cheaper for SpaceX (they pass only a small fraction on to the customer, because I don’t think customers have any other alternative at that price point anyway, but for things like Starlink launches, it’s a huge help to them).

Whoops, that should read “because reusability”

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