Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm accusing him of lying in the past, yes. He certainly exaggerates way more than he lies, but to say he hasn't lied publicly means you have your blinders on.

https://elonmusk.today/ has a looootttt of exaggerations that ended up being completely incorrect. It also has plenty of outright lies.

Just from scrolling a bit you can find plenty of indisputable lies:

Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1256239554148724737 Lie: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1078010341651492865

Just to link to a few.

Scrolling through the list, though, you can't help but know that Elon knows at least some of his exaggerations are bullshit, which would turn them into a lie. For example: https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 turns what seemed to be an exaggeration of a product being ready into a straight up lie.

Does knowingly miscategorizing facts count as a lie? Because I'm not convinced Elon is stupid enough to know that Twitter was not lying about bot numbers.

If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?

> If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?

Yes, that would be considered a lie, or at least a gross exaggeration.

But we can do the math using publically available information - assuming its correct. According to this article ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl... ) (which honestly feels like a click bait hit piece), as of Apr 8, there were 5000 terminals in the country. It says SpaceX paid for 3670 of those (so about 2/3), plus internet service for all.

As of May, there were 10k terminals (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/02/ukraine-official-150000-usin...). Who knows how many there are now - 4 months later. So at $1500 a pop of what it costs to manufacture, plus probably same, if not more, to fly it to Poland, then transport it via land to Ukraine - the numbers add up. Add to that work being done to overcome Russian attempts at jamming (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-russia-ramp...). Add things that we are not aware of. I can see how costs can pile up.

> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034

But this isn't a lie. Come on.

Great, that's $15m-$30m (if you accept that it's somehow $1500/unit to ship??). Only $50m-65m left to account for!

And once again (and again and again...), I'm not claiming the $80m number is a lie. You just can't take that number as fact when the only source is his twitter.

>> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374619379929772034

> But this isn't a lie. Come on.

One month after that tweet, Tesla announced selling 10% of their bitcoin stash, which they accumulated through their own purchases of bitcoin and customer transactions: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-sold-bitcoin-q1-proceed...

I have no idea how you get from that tweet to selling 10% of their bitcoin holdings without saying he lied. It's not like there was a massive time frame between the two.

And you picked one out of a ton of lies to attempt to refute. What about my other examples?

are these actually lies? i know tesla stopped accepting bitcoin but it doesn't seem surprising to operate nodes when they did accept it. companies change policies all the time so i wouldn't call this a lie unless they never did it all. is that public information?

"almost all" possessions is pretty vague. perhaps this is false but it's not obvious at face value and wouldn't be malicious. it seems mostly a question of semantics (does renting = owning? do we mean houses and cars or clothes and silverware?). if someone tweets "i'm selling all my shit" are they lying?

break pads never needing to be replaced is obviously not 100% true since some percentage of every part will inevitably break, but if pads without defects outlive the rest of the car, i don't see how you could disagree with this statement. teslas are barely old enough to evaluate this statement and doubly so for cars produced in 2018.

i don't follow this stuff nearly closely enough to know if these are lies and it's not clear to me the information needed to evaluate those tweets is publicly available or even exists. i don't dispute he's made misleading statements and exaggerated but i'm not convinced it's obvious he's lying or that not seeing it means you have blinders on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com