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Comment by nixon_why69 | Hacker News Reader

Tesla's sales are down year over year and yet it's somehow trading at a 360x multiple to earnings.

SpaceX has a really cool launch and satellite comms business saddled with multiple money-losing other businesses and is currently running at a loss despite the revolutionary aerospace part being profitable.

There's pre-2020 Elon who did cool technical stuff and then there's post-covid Elon who spent $50B on Twitter and then cut it's revenue by 66% so that he could post more cringe memes.

The sad part, relevant to TFA above, is that all of the financial chicanery turns out to have been vastly more profitable than inventing re-usable rockets or shipping the first viable electric car. That's not me being a jealous hater, that's me being mournful about what's rewarded.

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I don't own shares in any Musk company, and agree that Tesla as a car company is grossly overvalued. But as the parent states, dude gets shit done.

It is _hard_ to start a successful car company, let alone one on an untested platform. He did it, and it taught China how to build the future of cars.

It is _impossible_ to build a successful rocket company from nothing. He did it, and SpaceX is now ~60% of _worldwide_ launches.

He's had plenty of failures, but Musk is what people are buying. He's gross and annoying, but I wouldn't count him out, and I'm rooting for his success.

I guess I'm rooting for his success too, my point was that the actual product successes as I see them all happened pre-2020. Covid era broke some people and Musk seems to be one of them.

If he were still mission focused, he would have used his time in the Trump administration on cool missions instead of "ctrl-f trans" and defund random projects with "transducer" or "transfusion" in them.

I read the Isaacson biography a few months ago. Quit reading before he buys Twitter.

The rocket company is probably more technically impressive anyway but I am disinclined to accept the attempts to rewrite Tesla's history. Maybe it was necessary to force the actual people who started the company out for it to survive and a Series A is certainly important, but Musk is still an investor in the car company and not the person who started it.

I don't disagree, and most of what I know about Tesla early history comes from the Isaacson biography, but: it seems pretty clear the "actual" founders would never have been able to clear the hurdle of scale production without him. It wasn't just the funding (which would have been hard to come by), it's really hard to build a large, real-things-in-the-world industrial company from scratch, doubly so for something as complex as a car with all the complexities supply chains, regulations, literal factory construction require.

All glory to the guys who started the company (I love my Tesla Y), but I don't believe it would have gone anywhere without Musk.

(I was add something about Stacy Munro and the auto industry, but I'll just link to his first teardown of the Model 3[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpCrkO1x-Qo

Sure, I don't doubt that Tesla, Inc probably could have bankrupted itself without really producing anything at scale if Eberhard didn't get forced out, especially given the GFC happening at the same time, and it really sucks that legacy automakers weren't willing to sell the EVs they were perfectly capable of designing producing at the time, even if they were forced to, until someone else did it and showed there was a market for it. I still find the hype around Musk bothersome though.

Take a close look at what you are complaining about:

- Tesla ain't that successful

- SpaceX isn't even profitable

- Hes tweeting stuff I don't like

- I was rooting for him when "was keeping it real", but "now that financial chicanery is rewarded I can't in good conscience" etc

People love the underdog and love the looser, they hate successful people because of what it tells them about themselves.

That's some fantastic armchair psychiatry but I don't think you got where I'm coming from.

I specifically called out a bunch of compliments and things I liked prior to 2020, and I think we'd both agree that "spending all day on twitter" is not great regardless of tweet content.

What exactly happened in 2020 that changed your mind. Perhaps I'm missing something?

Thanks for the good faith question.

In my opinion, around that time he stopped being interested in tech and manufacturing of said tech as his top concerns (WHICH HE WAS GOOD AT), and started being more concerned with twitter culture war bullshit. This happened to a lot of people on both sides of the aisle around that time due to the lockdowns, but the lockdowns are well behind us and he's still not focused around "get to mars" or "redefine human energy usage" as his top goals IMO. He's buying twitter, doing what he did at DOGE and repackaging a failed AI company into an IPO on SpaceX's coattails. The stories out of the SpaceX launch business are all about how they effectively "manage up" to get him out of the way and on with their jobs.

So if I may rephrase, the issue is that he kind of lost his way as a pure-hearted engineer working for the progress of technology and the good of mankind and started to stray of path with his half-baked political exploits. He is no longer focused on the mission.

I understand the sentiment, and getting as involved into politics as he did was probably a mistake, simply because he is not good at it.

If I may offer a different perspective as to the on-mission part: he realised some years ago that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary, so he decided he had to get involved, if he wanted to or not. You will probably not agree with this point of view, but perhaps it will help soften the image of him in your own mind.

> that leftism was a grave danger to his plan to make mankind multi-planetary

Yeah, that's just saying "social media addiction" in more words. Also, Star Trek?

I think their statement is useful to contextualise what people consider leftism though. Looking at Musk's actual political actions, it seems like leftism (or at least the part that directly affects him and his companies) is when regulators are allowed to ask Musk to stop doing securities fraud with his social media addiction, and it's not entirely unreasonable for him to consider such enforcement a threat (though maybe not "a grave danger") in case it escalates beyond strongly worded letters. I am, by that metric, a leftist. Possibly a radical far-left communist, even.

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