I definitely have my issues with Tesla and Elon but this was one of the coolest demos I have ever seen in my life. The engineering needed to do this must have been unbelievable.
The one that flies has two COPVs- watch the top gear video
The negativity and nay saying on HN is next level.
Do you say the same thing every time McLaren/ferrari/bugatti/porsche announce the new hotness?
Who does the Bugatti veyron benefit? Or a super yacht? Or 3000 other things.
Sad that people feel the need to add this qualification. I see it regularly.
Its the character. Buying a global media platform to "promote free speech" and then shunt the entire thing and himself behind a particular political party. This guy uses his money and his twitter account to support neo-nazi hate groups in my country (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, Hundred Handers, Tommy Tennames). He has no self-restraint. Its abhorrent. Its not "about politics" when the politics is about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
> Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
and if Bill Gate was literally campaigning for the Dems, getting up on stage, handing voters cheques and THEN being employed by the government to run a department then you'd have a point.
He repeatedly crosses the line of what is appropriate. People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes. Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.
> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.
Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!
agreed and we should hate them for it.
The temptation to succumb to Godwin's Law is so, so, so strong. How shitty and horrible of a person does one have to be for someone on HN to admit that they are a shitty and bad person? At some point the Big Bang sterotype of "nerd" who jerks off to the idea of a rich guy who "computers" and "businesses" and "engineers" outgrows tiresome and becomes despicable once said rich guy facilitates/encourages/actualizes concentration camps. Grow up.
We also weren't discussing GoDaddy as a registrar without mentioning it's CEO killing elephants and being an all around douchebag. Or Oracle without the lawnmower.
It's tough to ask people to dissociate the CEO from the company, especially when he's doing all the PR by himself.
He's a bloviating conman and no rational person should believe that this demo will ever see the light of day, if it wasn't faked.
This is completely outside of politics.
On the road.
> Where is the mars program?
Starship is the required precursor.
> He's a bloviating conman
Enough of what he promised has been delivered that has made him a trillionaire.
Parting fools from their money is not respectable work in my view.
I think people should be reminded of this.
> But a rich one, so, you must be wrong!
Preferably those tasked regulating his companies.
3 or 4 data points isn’t a whole lot more than an anecdote, but it’s still more data than baseless claims line you’re throwing around here
Do you care about food safety, disease prevention, consumer protection or the ability for the government to investigate blatant corruption?
Do you think this has gotten better or worse?
Guess he hit a nerve, eh? My condolences you got hit by the layoffs, try to not browse Reddit and Facebook all day at your next government job. Or do, but ONLY if you work for the IRS or ATF, they deserve nothing less.
You'd have loved L Ron Hubbard back in the day.
Karin Spaink (RIP) did a good number on them.
I did not, at all. Never got laid off in my life.
I have seen my share of useless employees in private companies, though. You don't have to work for the government for that. But if it makes you feel better to think that you are useful because you are in the private sector...
I have seen my share of government funding going to private companies that completely wasted that money (or worse, used it to fuel their stupid ideas). The only thing they did well was convincing the government that they would do something useful - of course they did not. I'm sure you would take that as a reason to criticise the government, "not able to spend the money properly", but before you do: more often than not, it's VCs who invest in ridiculous projects. You want to stop wasting tax money? Stop investing in bullshit tech startups, too!
VCs are interesting: they are people put in a position where they are incompetent and dominant at the same time (i.e. they invest in technologies they don't understand, but they have the power of life or death over startups). That's a perfect recipe to create overconfident assholes (similar to getting rich, actually)!
At the very least, government employees contribute to a system that does stuff for the people. Like roads and schools. Not goddamn flying cars.
You want to be actually critical? Most white collars are doing bullshit. At least those who don't work in technology may contribute less to destroying the planet. But they don't get to be condescending assholes for that.
> they deserve nothing less.
I would be curious to learn about what useless job you do for a living.
We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.
The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.
(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)
You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".
If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
It will take years for those Musk lovers to grasp how much damage their sieg heiling idol has caused.
> This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths) [1]
30B+ is pocket change for the US, but makes a massive impact in poorer countries.
It also had a soft power effect that the current US government seems completely oblivious to [2].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23353912
[3] https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
The 90M figure is probably exaggerated, but this video is completely nuts. This is exactly why the internet has failed us.
Only the President and Congress were elected. The rest are all appointed.
> laid off thousands of government workers
He did at the direction of the President, who was elected. Government service is not a jobs program.
> the second order effects of that will affect millions
speculation
> All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
All you need to do is see how frequently he posts on Twitter to know he's broken and trying to fill the hole with money and attention.
I've worked with engineers "on the spectrum" my entire career. They can be difficult to get along with. None of them were evil, none intended to offend or hurt others. It would just come out wrong.
Once I understood, it wasn't an issue for me any more.
That’s an amazing claim in this context.
Just doing his job and following orders?
Have a read about his actions on Ukraine, even just this last week. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/16/musk-appro...
And just so i am clear on your philosophy there is no guilt that rides whatsoever with presenting this capability to the leader of the free world who then goes and does exactly what you suggested resulting in many people dying while a nation fights for its life.
Musk is many things, but I've never heard anyone seriously claim him to have any particular aptitude or expertise around military strategy or conflict resolution. So if Trump is unilaterally executing on Musk's musings, we can derive two definite (and highly conservative) observations:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.
We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.
Of course you're correct that Trump and Musk both hate Zelenskyy, and this established fact and not conjecture. Nonetheless it all still boils down to:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
My comment was more in regards to saying 'Musk has opinions' (who doesn't) is downplaying his involvement.
I'm basing this on what the 4 sources have stated mentioned in Telegraph article and also based on his previous behavior and comments about Zelenskyy / Ukraine and overall affinity and support for authoritarian political leaders.
It's all a game for him and winning at all costs.
Whatever it is Musk actually said to Trump (reporting of which we should take with a heaping grain of salt, since there are plenty of people with obvious motivations to lie and fabricate) we can see that the service SpaceX controls (Starlink) has remained unaffected, while the service the US military controls (Starshield) is what's in dispute.
Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
To this day full speed hasn't been restored, continuing to endanger lives.
'Zelensky stated that Ukrainian military commanders, the Ministry of Defense, and foreign diplomats are conducting active negotiations to resolve the constraints. However, he noted that management at SpaceX has declined direct dialogue with Ukrainian military representatives.'
Even in a degraded state, Starlink and Starshield remains a critical strategic advantage for Ukraine, even if it's less so now than before. Being less helpful to Ukraine isn't good, but it's still actively helping Ukraine, and that is worlds apart from actively helping Russia.
Musk, Trump and co know that they can't openly turn things off as it would be a PR nightmare, so the next best thing is to cripple it and deny deny deny that you've done it.
speculation
So an unelected official would be correct, right?
> He did at the direction of the President, who was elected.
Where is your evidence? Reporting contradicts what you say - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-...
> speculation
Not really. Multiple independent sources and reports have confirmed the damage done by Musk during his time at DOGE.
> Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
He is as "thrust" into that position as he was "thrust" into the DOGE role.
What are your thoughts on his illegal state-sanctioned intimidation of ex-FEMA CFO?
Free markets drive prosperity, socialism does the opposite.
What are the most expensive things in the US? Healthcare, housing, and education. Those are the most heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
What are the cheapest things in the US? Software (free), TVs, computers, consumer goods. The least regulated and subsidized.
A bit of advice: resorting to insults is what happens when one doesn't have an argument.
If I may, I recommend a book for you: "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist).
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Milton-Rose-Friedman/dp/B...
It's an easy read.
Both made by nazis too.
This should literally be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this guy - a mass murderer working his way up to the level of the despots of the early 20th century
I think the qualification is unbelievably tame considering what Elon deserves.
google: did congress restore food aid funding?
Wildly different estimates or not, this is a matter of principle not of degree.
Donating other peoples' money is not virtuous. Donating your own is.
Then you are indeed virtuous.
2) No of course we are not necessarily morally obligated to donate aid in perpetuity. We can decide to stop if we want to. But it was not Musk's or even Trump's decision to make. But since they assumed that mantle of illegitimate authority, they assumed the moral blame that comes with it.
(And yes, every Trump voter also shares significant moral blame for the deaths of all those people. Atrocity was a predictable and likely consequence of a Trump vote in 2024)
As it stands the war in Iran is creating problematic issues with many petrochemicals and their derivative products making it harder for countries to generate wealth to invest in the US stock market.
This is why I always find it a bit funny when people start blowing smoke up his ass. He's just some old guy who spouts points at this thread as a perfect example ideological nonsense and when challenged on it digs in harder in the face of evidence to the contrary - just what you'd want to lead a project (/s).
The qualifier matters, that guy has serious issues.
This engineering in this demo was only designed o get lucrative government contracts.
I wonder what the point of this was? Seems likely related to anticipated purchase of Tesla by SpaceX. Maybe meant to (irrationally) justify a high offer price for Tesla?
Can't say I'm a fan of the styling of the car - I guess it'd look at home parked beside a Cybertruck, but something like the Porsche Mission S is way sexier.
You seem triggered by the choice of wording. Do you think the upside down rocket car doing aerial flips deserves a more product-ish name like "concept car"? I don't.
Car manufacturers have been doing pointless things for over a century [1], with no plan to even try to make them available to the public. Why is this getting so much heat?
There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".
And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.
This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".
The demos for the future tech are fun for sure, but the Cybertruck and Tesla Semi started this exact same way. The Cybertruck arrived incredibly late, wildly missing even conservative estimates of it's capabilities, and at damn near double the price they teased, AND the units that have shipped have been a fucking mess, to such a degree where Tesla seemingly can't even give them away. And the Tesla Semi has still failed to materialize at all.
So yeah it's a bit of a joke to me to have them hocking a flying car, when their pickup truck can't even drive up a steep unpaved hill, that even my old clapped out F-150 on it's SUV tires would manage just fine.
Edit: and to clarify, I know that it can do that, because I helped a friend move some exercise equipment he bought at auction back to his house, and he has an open-back basement. We backed my truck with trailer down the hill, unloaded it through his basement patio door, and the truck then had to climb back up to the road. And I was a little nervous to be honest, but it did do that, despite as I said having SUV tires on 22-inch rims LOL
By that logic any performance car is useless. There are, albeit few, people that do track these cars.
most of the things a Tesla Roadster is advertised with is not street legal.
I'd bet most of them see this as a cooler, shinier toy.
He just misses with his products these days: Cyber Truck, Robotaxi, Grok...
Still hoping.
Everyone here can probably still remember the time to the minute that Steve Jobs in 2007 said "an internet communicator, a music player, a phone" and the 3-faced cube transformed into a single device. That's what gimmicky demos are for.
I expect that motivates exactly zero percent of the criticism that Musk gets.
--
Sent from my iPhone
Maybe. Another possibility is a feeling of opposition to the idea that the world's richest person continue to accumulate wealth, while using said wealth to dishonestly manipulate elections, support openly fascist and bigoted political parties, and, most recently, tip the scales of international conflict (by limiting Starlink use by Ukraine).
You might love his products, but Elon Musk should not have more power. That's a statement not based in envy, but in a revulsion for what he spends that money on, and how it impacts innocent people.
75.7% SpaceX
15.1% Tesla
1.3% The Boring Company
7.6% Other
https://x.com/dhh/status/2110983188910923926?s=20
Why the second hand outrage. If you didn't buy a car and feel bad about the wait time, just enjoy the demo! :D
Could it theoretically help to avoid *some* crashes? Yes
But in most cases, it'll just trade a frontal crash for a crash against obstacles off/above the road... Which is way more dangerous for pedestrians, buildings, etc.
Driver assistance can in some cases brake before an obstacles. But we've also seen Teslas drive into obstacles. Regardless if it's going to be driver assistance or a human with too much confidence in their ability to avoid obstacles... I wouldn't want to be near a Roadster leaping off the asphalt
Sorry, but in world where the vast majority of people can't afford groceries, gas, housing, or healthcare... I just can't look at these silly things the billionaires are spending their money on and get even remotely excited about it. It's just so absolutely tone deaf in the moment we're in right now.
That sounds extremely explosive and not something any random person should be irresponsibly driving around.
This is hot wheels. It's pretty clear Musk finally had enough of the culture wars at X and decided to go interfere with Tesla some more. Instead of producing a car people might actually want, he made them do this. This is the worst waste of a company you're likely to see in your life.
TSLA is probably not a good stock to be holding right now.
But TBF if they offered the SpaceX thrusters as an option, the SF effective altruists would slurp them right up to be their daily drivers even if they have to be strapped in next to a tank of toxic boom boom to use them. And Sam Altman would cry into his protein-supplemented energy drink because his Koenigsegg doesn't have them and I'd happily hand over 50 Quatloos to watch that.
Looks like the base version would be the one for that.
1. The kind of person who buys a sports-car often doesn't want the "base version". They want luxury. They want status. They don't want to face the choice of being upsold to an impractical deathtrap or driving around in the "base version" like someone who could barely just afford it.
2. This demo does absolutely nothing to demonstrate the abilities of the base version. I reiterate, a brick could have been made to fly in this way. The base version will no doubt have good paper stats because Musk understands that numbers must be big, but that doesn't mean the base model will be pleasant to drive.
3. The styling of this car is "wankpanzer with a few extra polygons". Given how well the wankpanzer sold, demand for this thing, even if the base model is a competent auto, will be limp.
4. Musk is currently trying to buy another election. With Musk visibly taking an interest in Tesla again, that's likely to backfire on Tesla. They need to cut ties with Musk, not keep doing the sort of puerile things he's known and frequently lambasted for.
5. When does this silly thing even release? They say 2028, but do we believe them? How long has it been since the last model released? We're talking half a decade between models. What the heck are they doing at Tesla? Making bricks fly apparently.
CRS-7, Amos-6, Starship 36, and Super Heavy 18.
> You can think of the COPV like the fuel tank in a compressed natural gas (CNG)- or liquid propane gas (LPG)-powered vehicle, except the nitrogen mixture in the COPV is stored at a much higher pressure, up to 10,000 psi, similar to the pressures in modern hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
LPG cars have somewhere between 100 and 300 psi.
10,000 PSI? That is beyond absurd. I can not imagine what alloy and how wrapped that pressure vessel is... Or what type of crazy pump is recharging it!
They'll happily burst (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ-__PlU4gM) and blow up your vehicle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71AwkBt3_ts).
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"'Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing,' the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19)."
> LPG explosions are real combustion due to tank rupture…
They're mostly designed to vent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_disc) to prevent a BLEVE. Big fire, big mess, but without oxidizer in the tank and much lower pressures, relatively safe by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDyNjCNxVY
The other two videos are triggered by the copv failing, but the explosion is due to the methane and lox.
My point still stands. The composite overwrap either survives a collision (crash tests will determine this) or doesn't (the vehicle will not be legal for sale in the US and Europe). The crash conditions are inside the design limitations, just like the batteries are and just like a standard fuel tank is.
Sure. For the car, the COPV rupturing is gonna look more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin.
> the vehicle will not be legal for sale in the US and Europe
I think that's already safe to assume.
This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Which they will, because Musk is all ego.
Making a car with a heavy EV battery and powertrain fly like that is probably not something they're able to do.
My only issue with it is that beyond being impressive and very cool, it's pretty useless.
First you have to build SpaceX.
Sorry for being skeptical but Elons track record of being honest at such demos isn't stellar.
Edit: To the downvoters, this is a serious question. I'd really love to see such evidence.