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Comment by harmmonica | Hacker News Reader

Can you share what you think could happen with Musk?

I know he’s polarizing, but he deserves a large amount of credit for Tesla’s success making ev’s mainstream and SpaceX’s success creating reusable rockets. These are certainly up there as major accomplishments from corporate America in the past 20 years (longer most likely).

Tesla’s market cap may get cut by 80% at some point to be more in line with auto manufacturers; SpaceX may eventually have other competition; and if he’s forced to go through with Twitter it might cause financial and reputational harm to him, but is there anything like Holmes on the horizon?

I’m no fanboy of Musk, but even his harshest critics have to acknowledge that his business successes are real and meaningful (assuming you believe any business successes can be meaningful).

Ps yes, he does seem like a jerk a lot of the times, but that’s different than being a fraud.

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Musk doesnt deserve credit for the success of Tesla, if you mean actually providing any leadership or technical skills. I do not work there so obviously I dont know internal details but everything we know points to him not making any contributions besides being an obnoxious taskmaster who wanted employees to work late.

He does credit for being such a charismatic charlatan and somehow managing to fool most of the world and being a social media and tech darling based on nothing but lies and empty promises. Tesla's valuation comes from a large part from Musks constant lies that FSD was a solved problem and was just around the corner, every ear since 2016. Every time he said that, he got more fanatics, and the stock surged.

SpaceX is almost fully funded by DoD and Musk has acknowledged the end goal is to use it for military purposes.

All his other ideas like Hyperloop/Boring company, the recently released private tweets with his billionaire friends, getting fired by his own board, clearly expose him as someone who doesn't really understand technology let alone be a 'genius'. More like an idiot.

He was born rich, got lucky and somehow people buy into his myth.

And yes, he is a fraud. He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade, charging for alpha code that kills people and lying about it. Its not the same level of fraud as Holmes but Musk was never honest about it either.

>He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade

Interesting, my Tesla feels pretty real.

How is that robotaxi working out for you?

I'm not sure there is anything in this comment that is true.

You become a magnet for this kind of commentary once you achieve any significant level of success.

Not true, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs get credit for what they built without this kind of commentary. Primarily because people don't detect immense amounts of fraud in how they operate(d), they actually built and delivered what they promised investors and consumers.

What "immense amounts of fraud" are you talking about?

Promising FSD, Self driving Taxis, Tesla Trucks, Tesla Semis, and other vaporware to raise funds from investors and public then never delivering.

There are also claims of games being played with Tesla options at the direction of Elon, though that area is less clear to me.

That's pretty ridiculous way to frame things IMO.

Maybe it's just a case of what he is doing is a dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand. And that would mean things don't go the way he planned a significant amount of the time (perfectly normal). And that includes the whole spectrum of business operations -> investors, funding/finance, marketing, technology, distribution, supply chains etc.

I know from the comfort of our desk chair (with no risk taken, no relevant experience, no nothing really) and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we can make these criticisms but really they dont mean much.

>dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand.

Jobs and Bezos fell into this category, they just underpromised and overdelivered, not the opposite.

So you are comparing 3 very different businesses, particularly in terms of market size and economics of distribution.

I'm going to assume you lack the background and expertise to make any meaningful assessment of these businesses in the general sense, let alone with regard to specific challenges they each faced.

And even if true, the opposite of under-promising and over-delivering is not "immense amounts of fraud".

Nobody cares about the potential. People only care about a CEO as the person who signs off quality of life.

Musk has barely signed off anything, he's constantly postponing the moment when he'll sign off quality of life, but he's getting paid right now.

Today has been a slow day and I used the various different flavors of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft so many times. They might not be a colony on Mars, but at least they are real.

lol, the guy has an extremely long track record of overpromising and underdelivering.

lol...if only Elon had delivered like your average forum commenter...

Fake quartz solar shingles with to bail out his cousin's and his solar company (that also was rescued by SpaceX using NASA funds to invest in trash bonds that had to be bailed out by doing the acquisition).

> It's never going to wear out. It's made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime

Somebody doing real things some of the time doesn't preclude them scamming other times. And vice versa, somebody scamming some of the time doesn't necessarily mean everything they does is a scam.

Basically, the rockets being real doesn't prove that FSD isn't a scam. And FSD being a scam doesn't prove the rockets aren't real.

Agree. My intent wasn’t to suggest otherwise. I was trying to give more depth to my question of what the parent could mean when they said Musk’s number may come up.

On the topic of FSD, I think that could be a fair answer for “why is Musk a fraud?” but that would require a follow up question: is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work and are lying when they say it will? If yes that seems like fraud and therefore the parent comment would end up being right about Elon’s number. But if he genuinely believes they’re going to get there and they’re wrong about the timing? That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?

It could be unethical to keep on saying it’ll be here soon and not delivering, and based on some of his behavior you can certainly make the case he may be unethical, but I guess I think the bar for being a fraud or even called a fraud is or ought to be higher (like Theranos or Nikola or Enron or MCI, the list goes on).

It was unethical (and dangerous) the moment they called `autopilot`

Shouldn't it at least have to work well within the lifetime of the cars they sold with it (first in 2016)? If they refund with interest everyone including people who sold it will be less of a retail scam, but still an investor scam.

> is FSD fraudulent, like the people working on it inside Tesla, or maybe just Elon, know it won’t ever work

They must know it would never have worked in the timeline they gave for it. Elon Musk got on stage and told people it would be fiscally irresponsible not to buy his cars because his cars would earn passive income as robo-taxis. There was simply no way that was going to happen and most people who weren't fanboys already thought it a risible claim. They aren't even close to level 5 and they knew it. Years later and they still aren't close to it.

Now, could you prove in court this was fraud and not just moronic optimism? Maybe, maybe not. That probably depends on what they were foolish enough to put in writing where legal discovery might find it. But personally I don't see a shred of reasonable doubt; it was fraud plain and simple. He knew these claims were bullshit but knew self driving cars were hype so he shamelessly exploited that hype to sell cars.

> That’s not fraud in the legal sense, is it? If he’s constantly wrong about the timing?

There is fraud in the legal sense and the colloquial sense. If I describe myself as a genius programmer, but am actually quite below average, I'm probably not legally on the hook for fraud, but me peers might call my one.

Similarly if you continually claim year after year that full self driving is a year away your either clueless about how long it'll take and how difficult a problem it is, while also being too clueless to realize how clueless you are (despite being so consistently wrong), and a colloquial fraud, or you know darn good and well that your claims are wrong and are just putting them out there to boost your stock price (potentially legal fraud).

Not really the point of the comment above whether Musk has done some good things or not. Specifically, he has literally lied about what Tesla is able to do. That's why his number would come up. He has knowingly said things he knew to be untrue.

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