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cbozeman

Peter Thiel once said, "Never bet against Elon Musk."

Elon said he was going to build a private space launch company. He did.

Elon said he was going to build an electric car company. He did.

Elon said he was going to build a $35,000 electric car for the masses. He did.

Elon said he was going to build a worldwide satellite constellation for Internet access. He is. Rapidly.

Everything Elon has said he was going to do, he has. He hasn't always done it at the speed at which he said he would, but he does always get it done.

He (meaning his team / company) will eventually develop a fully self-driving car. No, it may not occur at the pace at which he proclaimed, but I have confidence it'll occur.

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> Everything Elon has said he was going to do, he has.

True, as long as this excludes everything he still says he is going to do but hasn't yet done. But of course, he will.

He has accomplished everything he said he would do, except the ones he hasn’t yet.

So if he ever doesn’t accomplish something we’ll never know because maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.

He also said they would have a solar roof as cheap as a normal roof and that the new roadster would hover with rocket engines. Let’s see if that happens.

> He has accomplished everything he said he would do, except the ones he hasn’t yet.

That is true for absolutely everyone in the world.

That’s the point.

That's an excellent point! Too bad I initially missed that.

Name one of those projects that didn't take in huge amounts of money from the government? He did those things because they were initiatives of the US federal government (including autonomous cars, see DARPA challenge).

Thank uncle sam for putting in the effort to create the markets that Elon plays in.

And that's a bad thing because...?

The Federal Government has consistently funded some of our most important projects. The Human Genome Project, for instance.

It's not a bad thing. The bad thing is the myth of the genius of Musk.

I absolutely believe he's a genius, just not in the way of Einstein or Tesla. He's a genius at assembling people in order to execute a vision, and when I say genius, I don't mean the layperson's definition of "really smart", I really do mean that whatever qualities combine in a person to allow them to convince hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people to follow them and help them build their vision, Musk is a genius-level intellect in that capacity.

He's not unlike Steve Jobs. They both possessed enough knowledge and technical acumen to understand what they're being told about disparate subjects, but they may not have the in-depth knowledge that a Jim Keller would. And despite my enormous respect for Keller, he's not an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs. Jim's a craftsman at heart, and that comes through in interviews with him. Musk and Jobs are true visionaries.

Your description is not of a genius but more a "commercial community organizer" who organizes people and then negotiates between a company looking for cost reductions and State&Federal Governments to subsidize.

This is not genius-level but is the blending of two skills, a charismatic Administator, who can temporarily suspend disbelief, and a Fundraiser. Each of those takes a ton of work. I'm not minimizing Musk's dilligence in any way, but there are lots of people who can do those activities at high levels. The difference is that most people can't survive their tweeting SEC violations while stoned.

Most of the things he has accomplished have been accomplished before. I'm not saying it's easy and he doesn't deserve respect for it. But it's not like he's constantly achieving unprecedented things. Full self-driving cars, Hyperloop, Neuralink, people on Mars are just pipe dreams so far. And that wouldn't be a problem if he simply didn't claim for 5 years that FSD will definitely be ready next year and let customers pay for it and test it on public roads.

Ok, I'll bite.

Tesla will never achieve safe, certified level 5 autonomous self driving with the current generation of vehicles, without either a fuckton more CPU power or better sensors(as in some proper high res depth sensors).

On this I will bet. Come back at me in 5 years. He'll either have to bite his pride and put some sort of re-branded lidar on, or some decent stereo camera rigs.

You know there are many promises he made that haven't come to fruition? Remember Hyperloop? Interplanetary travel? Neuralink?

His achievements are remarkable but that doesn't mean that he should be treated like an infallible demi-god. Yes he's done some really cool stuff but that doesn't mean he should not be the subject of scrutiny.

Neuralink's being actively developed right now.

Hyperloop was an idea and nothing more. He never said he was personally committed to developing that, hence third-parties working on it.

Interplanetary travel? Starship is actively going through testing and looks like it should be ready for moon launches around 2023, which is in two more years.

I don't consider him infallible, or a demi-god, but its hard not to admire the sheer work ethic of this man. He's legitimately trying, and by all accounts of people who know him, he's actively working on all these projects and also making considerable stride towards these goals. These are not easily achieved tasks.

I admire the work he does. But he oversells. FSD is one example. He has been promising it for half a decade and people have paid him substantial amount of money for a feature that he'll likely never deliver as he describes and certainly not on the time-line he promised. At the same time he is putting dangerously incomplete software out on public roads and marketing it as FSD when it's clearly not. It's endangering not only his own customers but also everyone around a Tesla on the public roads. If that's not unethical, I don't know what is.

He promised Earth point to point travel, which would require rocket safety to improve by a factor of a million.

He has been promising ridiculous things from Neuralink but with literally nothing to show for it.

Look at this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/88805317515594957...

Does that really indicate no personal commitment? He touts that he's received government permission to build a Hyperloop, NY to DC in 29 mins.

To be fair though, iterative is usually the way to go.

We didn't get to the safety levels that airliners currently have by sitting down with books and, we got there by having the NTSB thoroughly analyze each incident.

Humans are terrible drivers, so each day we delay the transition to self-driving also costs lives, it's just that human traffic fatalities are less visible since society generally accepts that level of death.

> Hyperloop was an idea and nothing more. He never said he was personally committed to developing that, hence third-parties working on it.

It's not even his idea, Robert Goddard came up with it decades ago.

He also threw money into it, and then backed out, saying he was too busy.

And now he's tweeting about applying for and obtaining permission to build on the East Coast.

So, there's several issues there. Not to mention the more general issue - that it offers the same benefit as Maglev with massively inflated costs and far less comfortable passenger experience.

>Remember Hyperloop? Interplanetary travel? Neuralink?

All of these are still in progress/development in various ways. I don't remember him ever saying they were complete (or even over with).

He's definitely described autonomous driving as a solved problem. Does that count as "complete?" I don't know what happened with solarcity, but I thought I heard it's done poorly too.

What do you mean by "promises"?

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