Is his stuff really that good? I can't shake the feeling that he has a strong tendency to exaggerate.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...
He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.
He's also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.
I don't see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he has delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.
But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot's of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.
I guess it depends what you choose to focus on.
Even then, effective marketing are often lies, so why value effective marketing? Effective management is so often toxic, so why value effective management? As far as I can tell, he's full of BS and his employees are treated poorly, so I really don't care so much that he's first to market.
This is the sort extreme polarised view I was referring to. All I can say is NASA doesn't agree with you on this.
The problem is, if you go straight to "he's full of BS" it just kills all sensible debate. He's clearly not full of BS. He's delivering astronauts to the Space Station via his "startup". This is not something someone "full of BS" achieves.
I'm not saying every single thing he says is BS, like he's going around saying the sky is green and up is down. Just that he says a whole lot of shit that isn't true also.
Great! What are the margins? Most likely terrible because you have to build real stuff.
You know who ISN'T full of bullshit? Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.
They just STFU, present modest outlook to set the stage for the company to knock it out of the park Quarter after quarter.
I could care less about the rockets, the truth is in the boring numbers, not the showmanship
It's the Steve Jobs approach.
On Twitter people on the left claim vaguely that Elon is bad and why is SNL doing this etc.
People on the right say Elon is great and SNL is normally unfunny.
In the former case I think it’s just because people associate Elon with the right for some reason.
The latter is easier to understand since a lot of SNL’s humor is explicitly political (not in a bad way imo).
Part of me wonders if the irreverent tweets were an intentional way to broaden his appeal. He needed EVs to go from “liberal” Prius symbols about the environment to cool.
That’s a Herculean task when you think about it. Even now there are still coal rolling truck drivers yelling at EVs, but the sentiment has definitely changed in a positive way.
He did this without having to embrace trump (unlike Thiel for instance).
I think his biggest miss was on covid, but he seems to agree that he was wrong.
I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.
Putting all this aside and looking at what he’s building - it’s an exciting time to be alive. Most companies are fairly dull doing fairly dull things. Elon takes huge risks to try to pull the future down earlier. For the most part, he succeeds.
Among the political commentariat on the left, this kind of person is a Neanderthal that should be relegated to the dustbin of history.
For a lot of people on the outside of that demographic, he's just a fun, brilliant, if occasionally douchy guy who's way less out of touch than his billionaire contemporaries, and actually works to build neat things.
Yeah - this is basically my take, and stated better than I did in my comment.
In contemporary culture, that is enough to be considered right wing. Neutrality slowly ceased to be an option.
He IS an easy enemy in this regard, not only to the left. All his (mis)behaviour, naming his child like that, manipulating currency rates through tweets, that's not exactly what average people could afford. If he didn't fit this stereotype of billionaire, I'm sure he would be liked more.
Even so I just don’t think these things are a big deal? I also don’t agree with the anti-billionaire/anti-capitalist sentiment though.
It’s just odd to me given how much he’s done to aid the transition to EVs and renewable energy. I guess it’s not a huge surprise, people are wildly inconsistent around tribal issues.
I've got bad news for you. There is no secret plan that explains the irrational behavior.
Also Elon’s behavior isn’t that serious (and he’s not POTUS).
They've had a chance to do a clean sheet rethinking of cars, and it works wonderfully well. If you have your phone on you, you just walk up to the car and the door is unlocked and on by the time you touch it. There's no "start" button, you just press the brake, push the mode stalk to drive or reverse, and go. When you walk away, the car locks itself silently and turns off. Depending on whose key it depends, the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors are adjusted by the time you sit down.
There's no "idling" to keep the AC on, so there's no guilt about doing it. They've recently added a very efficient heat pump that shares loops with the battery so the heat doesn't drain much, either. We spent an hour in the car with AC on recently, it used about 1 mile of range.
I thought I'd hate the touchscreen controls, but what I didn't realize was that you generally don't need to use them while driving. Wipers and climate are automatic and work well, so there's no real need to adjust them. The voice control is incredibly good, and seems to have access to almost every non-driving setting. Press a button on the steering wheel, and speak "Set wipers to auto", "I'm cold", "Play Spanish Moon by Little Feat", "Navigate home". They all work as you'd expect.
Jury is still out on "autopilot", lane following and dynamic cruise control are fine, but the onscreen world representation (cars, especially) is very jittery. I guess not too surprising, it's a DNN making guesses about the state of the world, but I'm surprised there's not a more persistent context vector between states. If it's very sure about a car being there in frames 1-10, it should really not expect that car to just blip out of existence in frame 11.
But overall, I'm extremely impressed, and I think I'll have a hard time going back to cars by traditional automakers. The impression is of a holistic design that's extremely well integrated, rather than the impression of a hodge podge of poorly integrated new and old systems that I've gotten with any car with an "infotainment" system that I've ever used.
Definitely one of the most disappointing features of the car, which I generally love driving.
If Tesla will 'forget' to tell you that a feature is removed, or changed, then expect similar behavior around edge conditions for FSD if it ever materializes. For example, a number of different protocols could be added, tried, removed revolving around contention at 4-way stop signs. If the update notes are silent on FSD adopted behavior, a lot of annoyance and potential hazards will be created.
The rest of the car industry is starting to get a clue and catch up, but the Model S had no comparable competition when it came out. It wasn’t like trading a few dollars or features for a Lexus vs. the same class of Mercedes, the Model S created its own class.
And SpaceX is the same story. It vastly changed the space launch landscape, and isn’t done yet. Falcon 9 has no real competition until Vulcan has a successful launch. Falcon Heavy’s only competition is Delta IV Heavy, which is at the end of its life and all remaining launches are booked. Starship and Super Heavy could maybe be compared to SLS, but that’s kind of insulting when you consider the budget and track record of both programs.
I guess my point is that while Elon does over-promise and doesn’t have a perfect hit rate, the main products have still really embarrassed the established players in each industry.
It makes him miss sometimes, but it also is the reason SpaceX is where it is and they can turn around a rocket insanely quickly.
He sets crazy goals and even their “failures” are still 10x better than the rest of the market.
His plan for the company’s future is clear. The roadster -> S -> 3 worked, building out the charger network worked, the other vehicles and best-in-class software were really a bonus.
During all of this the competition and the press ranged from ignoring them to directly hostile.
People complained about why charging was less viable than gas for years, Tesla built out the charging network and fixed it.
Dealerships in the US fought for their rent seeking protections and local power - tesla fought them and won.
I think when nearly everyone is driving an EV within the next 20 years, people will look back on that NYT story where they intentionally killed the battery so they could have a cover story of a model S on a tow truck and will recognize it for what it was.
Musk makes Jobs and Gates look like under-achievers.
The staff at Spacex impress the hell out of me. Likewise at Apple. Sure, Jobs, Musk, et al are catelising figures, but please ...
I don't know how many people have this skill, and you first require to have a ton of capital at hand to make use of it, but of the people in the world who have that capital this skill seems rather rare.
The leaders at the top of these companies get way too much credit for "having the vision". The vision too mostly likely came from many individuals who are not in the limelight and don't have the connections nor the cash.
Musk otherwise comes across as vulgar and insecure.
Look, we all know Musk and other CEOs didn’t invent these products/ideas on their own but storytelling is a big part of leadership.
> Tesla cars -- truly helping humanity move from fossil fuels
It would be much more effective to use bicycle and trains wherever possible, and drive small cars otherwise. But wait ... that's not luxurious enough. Saving the world is just an excuse for cool cars.
> and now StarLink
... to make the last corner of the world addicted to the internet and pay money to Musk.
The development costs for Falcon 9 v1.0 were approximately US$300 million, and NASA verified those costs. If some of the Falcon 1 development costs were included, since F1 development did contribute to Falcon 9 to some extent, then the total might be considered as high as US$390 million.[14][2]
NASA also evaluated Falcon 9 development costs using the NASA‐Air Force Cost Model (NAFCOM)—a traditional cost-plus contract approach for US civilian and military space procurement—at US$$3.6 billion based on a NASA environment/culture, or US$$1.6 billion using a more commercial approach.[15][14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.0
Cited from https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Section403(b)...
Most space startups died without ever reaching orbit. One of the reasons why SpaceX has such a reputation is precisely that it stands so far apart from its competition.
We'd be waiting another 10 years for what we have today.
Thats just plain wrong
I mean...it's hard to prove a negative, but just to mention one of the tens of critical moments along the way, I have a hard time seeing how someone less ruthless than Musk would have saved them from bankruptcy in 2008.
Another obvious juncture was the whole thing about building a battery factory costing more than the company's market cap a few years prior, doubling the world's battery production capacity...
Musk simply led all funding rounds up to series C, was employee number 4, chairman of the board and took an extremely active role in the company before becoming the CEO. He and the first five employees are "co-founders" agreed to in court by Eberhard which is the one of the guys you are talking about.
A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.#The_beg...
I absolutely agree he has been instrumental to Tesla’s success since he joined as employee number 4 and then took over, but he didn’t start the company and the statement that nobody was interested in or working on electric cars is factually untrue though nobody else managed to bring them to the mass market before Musk.
Do you think Tesla would be where it's at today if Musk didn't get involved? How many times did Tesla almost die?
If you need to me to clarify it: the scale and rate of progress in EV was severely accelerated by Tesla. ICE auto companies had no incentive to develop electric. The space was unprofitable, had many technical challenges.
At least Biden seems to be a supporter of the railway. But it could go faster if you'd build tracks instead of tunnels with Teslas.
Maybe those wouldn't have been possible for someone lacking the confidence/exaggeration of Elon Musk at the helm of the companies.
[0] "The average cost per launch was about $1.2 billion (in 2010 dollars) during the shuttle's operational years from 1982 to 2010." https://www.space.com/11358-nasa-space-shuttle-program-cost-...
Meanwhile, SpaceX is actually landing the rocket in upright position. No salt water dip. The whole rocket is so cheap and procedure is so normalized that by this point, most people have lost count as to how many flights a given F9 first stage already had. I think they've already flown at least one booster 6 times. This is how true reusability looks like - saving money, increasing cadence, and well on its way towards the ultimate goal: being able to land a rocket, refuel it, and launch it again, all within couple hours at most.
You are also comparing amortized program cost of space shuttle and not final marginal cost (around $450million per launch at 7 astronaut capacity and higher payload capacity).
Prior to advent of Falcon 9 Block 5, people would automatically associate "big rockets" with "extremely expensive".