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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Musk seems to enjoy making promises about all kinds of fantasy transport, promising orders of magnitude cost reduction from already mature technologies like tunneling, rocketry, or high-speed rail. These promises meet with very little skepticism here.

Pan Am once offered tickets to the Moon.

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It would be different if this was coming from the mouth of the Comcast CEO but it's coming from Musk who has a series of successful achievements of his own, a profitable space company with the worlds first re-usable rockets, the first company to successfuly market an electric car, fastest growing battery storage solution on the market. These things matter.

They do, but the crux of every Musk fantasy is a radical drop in the cost of these things, a promise he has never delivered on.

Roadster: 110k

Model S: 70k

Model 3: 35k

The Roadster, Model S, and Model 3 aren't the same car.

Tesla Roof is cheaper than many traditional roofing materials and provides solar. See the chart here. [1]

Air Force launches with SpaceX are less than half the price of ULA launches. [2]

Can you clarify how you believe Musk's companies haven't delivered?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-10/tesla-s-s...

[2] https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/16/us-air-force-spacex-ula-...

To be fair, you couldn't get a solar roof delivered in the next month like you could a traditional one.

From their site "Initial trial installations are complete and undergoing evaluation, customer installations are about to start and will ramp up through 2017."

https://www.tesla.com/solarroof

Seems like it needs an update, 2017 is almost over...

They have not delivered "orders of magnitude cost reduction from already mature technologies", which is what I said in my parent comment. They've instead made (valuable!) incremental advances, usually by relying on immense government subsidies.

What immense government subsidies did Tesla and SpaceX rely on? Tesla got a loan it paid back early and a $7k tax rebate per car for the first 200k cars which other car companies also got. SpaceX got a contract to build a rocket and capsule NASA wants to use, for a fraction of the price Boeing and Lockheed charge for same job.

"A $7k tax rebate per car for the first 200k cars" is a $1.4B government subsidy.

"usually by relying on immense government subsidies" makes one think that Boeing and GM failed to do the engineering work that SpaceX and Tesla had done because they were somehow barred from some kind of government subsidy.

But of course, the opposite is true: Being, Lockheed, GM, Ford, etc. enjoy a lot of help from the government (money and regulation) and use a bunch of dirty tactics against Musk's companies. And despite this, SpaceX and Tesla did things the incumbents were incapable of doing. In some cases things that were said to be impossible rather than just uneconomical.

I think at least the "usually" in your post is unwarranted.

Delta IV Heavy: ~450 million

Falcon 9: ~100 million

Those are great achievements but still nowhere close to the grandiosity of his vision. I appreciate that he is an accomplished person and CEO but that doesn't mean he's going to colonize Mars and give us instant transport between any two cities on Earth.

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