Comment by JumpinJack_Cash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpinJack_Cash | Hacker News Reader

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JumpinJack_Cash

> > And he’s admitted self driving was way more difficult than anyone realized,

Sure and the guy is getting paid right now in cold hard cash, while all the synchopants keep ranting about hopes and dreams.

As Jack Nicholson said in 'the Departed' and I quote :

"What we generally do - in this country... is one guy brings the items and the other guy pays him. No tickee, no laundry!"

First the self-driving car for all Americans (the item), then the big payday for Mr.Musk, that's what happened with Mr. Ford back in the day, but what did the guy know? Nowadays you can just bluff your way into riches using the marvelous phenomenon of cult of personality and stock appreciation.

> > It’s now 2013, want to see a video of Starship taking off?

Want to see a sample of what Microsoft's ChatGPT can do?? It's amazing! But that has nothing to do with Microsoft giving Apple a run for its money in the smartphone market like Ballmer predicted back in 2012

There is no correlation between the 2 things just like there is no correlation between rockets and self driving cars, and it's laughable that synchopants think they are correlated just because thought leader and cult of personality enthusiast Elon Musk is both the founder of SpaceX and the petty individual who sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla

My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success which follows a formula of overhype, delays, and eventual achievement if not overachievement.

You seem to have a more personal vendetta against him, I’m just looking at his insane success and envying hype/ management style

Easy there, cowboy, he’s had incredible success whipping his fans into frothing frenzies of self congratulatory adulation that would make a seesaw get dizzy. No other boss person since the mighty Steve has had this effect on the mass psyche, and Elon has arguably done a lot less. I claim teslas success is in spite of him, not because of him. Facts matter, and the SEC case was where I first realized his lack of leadership skill, and boasting about tanking his own stock price was not impressive. He’s not impressive, rather dull and low imagination if you ask me, which you didn’t, as you were busy falling over yourself to worship Elon Musk, who sounds like a cheap cologne

...this...has to be a troll right? The guy helped bring space flight out of a stagnant era into commercial viability and put electric cars into the world's popular psyche.

> My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success which follows a formula of overhype, delays, and eventual achievement if not overachievement.

His biggest success is the rocket industry. Let's examine top competitors - corrupt ULA which flies rockets on 50 year old engines and does cost+ contracts, his other competitor was Russia, a corrupt kleptocracy that stopped innovating when USSR fell apart. Russia would sell engines physically made in USSR to ULA. This market literally had no competition and no innovation for like 40 years.

So yes, his great achievement is that he could march finance into an industry that no-one would consider for investment. But results in other industries were not so great.

Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive. His leadership was not good enough to take advantage of the head start he had and extremely high level of finance that he had.

Where is cybertruck? Other automakers are already selling electric trucks. VW and even Chinese automakers are eating Tesla's lunch.

Elon's boring company is an abject failure, as is hyperloop.

Cybertruck is delayed because people are still buying other high margin vehicles.

“ Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this. Once other manufacturers woke up to the threat, it became clear Tesla has nothing on them, and car industry is fiercely competitive.”

Is there any other car company in the world selling electric vehicles at a profit besides Tesla? Everyone else is losing money on their EVs most are losing a lot of money. Not only is Tesla profitable but they have better margins than many companies have on their gas cars.

If you are looking to buy a car in 2023 and you are not looking at a model y or a model 3…

Tesla is the only car to drop prices in 2023, and the only car that doesn’t feel like you are paying 50% more for whatever you got 3 years ago.

Anything else at the 40-50k usd range is simply a joke compared to model y, and Tesla is simply eating the market right now.

Nah Tesla is just goosing the government subsidies hard. The ioniq5 is a great car just doesn’t qualify for inflation increase act subsidies

If that's the case, why Tesla easily beats any other opponent overseas as well? Here, in Australia, they do not get any subsidies. Model 3 and Y sales are leaving all others, including Ioniq, far behind.

Other manufacturers haven’t had time to scale up production. Also the direct you consumer model has been a real winner in preventing dealer price gouging due to shortages

If someone built a dozen companies, and like a third of them succeeded and made him one of (if not the) richest man in the world, I think you could say that that person "has an incredible track record of success"

and I don't even like this guy, but this is just dishonest from you

What was successful after Tesla and SpaceX?

Parent might be including PayPal too. Though it's not clear what Musk's involvement in their success was.

By the way, if you or I owned either one of the companies you mentioned it would be considered a great success. Your question itself is putting Musk in a league of his own. I don't care that he's an asshole. If someone asked the three of us to eject into space a car that we built, only he could comply.

I would say that PayPal was a success because of the mafia (which mostly consists of Thiel and Levchin's team by the way). I would argue that Musk actually hampered PayPal in many ways (pushing Windows as the dev environment, as one example, when the rest of the team wanted Linux).

That being said, SpaceX and Tesla are successful, even if they took government subsidies to get started. There are many more companies which took a lot of government money yet managed to return nothing except fat bonuses for their executives. Or the number of large companies which have stopped innovating now (IBM and Intel for instance).

  > What was successful after Tesla and SpaceX?

Is Tesla and SpaceX not enough of a track record? Seriously, if that is not a track record of success, what is a track record of success by your measure?

2 successful billion dollar companies is more than what most people can boast of.

Your bias against elon is showing and it's not a good look. You're not being very rational.

I used to be a fan, then he showed up to the cave rescue operation with half a submarine, and in responce to crtiticism he called rescue divers pedoes.

So I started wondering, can he be a good leader when he can't take criticism? How does he retain best pepple if his ego is this fragile?

I am quite happy to see more people reassess him as he demonstrates capricious and callous behavioir, for exanple the Twitter aquisition whoch he first wanted then tried to get out of.

I think you will come around when he targets something yoi carw about.

No, I won't, because I don't think he's a faultless person. In fact, I think he's quite an asshole, but I can rationally separate who he is from his long list of accomplishments.

Just because you want him to be a failure or a con-artist or whatever doesn't mean he actually is.

Elon's biggest accomplishment is how he optimizes for capital growth by any means necessary and is willing to throw norms to the wind and think very big. Elon never had to be a good people person to succeed here. It is why successful companies allow brilliant jerks... they are so brilliant it makes up for their asshole nature. Elon is this, as much as it pains me to say it.

Jerk is not a synonym for bigoted asshole. Increasingly the cruelty (to his employees mainly, but hardly exclusively) seems to the point.

Why do people emphasis rationality when reasonability is much more important?

Why do people make semantic arguments disguised as philosophy instead of making a concrete point and furthering the discussion? Seems like a cop out to me. It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say.

It's not remotely philosophical. What's the point of emphasizing what is rational, when the likely answer is within a much smaller subset (what is reasonable). You overemphasize rationality to the point you aren't reasonable. You sit here and talk about what is rational, but you aren't reasonable and therefore it's not a good argument. We aren't dealing in the abstract world of mathematics, we are dealing with human relationships.

"It's tempting to respond to everything online and hit enter but sometimes you don't have to if you don't have anything meaningful to say."

What a projection

There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.

Happy?

It's not reasonable to pretend like Tesla/spacex is not a smashing success story.

You're not dealing with human relationships. What are you talking about. The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.

Well Tesla has significantly devalued as of late, is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall, and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car, and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.

so as an initial, I don't think your argument is reasonable at all. it goes against so of the most basic and recent facts about tesla. I can understand feeling different because you like him and he makes you feel fuzzy or something like that. but hard to say you are being reasonable - when you don't offer reasons!

> The parent of my original comment is spinning a narrative about Elon's accomplishments because of his personality quirks.

This is absolutely the boundaries of human relationships and is not better defined in the space of mathematics or physics, or even game theory, to the point you boil things down to being rational/un-rational. rational is basically the lowest boundary here, it means possible, it doesn't mean likely.

>There is nothing reasonable about pretending like Elon isn't accomplished because you don't like him.

I guess it depends on what you think accomplished is. I certainly think he's achieved a certain kind of status in society, I'm not sure if it's an accomplishment, but the amount of money that belongs to him is certainly very large and something anyone else would like to have.

>Well Tesla has significantly devalued as of late,

So have a lot of companies? Tesla is down 7% in the last year. Up 12% from 2 years ago. Another example of unreasonable hyperbole.

> is facing tremendous regulatory scrutiny, just recently suffered a massive recall,

A massive recall fixed by over the air updates? Be real. Yet another example of hyperbole.

> and is likely never going to deliver on its key promise of achieving practicable self-driving car,

Okay this is speculation. What can I really say about this?

> and by all estimates from anyone else in the industry, is being completely unreasonable in going about it predominantly via computer-vision.

what does this have to do with elon's success? He's not allowed to fail sometimes?

> Tesla had a head start on electric, but they could not take advantage of this.

The Model Y is currently the world's best-selling car. I think that counts as Tesla taking advantage.

https://www.motor1.com/news/669135/tesla-model-y-worlds-best...

Agreed on some points.

Although I do think Tesla did take advantage of their head start. But it’s clear that the pandemic and issues with China and supply chains are hampering them globally.

And sure, Tesla launched successful Electric cars and woke the market up when they realised consumers actually really would switch.

But it’s not like other manufacturers couldn’t do it, they just chose not to.

The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!

In a market where companies stopped selling sedans in favour of SUVs, Teslas came along with the model 3 and then model Y, and showed people will choose electric tech over SUV form factor.

People weren’t buying ICE sedans because they were largely garbage!

  > The biggest thing Tesla did was actually making it happen with vehicles that were significantly differentiated and looked like the future!

Tesla also invested in charging infrastructure - taking care of both the chicken and the egg.

I think it would be fair to state that every single electric car on the market today would have been radically different if Tesla didn’t exist.

Success is measured by hypothetical subtraction.

If you disappeared Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Twitter and even Mr.Musk overnight, the world would look exactly the same the following morning.

Try and disappear Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Boeing, JPMorgan, BankofAmerica, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell overnight.

You'll have chaos and civil unrest within a week. That's where your quality of life comes from, sure it's not as exciting aas drinking the kool-aid of future Mars colonies and self driving cars and 100% domination in the EV cars sector, but at least it's real

Actually, Ukraine said they would have lost already without starlink.

Hardly, Starlink has had some impact on Ukraine but not nearly that much. They have called it “critical” but they call a great many things critical, the actual use of Starlink still isn’t that common.

The important bit for Ukrainian is Starlink is subsidized by other countries and it reduces the incentives for Russia to destroy communication infrastructure. Unfortunately because Russia is focusing less on communication infrastructure they get to focus more on other targets.

People following this closely disagree.

A few of those people do, but it’s a minority opinion.

People say same seriously crazy shit about the Ukraine war, but the ground truth is fairly pedestrian as far as recent wars go.

> If you disappeared Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Twitter and even Mr.Musk overnight, the world would look exactly the same the following morning.

No it won't. Where would the Twitter trolls go? They'd flood the streets. If Twitter had disappeared no 1 can announce for president anymore!

> Where would the Twitter trolls go? They'd flood the streets.

Compare this argumentation with typical argumentation about violenceful computer games players which are also going to flood the streets for some different reasons but with similar unwanted outcomes.

I assume the person you're replying to wasn't being entirely serious :)

> wasn't being entirely serious :)

Thanks for understanding.

SpaceX has been quite successful, though it also came really close to failing.

Solar city actually failed as an independent company.

Boring company is floundering.

Twitter is having massive issues.

I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit. It’s unclear but he definitely took massive risks which were unnecessary and has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.

All together not a bad track record, but also not nearly as impressive as many people seem to think. I don’t want to suggest it’s luck, but many companies that might have been successful which came that close to failure simply failed. We look back on people who happened to have passed those thresholds because they go past them not necessarily because they had a better approach.

> has many serious failures such as how long their truck has slipped.

i wouldn't call the cybertruck a true failure, since it's effectively free marketing, and they don't have a real obligation to make a sale.

Tesla's massive competitive moat is their battery making capacity. I do not believe the incumbent car manufacturers are able to catch up any time soon.

It would be the chinese manufacturers of electric cars that pose the biggest threat to tesla, not the US/western incumbents.

Tesla is down to 54% of US EV sales (it’s much worse globally) and it’s been falling very quickly. So, their battery moat is basically gone, and the need for the recent price drop amid such rapidly expanding EV sales is a really bad sign.

A significant part of that is they lack of a truck option considering how popular the Ford Lightning, Rivian, etc are. Alongside that is the general perception of stagnation among car buyers, the yoke was seen as a gimmick not the refresh the model S is in serious need of.

They just keep fumbling. Consider the amount of bad press they got around the undersized breaks on the Plaid or their 1 foot rollout numbers. What could have been a real halo product did almost as much harm as it helped.

This is such a silly criticism, of course Tesla's share of the "EV Car" market is going to shrink as more companies sell EV cars. DUH! But that is a silly way to view things, Toyota was never compared on their share of the "Hybrid Car Market", because that is not a real thing, just as the "EV Car" market isn't really a thing, people buy cars and to the extent they cross shop they generally do so across drive trains.

Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.

The Model S is a tiny and irrelevant portion of Tesla's sales.

The Halo effect / most premium products do drive sales. This is graphics card manufacturers care about the speed crown for a product launch even if their most expensive products are a trivial number of sales.

The perception of the plaid being unsafe unconditionally extends to people viewing all their cars as unsafe irrespective of actual crash statistics etc. The same thing happened with self diving car fatalities it’s a trivial number of accidents but still impacted people’s perception of the brand.

> Tesla's share of the overall Automotive market is growing and that is what matters.

The company’s stock price is based on the assumption they can ride the wave of exponentially increasing EV sales and take a large share of the global car market. Having largely squandered that opportunity the company’s prospects are far less favorable.

> I think he’s done more harm to Tesla after taking it over from the original founders than been a benefit.

Didn't every single product launch happen after the takeover? We probably would have never heard of the company otherwise, why would we assume a similar trajectory with different leadership? It's like saying Jobs did more harm than good after returning to Apple.

No.

Tesla was founded in 2003, Musk invested in 2004, Roadster unveiled in 2006 and entered production in 2008. October 2008, Musk took over as CEO of the 5 year old company which then went public in 2010. The model S entered production in 2012 and they discontinued the roadster.

So Tesla went public selling a product developed under the original CEO, and he took 5 years to get the next model our even after having a working EV. That said the Model S was a hit, but it was also the original founders goal to work down to more mainstream products.

The boring company was always hype… we’ve known how to use TBMs to drill tunnels for years

I mean we’ve known how to use rockets for decades, but SpaceX was a good idea.

TBMs are just slightly too expensive right now. At 1/2 the price per mile a huge number of projects suddenly become very attractive. Which then opens the door for more economies of scale, further efficiencies, and in theory a very valuable company.

There are plenty of lower cost TBM options, low enough cost for my local water company to be using a mini one to dig a 12 mile sewer near where I live

Lower cost, but not cheaper because you can’t use them for the same things. Aka a toy car costs less than a real one but isn’t a cheaper transportation option.

But you can’t use the Boring Company’s TBM to drill ‘real’ tunnels - it’s build for tiny Tesla car sized tunnels (which aren’t actually that much larger than the local sewer being bored)

Trains i.e. proper mass transit, require wide bore tunnels and cost increases with the diameter of the bore

A lot of the costs with tunnels isn’t the tunnel but things like the portals that need to dissipate pressure waves as trains enter and leave at high speed

The boring company produced a smallish bore TBM and then ‘oh look it’s cheaper than a large one’, there is no innovation there

> My point was Elon has an incredible track record of success

Um what? He has a rocket company where he basically has absolutely no involvement at all...

> …while all the synchopants keep ranting…

We definitely now live in a world that needs this word. I am now adopting it myself. Thanks!

Do you mean “sycophants” or is “synchopants” a new word I’m not trendy enough to know yet?

Elon is paid in stock not cash.

that he regularly sells.

And is bought by people that think the company is valuable enough to give the stock said value. You can argue that those people are wrong, sure, but I don't get what point you're trying to make. He isn't taking money away from someone else or being given "underserved" rewards, when the people that are keeping the value of what he receives believes it to be of such value.

Point is that you first sign off the effing self-driving car, then you get your effing money.

That is what we used to do in America, since the days of JD Rockefeller, Henry Ford...but also Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. I mean I used Windows before Gates became richest man in the world and so did hundreds of millions of people.

Musk got to #1 by selling go karts to a handful of rich people and promises of future selfdriving and total domination of the EV sector when EVs are not even sure to be the winner tech in the decarbonization of cars

The vast majority of Americans have never even set foot in a Tesla.

You seem to condone the poker game that Wall St. has become, I don't agree with that because entrepreneurship shouldn't be about bluffing and then offloading your hand to a bigger fool. We do that in Vegas, like men where at least you have to look in the eyes the dude you are screwing over.

How do you expect self driving cars, or any extremely hard technology, to come about then without long term risk capital via public/private investment? Just pure R&D working out of universities and gov labs? Let them perfect it and only then try to raise capital? Go back to the Rockefeller days before there was venture capital and mature public markets?

> The vast majority of Americans have never even set foot in a Tesla.

Not so sure about that. Model 3s seem to rapidly replacing Civics as the Uber car of choice.

so what do you propose is to be done? you simply stop people from buying tesla stock so that the price doesn't go up and he doesn't get as much money? Seriously i'm really struggling to understand what you are proposing here.

You stop the fed from printing so much money. I mean, right now it's too late, but for the future, it would be a good policy.

> And is bought by people that think the company is valuable enough to give the stock said value.

They say a sucker is born every minute

> no correlation between rockets and self driving cars,

This is actually false. Automation of vehicle controls has a surprisingly large overlap between air/space and land.

The main difference is the amount of traffic and lack of vibration dampening.

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