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Comment by navigatesol | Hacker News Reader

>but Musk’s companies are likely to be the biggest human decentralizing force in history.

Are you completely unaware that Musk and his family are being sued for self-dealing and fraud? Are you not paying attention to what's happening to cash bleeding companies?

>the solar roofs

The solar roofs that the CFO at the time they were demonstrated publicly didn't think were real, or that the global sales manager for Tesla energy didn't know if they sold a single one during his tenure? Those are changing the world?

SpaceX can't go to Mars. Teslas don't drive themselves. The Solar Roof doesn't exist. Starlink has yet to prove viable. Neuralink and The Boring Company are jokes. These are money-burning "ideas" to get to the next funding round.

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It's easy to be a nay-sayer, when the subject of your criticism is taking on long-term difficult problems.

I wonder whether, four years ago, you'd have written "SpaceX can't land or reuse rockets - that's a pipe dream"? Or more recently "Tesla is a basket-case that can't return a profit and will go bust"?

* SpaceX can't go to Mars... yet; but that's really hard, so they're working on it and are closer to it than anyone else

* Teslas don't drive themselves yet; but that's really hard, so they're working on it and are showing constant improvements to their software in pursuit of that end

* Solar Roof v3 probably does exist, and might be a viable product - let's see

* Starlink has yet to be in a position to be proven viable; but that's a question of time

No doubt Musk over-promises and under-delivers (to the extent that it's a meme at this point) but he has already delivered hugely in some areas, and I suspect he'll prove you wrong time and time again over coming years.

Waymo and others appear to be far ahead of Tesla in the self driving realm.

Indeed; once again, Musk is making it hard in the shorter-term for himself/Tesla by going a route based on a totally different vision (i.e. eschewing LIDAR) to the rest of the industry.

Time will tell whether he'll win out in the long term; will this be another landing and reusing rockets moment, or will his approach to self-driving cars be a relative failure?

Seeing as he has to know that the cost of Lidar will continue to fall precipitously, I have to believe the only reason he is actually going all in on cameras only is because he has to be able to continue selling the fantasy that the Tesla you buy today will be fully autonomous with nothing more than a software update.

Tesla and SpaceX are already both massive successes at this point, which wouldn't change even if they both disappeared tomorrow. They've already proven themselves.

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