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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

I will just quote the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk from 2019:

"If you buy a Tesla today, I believe you are buying an appreciating asset, not a depreciating asset."

And the reason: "Musk's prediction is based on two assumptions: Tesla vehicles will be able to drive themselves without any human input by the end of 2019, and customers will be able to make money from their vehicles by including them in an autonomous ride-hailing service Musk says will be ready next year."

As Elon would say "Let that sink in".

This is one of the major reasons he's in the White House now. Otherwise he would be in prison.

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Investors love to hang engineers when things don’t go according to plan, but the reality is that R+D means doing something where the outcome is totally unknown.

Time blows out and things don’t go the way you expect: it’s nearly unavoidable. Something like 30% of projects (anecdotal) are never finished and 85% (from a study) go over time and budget. The whole time, the end of the line seems like it’s just around the corner.

It’s super scary, yes, but that’s why deep tech investment is at an all time low in western countries. China’s dominant attitude - not being scared of it - is also why China is winning across the board in EVs and deep tech.

Perfection isn’t a human trait: actually, holding others to perfection but not yourself is a sign of diagnosable narcissism. Therefore when someone seems to be trying their best, I think it needs to be interpreted in good faith and not as a criminal offence if they don’t meet their mark.

How much of the Tesla failure to catch up with Waymo in self-driving is because of a Elon-dictated limitation on the tools and technologies they can use? Elon threw out a lot of the "R" part of R&D and said "just develop this approach I chose."

The critiques of Tesla self-driving are not saying it isn't a hard problem, they are the:

* Elon acts like it's an easier problem than it is in terms of constraining how his company approaches it

* Elon ALSO acts like it's an easier problem than it is in terms of his claims about when it will be done, in a way that offers potential harm to purchasers and investors

It's hard to say he's "trying his best" to be honest about the timelines when they've slipped this many times.

Are there any consumer cars fitted with LiDAR that also advertise FSD capability?

If not: perhaps something like a Waymo fit-out is way outside a consumers normal capability to afford, or even clean and maintain?

I’m not convinced either way yet. But I think the need to fulfill the FSD promise to prior buyers is one reason why FSD would need to happen without LiDAR.

In China there are. But of course the hardware and supplier integration is much easier for them than for American competitors.

Musk would not be in prison if Trump hadn't won - these claims happened before, and failed before, Trump lost to Biden, after all - because nobody really gives a shit about the sort of false advertising/bullshit that Musk spews. There's a general "good faith" assumption that you have to REALLY blatantly be breaking like Theranos to get in trouble. Being irrationally stupidly optimistic is seen as OK compared to knowingly dishonest.

Hell, Trump isn't in prison and he's had more failed businesses than Elon, and made just as many or more political enemies.

But maybe we should care more about that. Irrationally optimistic claims that people believe - cause how would they know you're full of shit before the second, third, fourth, fifth time around - still influence a ton of decisions, and it would be easy to not make them until the tech is actually there.

A world where lying has no consequences only increases the burden on everyone.

Well, if the CEO of a company says that the product is being released by the end of the year, we can reasonably expect that it is, or at most the next year. We can definitely assume that they are really close.

He said such things since 2016. This is almost 10 years, and they are nowhere near close to have a Full Self-Driving. In the meantime, they sold milions of cars who supposedly have all the hardware necessary for FSD. Except they already admitted twice that it's not the case and they will need to upgrade them once they solve FSD. But that's not an issue, since it will take another 10 years.

But yeah, this is not 'blantantly lying'.

PS. He's so optimistic about Tesla's future, that he sold $40B worth of shares at the peak in 2022, and so did most of the board.

> Well, if the CEO of a company says that the product is being released by the end of the year, we can reasonably expect that it is, or at most the next year. We can definitely assume that they are really close.

Vaporware was a thing long before Tesla, it's not been a prison thing.

Is he deluded and/or full of shit about Tesla and self-driving? Definitely. Is he actually at risk of prison? No. None of his actions from 2016-2022 that you're talking about here were undertaken with an assumption of "boy, this is illegal, Trump better win in two years or I'm screwed!"

He just says that shit to rile up the base and get voters motivated. Stirring fear and anger at big-bad-government has been a reliable Republican staple for over forty years now. He's fully committed to the bit.

Vaporware is different that fraud.

If I promise the public next year can buy a car that will fly you to mars, well, that's not prosecutable unless particular people enter into a business contract.

If I promise the public that if you pay me $50k now for a car and make statements that next year it will fly you to mars "once they get the bugs worked out". Well, that borders closer to fraud.

I mean, come on, if you believed that, you'd believe anything. Surely no-one _actually_ believed that?

I'm sorry what ?

Elon Musk is the richest person on earth, because millions of people believed him.

Just as a lot of people believe we're going to Mars soon.

Thanks for the quote! Do you happen to have a source for that quote?

Other than that, you suggest Musk would otherwise “be in prison.” Under which legal framework or statute should a CEO face criminal liability for a failed technological prediction or delayed product rollout?

It's from this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEv99vxKjVI

I think he also repeated that on an investor call later.

As for prison, just ask Trevor Milton or Elizabeth Holmes.

Theranos was private, and its valuation went to 0. Tesla is public, and it lives as a meme stock. As long as enough fools believe Tesla will have self-driving taxis within Musk's latest timeline, the price can stay up, and nobody will sue. Instead, the investors voted to give him money that they had no obligation to give him.

This is a good take - 'As long as enough fools believe Tesla will have self-driving taxis within Musk's latest timeline, the price can stay up, and nobody will sue'.

What I'm describing is what happens after the pool of fools is exhausted.

Regarding prison, OP is making a reference to an interview of Elon Musk by Tucker Carlson.

https://youtu.be/k89aYdZOC_I?si=didH8UhYUIz7Y1zy (link to the video snippet on the Tucker Carlson YouTube channel).

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