I would say that the one redeeming quality of Elon Musk (in a sea of otherwise awful personality traits) is that for at least Tesla and SpaceX, that he was interested in running those companies primarily to produce a product. Like that was the primary focus and raison d'être of both of those companies, especially SpaceX I think. This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot point.
When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if that excludes building a good product or for that matter even the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural thing to believe.
Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018 or so.
Your comment wouldn't be so bad if you had taken out the obvious provocations ("awful personality traits" etc.), but in any case it flew too close to the planet Musk and the whole thread got sucked in. We don't want to die that way.
I did that more in a "let's take this as read and focus on the other things" way i.e. I knew I was going to give Musk a sort of backhanded compliment, and didn't want a bunch of replies from people who hate him, explaining to me carefully and in great detail why they hate him (even though I probably agree with them, it doesn't seem like an interesting discussion to have).
I did get that (more or less), and yes that kind of thing is in vain. It just adds complications, e.g. spawning meta levels of offtopicness (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40590135).
Most people who have worked close to him generally note that he has intimate knowledge up and down the entire product side (at minimum) of the company. This can lead to micro-management, but leads to far better results than most companies could ever hope to achieve.
Communication and agreement are what add cost and misdirection to development. When a tiny set of people with one clear goal pull the strings, it is much more efficient to reach the north star product.
I cant say I'm a fan of Elon but he got it right with SpaceX. Space is expensive, stupidly expensive. There was zero chance SpaceX would've been able to survive this long if they'd not focused on profits. Reusable rockets brought general launch costs down by millions, reusable farings even more (people underestimate how much they cost. $6 million a pair. At ~$62 million a launch thats a fairly sizable chunk of money to be throwing away).
Starlink was a fantastic way to ensure long term high profitability, and is set to bring them $6.6bn this year alone. For some context the Falcon 9 development costs were estimated by Nasa to be around $300 million, and Starship's development is estimated to going to have cost anywhere from $5-$10 billion by the time its fully operational.
Starlink's profitability is what's going to make it possible for some monumentally huge projects once Starship is in full swing.
In terms of Elons involvement in SpaceX it does seem to be a bit more than just a money making venture for him.
This comment is misleading, unintentionally of course.
The comment starts out with "long term high profitability", then offers "bring them 6.6B", and the central proposition of the comment is extremely high Starlink profits allows for free moonshots.
6.6B is a recent revenue projection, not profit.[1]
Their finance people say it's unprofitable, still. (off the record) [2]
Rooting for them and it will be profitable IMHO, but I've never heard any reporting it's profitable.
I don't get the same sense from it you do. It looks to me like they realized they needed more income than launches could get them in the time they needed. Rather than solely depending on investors, they came up with a business that plays to their strength that can be a steady/recurring source of income to be less dependent on investors. I don't see SpaceX so focused on profiting from Starlink that they've lost any momentum towards any of the other SpaceX plans. From where I sit, it looks like a pretty smart play on their part. It also just happens to be a very beneficial service that so many other players in the market refused to do.
"SpaceX’s prized Starlink satellite business is still burning through more cash than it brings in" has a fairly plain meaning! And it's that it's not profitable. I'm not sure I have any sense at all other than relaying content. :)
Spacex still burning investor cash hence the capital raise recently on the backs of another capital raise. Building rockets is a great way to burn capital and also the end product, when working, is a great goal for humanity.
Elon absolutely focuses on making money, which is why it was successful. I don’t know why your conclusion is completely backwards.
Do you think blue origin is focused on making money? They haven’t done anything that would indicate that.
SpaceX on the other hand focused on landing rockets completely to make money. There is no other reason to do it and it’s why NASA never focused on it.
Starlink is entirely to make money to feed the mars mission long term.
You might say that his visions aren’t focused on money, but the execution is ruthlessly so. It’s why both companies are famous for squeezing their suppliers so hard and inhousing when they can.
Yea I have a hard time distinguishing focusing on return vs focusing on product. They’re complimentary, not mutually exclusive. I hope those implementing my investments are focused on both.
Oh gawd, now that's a not pleasant thought. Thinking of long haul space flights in terms of today's air travels. I shudder at the thought of being in the middle seat for the duration of that trip
There’s no reason for that. There’s no shortage of space in transit, and plenty of ideas for making transit comfortable (inflatable habitats or reusable cyclers, for example).
It's the exact same reason as it is now for air travel...profits. It doesn't matter the size of the ship. If you can squeeze the space to increase the number of occupants per flight on the same ship, you increase revenue. That's all corporate bean counters will care about. I would not be surprised if they hire a similar team that airlines have now that get paid to specifically redesign seats to squeeze more in per flight.
There's no air in space, so there's no need for aerodynamics. Inflatable structures allow for quite a bit of volume during transit without much impact on structural mass. This is not analogous to airplanes.
Yes this exactly. Our entire economy is enshittified and becoming more so daily, and it's precisely because we've become a 100% production for profit economy. Eventually you lose the plot when you do that.
Because he is a complex human being with a very visible dark side and any praise of his achievements will make his terrible personality traits stain you like a soggy barf bag on an overnight flight
This is so silly. Reading comments like these, you’d think everyone on HN is a perfect human, without flaws and liked by everyone. I’m glad someone like Elon doesn’t spend his time reading stuff like this and instead spends most of his time kicking ass. In the long run, his results will continue to speak for him.
Half the problem with Elon is that he does spend some of his time reading stuff like this and shitposting on the website formerly known as Twitter about it, instead of going to work or sitting on a beach reading something more useful.
Upon reflection this is also a problem with me, but I don't own SpaceX or Tesla, so fewer people are going to call me out on it.
Elon's propensity to say dumb shit and take a side in the culture war is not a tiny problem. It is devaluing the brand of every company he publicly contributes to, when the brand is the most valuable thing about many of them.
It's a big problem because it is devaluing the brand of his companies, which it is doing because investors and consumers aren't psychopathically logical actors and will refuse to buy from companies associated with men who breach their deeply held beliefs, which is why casually choosing a side is a dumb idea[0]. If you think this is self-referential, can you explain why?
[0] I will accept that choosing a side is fine if it aligns with your goals, but Elon's most ambitious goal appears to be going to Mars, and voicing his opinions about politics on Xwixxer appears to be hampering his efforts to achieve that goal
I mean, yes and no. In principle I agree with you but Musk very much does also spend his time reading stuff like this and getting into internet slap fights. Last time I checked he was tweeting 29.2 times a day, or roughly once every thirty minutes of wake time.
But you know... they're all complex. Even you are a complex human being... maybe not so visible as Elon Musk... but... so what?
You know why people really do it? It has nothing to do with Elon Musk, but rather is a response to our own fears for our own social standing. We fear that if we say something good about a person that our social group has, in defiance of your complex human point, decided is "a bad guy" that we'll just as cavalierly be excluded or derided from that group.
So when you acknowledge that complexity or something good that this "good for nothing" person has done, you have to start off with with virtual signaling: "oh this guy is terrible, but... ", (meaning "please see that I'm still one of you").
I find the whole act kinda craven, perhaps even moreso than a social group that demands it.
It's very much a "religion of society". There is dogma, sins, shunning, confession, penance, blasphemy, heretics, etc. Just because it doesn't have a creation myth doesn't make it not religious.
A more gratuitous interpretation is that someone who does this is making an attempt to stave off the expected vapid replies that occur whenever you mention polarizing topics or people.
That might be what you would do but I think the man is a shit and I only mention his achievements out of duty to try to be fair. If I wasn't interested in being fair I'd just say I don't care what he has done - he has been paid well for whatever it is and doesn't need any admiration from anyone.
> The man has objectively created some incredible businesses
Even this, you need to put asterisks on "created" because he spends so much time building out lies about the companies he runs/ran because the creation myth is so important. The amount of unforced errors behind his tenure at Paypal, a lot of it around trying to be taken as the guy who "made Paypal"... it's just very silly!
And I think ultimately in a place like HN, where there are supposedly a lot of "builder" types, when you hear every Musk company say "yeah the way we stay productive is to keep Musk out of things...." everyone's natural bias against bullshitters kick in!
I think it's hard to discount Tesla really pushing forward EVs. I think it's extremely easy to discount all of his other stuff if you're cynical (yes I include SpaceX in there, though it's easy for me because I think manned spaceflight, let alone "going to Mars", is extremely silly). But this stuff isn't really fungible...
That's a weird article, because most of them don't even fit a reasonable person's definition of a "lie". The majority of them are overconfident predictions of the future, or differences of opinion between Musk and the author of this listicle.
For a person who does and says so much in public, the notion that a "top ten" list of "lies" needed so much filler is, IMHO, a compelling case for the inverse assertion.
Like when they faked the first Tesla self driving video, or when Musk boasted in 2017 (!!!) that they can drive the Semi in convoys so that it beats rail ("This is something we can do RIGHT NOW!"). Robotaxis that make the car appreciate, and not depreciate... etc. These are lies, but perhaps more importantly, should be considered fraud. To this day I don't understand how Musk can get away with all this... but hey, it's not my money (I'm not a US taxpayer).
The first self driving video wasn’t faked, it was “staged” which just means they planned the route ahead of time.
When Musk said “we can do this right now” he meant it’s possible with today’s technology, and that Tesla had probably run experiments to that effect already.
The hypothetical ability for a vehicle to act as a robotaxi would absolutely lift the value of the asset. That’s not even controversial. It’s a separate question whether the technology is ready to go in time for people to take advantage of it.
Like, the guy has done good shit (better than most), but he has certainly set his reputation on fire with many of his (at best “inaccurate”) tweets. At that point you gotta caveat praise lol.
Hyperloop? The Boring Company? The founding myth of Tesla? Is it really controversial to observe the Elon has a very flexible relationship with facts?
He made some good choices with Tesla. And some boneheaded ones. And SpaceX is a great example of success, because he made a really great decision there -- he hired Gwynne Shotwell. Then there's Twitter. Which is less about overt lies and more about gross incompetence. I think being a billionaire might have gone to his head and made him think he could only be successful.
It's far more likely that Musk was misled, not that he lied.
My zero-evidence guess is that the Cybertruck team predicted the outcome in simulation, hyped everyone up about this as a visual demonstration, then spent tens of millions of dollars replicating the outcome in the real world, buying two Porsche 911s, renting a film crew etc. Except they couldn't replicate it in the real world. So instead of admitting the wasted money/time, they covered their asses and misled their boss.
If that is true it does not exonerate Musk at all, it means the lying is systemic. If the CEO creates a culture where people are too scared to tell him the truth, that falls squarely on the CEO. And it inspires no confidence if a $500B company can't predict the performance of their own product when the YouTuber above could predict it with nothing but a whiteboard.
I think you're being a bit optimistic if you think that stretching the truth and/or concealing one's mistakes and/or covering one's own ass is not utterly unremarkable behaviour for any sufficiently large company. While it's fair to say that Musk sets the tone, it's a bit much to suggest that he should have the power to totally suppress all negative human tendencies.
There are many possible explanations for the discrepancy. The failure might have been in predicting the performance of that base model 911. Maybe the data they used was someone who was very slightly less urgent on the manual transmission.
The failure might have been a failure to predict the performance of their own product when it was still in the late stages of tuning. A last minute change to tyre compounds or stability control algorithms could have made enough of a difference in this very very close race.
It could be argued that in a fair comparison between cars, the stopwatch should begin when the driver slams the pedal, not when the car itself starts moving. The latter is how races are timed, but I'd argue that the former is more honest. Including the split-second delay of the ICE engine might make enough of a difference.
No doubt, but Tesla would not be where it is today without Musk's deceptive marketing, stock manipulation, disregard for labor laws, and just generally acting like he's above the law. One can admire the products he's had a hand in building without admiring the man himself. And the moment he got involved in politics it was inevitable that people would distance themselves from him.
Because he’s an easy person to dislike. And he’s spent a lot of his career taking credit for other people’s work.
He also has a section of people that are cult-like in their defense of him which adds fuel to the fire. “You’re jealous” or “you’re just angry he’s rich” or some other such nonsense seems to come out of the woodwork for anyone who has anything even slightly negative to say about him.
I do it very deliberately and I think it is good practice. It ads nuance and balance to Internet discussions which often tend to be very polarised with people shouting at each other. In my view Musk is a very flawed person but that doesn't justify spreading misinformation about SpaceX's very real and important accomplishments. Crazed evangelism over SpaceX also doesn't negate Musk's troubling history of public statements and actions.
I didn't say it was a virtue. Nobody thinks virtuous thoughts all the time. But I do find Musk more engaging because the pablum coming through a PR firm is boring.
> The man has objectively created some incredible businesses.
... and since then called a rescue diver a pedo, got into quite the mess regarding his partnerships and offspring [1], burned dozens of billions of dollars in Twitter, seems to be doing the public customer service for a bunch of literal neo-Nazis on Twitter [2], and is apparently on a truckload of drugs on the regular [3].
It takes years to build up trust, but it's very easy to completely erode it in a few weeks.
> Why do people always have to preface Elon praise with some initial criticism.
Because otherwise, people might accuse one of being a Musk shill, and there's unfortunately quite a bunch of these, completely ignoring any of the countless issues with Musk.
> He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and everyone around him,
His dark side is out in the open for everyone to see. What you are saying is the people prefer someone who is apparently appears not have a dark side. IMO such people are just adept at camouflaging their dark side, politicians do it routinely.
>That man need a therapist.
Well, IMO it's mostly the public that needs therapists.
Quote: It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
>The public hatred he has gotten is his making, ultimately.
> you are saying is the people prefer someone who is apparently appears not have a dark side. IMO such people are just adept at camouflaging their dark side, politicians do it routinely.
When this person owns one of the largest communication platforms on Earth and regularly spreads conspiracy theories, disinformation, and transphobia... yes, I would prefer they hide that. That rhetoric does real harm to people.
Accusing someone of being a pedophile without evidence isn't something you just say "Well at least he's speaking his mind!" to.
The richest man on Earth should be able to afford a therapist, or at least a PR firm. If his ego is preventing him from doing so, well, that's a fair thing to criticize.
>regularly spreads conspiracy theories, disinformation, and transphobia
What you are saying indirectly are that common people are idiots to believe those 'conspiracy theories' ? or am I misinterpreting you?
>Accusing someone of being a pedophile without evidence isn't something you just say "Well at least he's speaking his mind!" to.
No I did not quite mean that. No excuses for him to call someone names. But if you know people ( or along lines of what I understand of people), actions speak louder than words. The most evil people manage to hide their evilness though glib talk.
> He has an extremely dark side that impedes him and everyone around him, regardless of the extraordinary success he experienced.
I think people have a hard time separating out the good work someone has done vs the bad. We humans are imperfect, but ironically have the tendency to put a binary label on people as good or bad without leaving much room for gray area.
Ex. Shockley got a Nobel prize for his foundational work on transistors and semiconductors - inarguably one of the most important 20th century inventions, but he was also an extremely vocal racist and eugenicist. Was Shockley a brilliant scientist or a vociferous racist? He can be both while acknowledging the good contributions to society he made.
I find this is often the case of many historical figures that made their mark on humanity. Is Elon Musk a brilliant entrepreneur or a micromanaging arrogant narcissist who carries some deeply rooted insecurities? (Among other "flaws" such as being an absentee father) Why not both? Perhaps the dark side has enabled their success to some degree? Who knows.
Its hard to do anything important without a carrying a little bit of controversy in life.
> he was also an extremely vocal racist and eugenicist.
He was vocal about scientific evidence and what conclusions he drew from that evidence. I wouldn't draw the same conclusions but the evidence was quite clear (and is now clearer still).
Why waste admiration on someone who has been very well rewarded for what they did? I'd rather admire people who acted out of altruism.
A soldier dying to save his friends - nobody can give more than their life and nothing can compensate a person for losing it. That's an example of 'admirable' to me...or a doctor working for Medecins sans Frontiers.
I agree and further to your point, I’d suggest he would never have achieved anything like what he has achieved in any other country other than the USA. Imagine SpaceX was based in the UK, EU, or Asia. It would be shackled beyond recognition.
Not sure why my previous comment got flagged. HN doesn't seem to allow you to appeal a flagging. How is other people's judgement of what constitutes a rules-break better than mine?
It's sad that Elon's waves of fans come to his side, even after the incredibly offensive "pedo diver" episode. He is not the "man of the people" he'd like you to believe. It surprises me that hackers think Big Tech CEOs are on their side
He gets away with being libelous because he's rich and famous, while I get away with being libelous because I'm a poor nobody. Funny how the world works.
First, this is what happens when moderation is removed from Twitter [1]. So Dom Lucre was in possession of CSAM that would literally land anyone else in jail for the mere possession of it (fuelling the rumors he is an FBI informant), watermarked it, posted it on Twitter and it was for for days.
That's who Elon unbanned.
Now if you've bought into the lie that Elon is a free speech absolutist, which he absolutely is not, you might consider that a good thing. Now take a look at a partial list of Twitter accounts Elon has banned [2]. This includes many journalists and a guy posting where his private plane is (from public information), many of whom were banned for simply hurting his feelings or calling out one of his lies.
It’s a niche area of interest, I don’t enjoy it because of heavy moderation. My opinion is that it provides value by furthering knowledge of folks in engineering.
Heavy moderation is a technique that makes dang’s job easier by perpetuating rigorous standards and makes people police themselves. See Broken Window Theory.
As a non Twitter/X user, I keep hearing this take and I gotta say... I just don't see it.
To me, there has been no significant change, aside from hearing more people on the left bemoan that Elon is giving "dangerous" people on the right a platform.
But I honestly don't see an actual difference aside from people saying there is one.
> As a non Twitter/X user, I keep hearing this take and I gotta say... I just don't see it.
Yeah, but everyone who does use Twitter will see it. The place is going down in flames - no matter what you write, you'll get likes from a "<firstname><bunchofnumbers>" bots, and replies such as "P U S S Y I N B I O" in a matter of seconds.
Seriously, your response to this is "I don't use the product. The product doesn't seem any different to me under new ownership." Do you not see the inherent contradiction?
So the Senate says don't impeach, let the law take care of it. Now they say don't prosecute, let the House and Senate impeach and convict first. It's quite a system they've got there!
Free flow of information is a huge risk to democractic systems? Seems like shadow banning and political censorship are the real risks to democractic systems and he got rid of those. You fight disinformation with accurate information while keeping in mind every once in a while those crazy conspiracy theories end up being real.
uhm, yes seriously if you are not from the US that is actually kinda sorta what it looks like. You functionally have nothing in the US in relevant politics that is looking left of center to most people from say western europe and the "rival" 24 hour news networks reflect that.
I am well aware that that is not what I looks like to people from the US.
As AngryData said - they are the left edge of the democratic party. A party that is sorta center right? There is a limited amount they can do in that enviroment and they do not turn the party left leaning in any way.
> uhm, yes seriously if you are not from the US that is actually kinda sorta what it looks like […]
Clearly, the context is within the U.S. Why use a straw man to respond to my question? I wouldn’t enter a topic about Canadians to talk about Brazilians. Very bizarre.
(I’m very well aware that American politics is quite different from the rest of the world. E.g., a neoliberal like Hillary Clinton is considered a leftist in America, which wouldn’t fly in most of the rest of the world.)
Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or political-ideological battle comments? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
My contributions to this thread started here [0]. I made a rather simple comment there. The thread got more ideological as more folks commented. If other folks post comments that are rooted in their ideology, why am I being personally targeted for responding to them? (I don’t want to assume anything, so I’m asking this genuinely.)
For the record, if, for whatever reason, you just don’t want me here, as much as I love this community, I’m happy to leave, because I’d rather do that than have my views silenced because they’re unpopular or be targeted like this for responding in kind to others who openly share their own views.
That wasn't a simple comment—that was clearly a flamewar comment, guaranteed to produce more of the same and likely worse.
You're not being targeted personally and we don't take ideological sides nor care what your (or anyone else's) views are. If other people are breaking the site guidelines too, and their posts don't look moderated, it doesn't follow that moderators have deemed it ok. That's a gigantic non sequitur. Far more likely is that we just didn't see it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> The thread got more ideological as more folks commented.
In my experience, the feeling "other people just started behaving badly for reasons that had nothing to do with my post" is generally not very reliable. It does happen sometimes of course. But it's more likely that you (I don't mean you personally—I mean any of us in this position) are underestimating the degree of provocation in what you posted.
> That wasn't a simple comment—that was clearly a flamewar comment, guaranteed to produce more of the same and likely worse.
I’ve reread my initial comment [0] probably a couple dozen times (at least) trying to see why it’d be considered a flamewar comment and I just don’t see it. What am I missing? Is it me calling the text I quoted an understatement? Or is it the last part where I object to the consistent negative rhetoric re Elon I see on HN? I have a feeling it might be the latter, since it specifically calls out the community. Do you mind clarifying so I can understand?
> You're not being targeted personally and we don't take ideological sides nor care what your (or anyone else's) views are. If other people are breaking the site guidelines too, and their posts don't look moderated, it doesn't follow that moderators have deemed it ok.
You’re generally pretty fair from what I’ve seen (and also from communicating with you via email), so I believe you and I appreciate that. Thank you for making that clear though.
> […] it's more likely that you (I don't mean you personally—I mean any of us in this position) are underestimating the degree of provocation in what you posted.
Fair enough—I’ll keep that in mind moving forward.
"I find it beyond unfortunate that so many in this community constantly feel the need to belittle Elon or downplay his accomplishments simply because they don’t like the guy, his politics, etc."
When I read a sentence like this it breaks down something like the following:
I find it beyond unfortunate - pejorative rhetoric
constantly feel the need - this is a putdown as well as an assumption about the inner state of the other
to belittle Elon or downplay his accomplishments - more or less fine, except that "belittle" and "downplay" are pejoratives so it adds to the provocation
simply because they don’t like the guy - another putdown and imputation of inner state to the other
his politics, etc. - ups the ante at the end
I know I'm exaggerating quite a bit! I'm sure these interpretations are not what you intended. But this is exactly the sort of exaggeration that takes place in the reader's mind, so if the reader happens to be one of the people who you are criticizing, there's no doubt that all these signals will pack quite a punch, even if it wasn't a punch you intended to land.
The "because you don't like the guy..." bit is one that used to set me off pretty reliably. There's a reason I don't like the guy (whatever guy [or gal, or nonbinary pal, etc] is under discussion at the time).
It's hard to remember in these discussions that other people have thoughts and feelings and perspectives and fall back on assuming they're just being irrational, or trying to obfuscate their true motives.
This is why I'm a fan of this particular guideline:
>> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Maybe my interlocutor is a sniveling suck-up to power driven entirely by fantasies of becoming the next boot on my neck, but we sure aren't going to go anywhere in a discussion if I launch off with that assumption. Especially if I'm wrong.
It's hard to learn to recognize one's own part in the way things are and set ego aside, but it's one of those essential growth milestones that makes everything better.
He wouldn't necessarily have to (but I also don't know whether he did or didn't). I already explained, assholes have a competitive advantage because they don't worry about consequences and externalities. It's the same reason many corporate regulations exist, to even the playing field among ethical and unethical actors.
There is also a perspective that the worryingly popular ‘silence all dissent’ mentality is vastly more of a threat to democracy than anything Elon has done.
Who are you talking about? I'm talking about the guy who declared "cis" is a slur and promised to ban people for saying it on his private free speech platform.
Yes and now Twitter is filled with hate speech, porn bots, crypto scams, misinfo, compelling and difficult to disprove conspiracies. I'm glad that stuff is no longer being silenced.
He's the worst kind of megalomaniac narcissist CEO - the kind that everyone hides from and works around, because of a compulsive addiction to self-important thinkfluencer larping.
Cybertruck. That's the real Elon. A child's fridge drawing of a fantasy car whose build quality seethes with barely hidden contempt for his adoring stans.
Mars? From the man who gave the world a car that can't handle rain?
Truthfully I’m just going to stop posting here. This place has become a disaster in terms of the general attitude of many commenters. The spirit of the site is to celebrate hacking, and this person is trashing some of the greatest hackers alive who are pushing the boundaries and sometimes succeeding sometimes failing. I did in fact want to know if they have been seeing mental health professionals about their attitude - it’s not an insult to ask a question, it’s a genuine curiosity of mine if these people who have this mindset have certain pathologies they are working through.
I think it quite stifles discourse to require everyone to have done the exact same things as a person before commenting about a person. We don’t require you to kill a man before commenting about a murder. You don’t require someone to run for office before they are allowed to comment on a public official.
Good point, but that’s not what I did. I just responded in kind to someone using the absurd rhetoric that because Tesla’s cars supposedly can’t handle rain*, Elon is too incompetent to accomplish his goals re Mars. While we don’t [to quote you] “require everyone to have done the exact same things as a person before commenting about a person,” for certain arguments to carry any weight, the credibility of the person making them does, in fact, matter. If someone was criticizing Bjarne Stroustrup and how exceptions work in C++, but has never even written a single line of code in any systems language, it’d be completely reasonable to dismiss every single word out of that person’s mouth.
* Please note that I’ve driven a Tesla in rain just fine, but I’ll pretend the critique is legit and in good faith for the sake of the argument.
I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole but IMHO there has been a whole lot of historical revisionism and propaganda regarding the history of both Tesla and SpaceX.
Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it. He was an early investor who essentially took over the company. Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits. Also, it arguably only survived thanks to a 2009 Department of Energy loan (for $465 million). If you look at the history here, this loan is under a cloud.
This is particularly funny given Elon's self-made propaganda.
SpaceX succeeded (IMHO) in spite of Elon not because of him. I've read (admittedly unverified) accounts where someone in SpaceX's leadership essentially built a wall around Elon to insulate the rest of the company from him. SpaceX engineers themselves are a byproduct of NASA to a large degree. Also, SpaceX could not have succeeded without government loans, grants and contracts. Even today, it's completely reliant on the government purse.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have made huge promises and under-delivered on them or delivered late. People forget how delayed the Falcon timeline was. It just didn't matter because there was no competition: the ULA, for example, is a jobs program with no interest in competing on price or features.
I don't want to go deep down this rabbit hole, but when Elon "took over the company" it had no IP, or products, or employees and had produced nothing of value.
Attributing the success of Tesla to a government loan they paid back early is also joke and insulting to all the hard work of the employees and other investors.
"Tesla only exists through government largesse, specifically carbon tax credits."
This assumes no subsidies for oil and gas (plenty, including depreciation below cost basis!)
In terms of credits - those are in the 2%-3% range of revenue.
In terms of SpaceX being the most dependent on the govt - totally false. Things like SLS are cost plus, have cost $20 billion with almost nothing to show for it. SpaceX is so available, cheap and reliable they are literally launching ESA payloads (ESA won't even mention them its so embarrassing), most commercial payloads that can actually go to bid and competitors payloads (looking at you Amazon).
US government contracts account for 70%+ of SpaceX’s revenues through 2018. Can’t speculate about since. I like SpaceX but it’s just untrue that they weren’t highly dependent on US gov’t contracts for a long time (which itself is the product of space market liberalization by Obama in 2010).
So the government does fund space companies - including slush amounts for things like "launch availability" and launch readiness / quick launch capabilities which are ways to try to keep the reported per launch costs down.
For both National Security and other missions SpaceX is FAR cheaper. I'm not sure if that still counts as government "largesse" - which is more about a generous gift or contract. To keep more than one provider in mix the government has been doing some largesse to try to get some money to other providers.
- None of the markets he participates in could ever truly be free markets no matter what due to their very high (and necessarily high) capital requirements. It's not like other tech companies which use government money to monopolize markets that have low entry barriers and end up messing with millions of little guys who think they're operating in a free market... Then it takes a decade for them to learn that they actually had 0 chance of ever competing in that market due to asymmetries in margins caused by gov subsidies.
- He consistently gave the government value for money. If his companies weren't there, the government would have spent the same amount of money (or more) and obtained worse results.
> Tesla lists Elon Musk as a founder but he didn't found it. He was an early investor who essentially took over the company.
He invested in a 6 month startup that consisted of an office and desk. Tesla had no money, no plan, and a borrowed electric kit car. Musk was the early investor.
From a practical point of view, Musk was indeed the founder.
In spite of all your criticism, neither Tesla nor SpaceX would exist without Musk, and Musk has greatly pushed forward the technology of both, creating two new major industries.
He is a founder at Tesla, as when he entered the round A financing Tesla was just three guys, some networking, and nothing more. Even the "Tesla" trademark and logo registration was made by SpaceX people. He didn't found his own car company with just J. B. Straubel (another Tesla founder who was being paid by him to develop electric car batteries at the time) because he thought it would be better to cooperate with that other group that was was inspired by the same idea and he though he would be able to concentrate more on SpaceX that way. He was wrong and had to take "take over the company" later to avoid bankrupcy, move the Model S design headquarters to SpaceX, etc. And it's now nothing like what it was when he first put money on it.
As for the loan, Fisker got an even bigger one and went bankrupt[1]. Ford took a much bigger one (justified by their size) and in 2020 still didn't manage to pay it back[2]. What is wrong with the loan Tesla took, kept it alive, and it paid back early with interest?
USA likes to tout free markets and lobby against protectionism, but aside from the UK as a first mover nobody ever industrialized without protectionism and directed industrial policy, and I would argue it is impossible or at very least inefficient.
I agree SpaceX could not have succeeded w/o the government contracts, but that is true to any space launch company. All SpaceX contracts were acquired as the lowest bidder, often offering dramatically lower prices and higher value than anyone. Just look at the Commercial Crew where Boeing got $4.49B, SpaceX got $2.6B and did a better job.
Elon time is a known phenomenon. "At SpaceX we specialize at converting the impossible to late". And delays are a common thing in the aerospace industry. Can you name a rocket in recent times that was developed faster, or even just less delayed than Falcon 1? Or than Falcon 9? I bet you find much easier to name those who were more.
Musk succeeded in two industries that were certified money pits. You have a big graveyard both before and after 2002 of bankrupt companies in both fields.
It's ludicrous to believe SpaceX succeeded despite Musk when all other "new space" companies started before or around the same time, with the same NASA/Military complex boosted engineers and contracts available to them, failed, and when Musk has been so involved in SpaceX. Instead of unverified accounts, what about hearing about the organizational structure of early Spacex from a senior NASA scientist that worked with them[3] (the whole series of videos with him is very interesting), or many other similar accounts [4]?
Yeah I mean, I agree with you on this stuff - I just wanted to make a point about production for use vs production for profit and how a manic fixation on the latter can lead to adverse outcomes. And, like I hinted at, I don't think Elon Musk really prioritized the former - in fact I don't think he understands the difference between the two - but he did cultivate a narrative around his personality and management style that led a lot of people to believe that he valued the former, including at his companies which shaped the culture there to some extent.
I would not use Tesla's market valuation as proof of anything, looking at production numbers it is clearly inflated to hell, and they still has big problems with quality control and parts supply. They are doing pretty well yes, but that stock is an obvious ticking timebomb and people are playing hot potato holding on to it.
Seriously? Your definition of "self-driving" must be different from normal.
Any proper understanding of the term "self driving", including the way Musk advertises it, is 'tell car through the UI where you want it to go, sit back and it reliably gets you there with zero further input, better than the average human driver'.
Please post a video of it doing this for any route on real roads, with no driver input. Seriously. I'd love to see it, because I never have.
I've seen Tesla videos with few required driver interventions. But not none. And from the accidents I've read about, I sure as shirt would not give it a destination and recline reading a book. Especially on left-turns and near emergency vehicles, turning trucks, or construction barriers.
So, what is your definition of self-driving, and what performance can you show? And in what road conditions?
I drove the Mercedes with officially regulated L2 self driving capability and it was much worse than the old Tesla model I tested years before... The current version is supposedly much further based on the online feedback, while the Mercedes is still bad.
OK, that tells me that the Tesla seems better than the Mercedes.
It does NOT tell me that either have achieved anything near the stated standard: "for practical purposes it is self-driving."
I don't think anyone promotes (or any reasonable person understands) L2 as self driving. SAE defines L2 assist [0] as "You ARE driving... you must constantly supervise and support these features ... lane centering and adaptive cruise control at the same time".
"Self driving" implies to me and everyone I know as "the car drives itself". As in I can safely sleep in the back seat as if another human were driving, or I could ask the car to come or go to a destination, as I could ask another human to drive my car to/from a destination.
Can you provide an example of ANY car doing this yet?
Right, DrivePilot is less capable than a Tesla. Got it.
You still have provided ANY example of the topic of the discussion — a car that is actually self-driving, as in can get from one location to another on public roads with zero intervention by a human.
Telling us about another less capable car with driver-assist tech advances the conversation how?
IMO he is the main design engineer of all products in all his companies. This is why I admire him greatly and don't get the MSM parotting about him being a terrible person because -insert random half true MSM story about some emerald mine or being born into a rich family- or whatever other clickbait bs.
His companies where all founded based on his own engineering idea about how an important (existing) product/service could be fundamentally !at least an order of magnitude! better in multiple areas by designing it with a different approach or even different goal (going to space as a country vs commercially building a precense on mars for example).
His vision about the future, substantiated by (simple) physics calculations + drive to actually do it make him outright unique in the world right now.
There would be no SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, etc without Elon Musk. Period. I don't get why people must insist on what a terrible personality he has (often based on gossip and outright lies).
This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore. The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
Call it cynicism, but decision calculus from upstairs always work in that direction (i.e. gotta hit arbitrary financial goals for this quarter because that's how bonuses and comp gets dictated) so I think in that mindset so I don't setup myself for disappointment or surprise if a decision that doesn't appeal to that shorted-sighted thinking doesn't gain traction.
>This is in opposition to the usual "the only point of a business is to make money" ethos that so permeates neoliberal capitalism that we hardly even notice it anymore.
>The latter is dysfunctional, inhuman, and ultimately bad for business.
Thanks for putting it words that I could not normally articulate. On HN, I find people are quick to label capitalism=only for profit,hence bad for people and the supposed opposite i.e socialism=good for people. The lack of nuance among cranial challenged is annoying, without realizing that the later embodies the quintessential the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-good-intentions.
I mean, for what it's worth I'm a Marxist and that fact definitely influenced my choice of words there and how I think about this stuff. That said, while I'm also a communist (because I can't think of anything else that describes me better), I do think that Marx's critique of capitalism is his most enduring body of work that remains relevant to this day, while his contributions to how to build socialism are important for historical purposes but have been mostly superseded by later theorists. I don't think he would have found that particularly surprising, either.
Capitalism is about the accumulation of capital goods into private hands and centralization and socialization of production. To my mind, that's what it does and what drives it forward - most everything else is secondary. That's not quite the same as "only for profit" but it's close. People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
>People under capitalism don't all think of it that way, but unfortunately the humans aren't in charge. The logic of capitalism, is.
What you are saying is that if people are told that meaning of life = make money, then they will do so, with little or no compassion for their fellow humans?
( it's not a rhetorical question, so please answer)
No, I'm not saying that at all. People have agency and will act according to various factors including what they perceive as their material interest but also cultural factors such as morality and upbringing, etc. I do think that the incentives established by the relations of production on the economic side of things, will tend to dominate over cultural values most (but not all) of the time. Base and superstructure stuff, in other words.
But all I was getting at with my comment is that we can't even be said to be ruled by capitalists, I don't think. Our government acts at the behest of capital not capitalists, and our society is shaped by that as well. All our institutions are bent toward it. It may seem like a trivial distinction but it means that people - even capitalists - who for whatever reason act against the interests of capital accumulation, will find their influence wane and eventually wink out of existence. They'll be pushed out. As such we're ruled by capital i.e. "the humans aren't in charge."
Fair enough an explanation. But then it begets the question what do you mean by socialism and capitalism?
My original understanding socialism = mostly control by government. ( which is a perverted version of 'let's co-operate as a society', and since that does not quite work it's need a central authority to force co-operation). Nearly all business end up be controlled by the state.
Capitalism = Govt. should not involve itself in ordinary and other activities such as enterprises, businesses of citizen, except when there is direct harm, like stealing, murder etc. Or so this was the original definition.
Note: I realize that neither is perfect, and that there can be nuances and different definitions. What's yours?
The defining feature of capitalism (for a Marxist, anyway) is the private ownership, control, and accumulation of capital goods. In practice this tends to mean that productive capacity becomes centralized, and as a consequence most people exercise no control over what we do with accumulated capital as a society: they merely sell their labor / time for a wage. Also since productive forces are more centralized, productive relations tend to become more socialized as well (the difference between working the land as a peasant in an economy with low development, vs working in a factory as a laborer in an economy with higher development).
Note that the centralization and socialization of production is regarded as a good thing here. You get greater economies of scale and thus greater productive capacity when this happens. This is why Marxists view capitalism as a progressive historical development - we just don't fixate on it as though it's the pinnacle of human productive relations or the "final step" or something like that.
The main problem with capitalism comes when you have a great degree of centralization and control at which point the profit motive inherent in capitalism tends to produce a ton of rent-seeking behavior which drags the economy down and makes further progress difficult or impossible. I would argue that in most industries we reached this point decades ago, or even a century ago in some cases. Tech is a notable exception, though we're reaching the point there as well.
This is the point at which reformists will say "well you just need to break up monopolies" but it's like I said: social, cultural, and government institutions tend to bend toward the economic paradigm more than the other way around. The economic base tends to influence the societal superstructure more than the other way around. This is mostly because, day-to-day, people are more focused on their material needs than they are on ideology and culture. So, our government is much more reluctant than it should be to break up monopolies, our media is dominated by capital interests (to control public opinion in favor of capital interests) and so on. Idealists will insist we're "not doing capitalism right" or something but that argument is not persuasive if the long-term result of doing capitalism "right" is that you eventually stop doing it "right" as government and culture bends toward capital interests - which seems inevitable.
And, anyway, remember that the centralization of productive capacity and control is a good thing. It is more efficient, at least until the rent-seeking behavior starts to assert itself and drags the economy down. So breaking up monopolies is kind of a regressive course of action. It would be nice if we could have highly-developed productive forces with a great degree of specialization and centralization, etc., but without the rent-seeking behavior. In order for that to happen you need to keep the accumulation of capital but get rid of the profit motive - or at least remove it as the primary driver of economic activity. Marxists identify the working class as the only class that has the correct incentives to make this happen: capitalists won't do it because they won't benefit from it personally and in fact stand to lose out personally if it happens.
And then, from there you have 150+ years of history of trying to figure out the best way to do that, usually in the face of violent reprisals from capital interests. A history filled with success and failure and lessons learned. A history I'm not going to get into here because I've already typed a massive wall of text and need to get back to work - I'll just say that IMO China has done a lot of good work in this regard but they still have a long way to go.
Judging by your first paragraph, I suspect (but 'm not sure) you did not get the spirit in which capitalism was defined. (or the way I think it was defined) i.e free enterprise. As far as the long term outcome is concerned your are essentially correct.
To the extent I have read about the term capitalism, one area is almost completely ignored - private land ownership as 'birth' right. ( a subject in its own right)
It's a larger discussion though - both so called capitalism and socialism as normally characterized misses many fundamentals of human life, but has huge appeal for the simplistic minded economists, philosophers and masses alike. When you get the fundamentals wrong, sooner or later things turn sour. And my firm belief is that one cannot get the fundamentals right with an IQ of 100 except for tiny groups of people, say less than 150.
I don't know if he still takes that approach. In fact, I kind of doubt he ever really did, but he certainly projected that image publicly, and most importantly to workers of those companies - whether he "really believed" it I guess is a moot point.
When you take the "businesses exist to return a profit to shareholders" approach you're always going to focus on leadership that has a track record of doing that, even if that excludes building a good product or for that matter even the long-term viability of the business. Thus, you see these CEO hires that don't seem to make sense - most of us unconsciously still think of businesses as things created to make a thing or do a specific thing, because that's a natural thing to believe.
Anyway I think you can attribute some of the success of both to this, as well as Musk's public image at least ca 2008-2018 or so.