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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

WTF.

Criticism regarding Teslas prospects, cash flow and viability as a company may all be valid.

But the ridiculous animation and the live cash counter immediately take all credibility away for me. What credible news source would present a financial news article in this way?

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I agree that the counter makes no sense. There's just no way to put it into any perspective other than "that's a lot of money for me as a person". The graphics I thought was witty though. Lets face it, Musk does a lot of publicity stunts like selling 20 000 flamethrowers, and using them in the graphics I thought was rather witty. That said, I just don't know what to make of Tesla. The deposits schemes, financials etc, I just can't make my mind up if it is doing good or bad. On the other hand, a cult of personality that worships a guy building rockets, electric vehicles and so on seems preferable to many of the other celebrity cults around today. Lets hope a lot of people don't lose a bunch of money on it, I guess.

This is obviously jazzy infographic to entice people into reading boring stuff like prospects, cash flow and viability.

But, they sometimes provide good information too. For example Tesla Model 3 Tracker:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

The same sources that often do crappy infographics and poor data displays. (And headlines that verge on or are misleading.) There are a lot of incentives for people who aren't the reporter to spice up the presentation.

I agree with you in this case though. The cutesy animation is 1.) a bridge too far and 2.) even the numbers themselves don't add any intuitive sense. Knowing how much money a company is burning per minute doesn't tell me anything until I multiply it out to a quarter or a year.

Goofy splash graphics are Bloomberg.com's style:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-08/inside-ju...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hampton-creek-just-m...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-co...

They also had one of the best 404 pages, which I would use as an example when teaching HTTP responses (how a server could still serve what seems like a normal page even as its status code was a 404). Sadly, it's now gone, but Internet Archive has a snapshot:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150202030918/http://www.bloombe...

Sadly, are thier any credible news sources left? With respects to Bloomberg, there are many articles by 'experts' whom are nothing more than FUD spreading shills by larger corps, seen it many times. I suspect this is one of them.

I think these articles are the work of their PR. Because they want to paint what they are trying to do to be Impossible.

Even though this might be common knowledge, Elon Musk wants to inspire blind belief aka create a reality distortion field around him. For this, continuously emphasizing the impossibility of what they are trying to achieve is very important..

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