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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

While there obviously has been innovation over the last 40 years, the pace of innovation seems to have slowed.

We got lots of dubious things like bitcoin and twitter. Not a lot of things that required real world risk and engineering - maybe because that's a harder way to make money and the low hanging fruit has been picked.

That's what makes Elon Musk so interesting, he tackled two incredibly hard real engineering challenges and succeeded wildly at both. He changed the world and brought the future closer. That's impressive. I wish there were more entrepreneurs like him.

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In my opinion the perception that the pace of innovation has slowed down is the result of a shift away from the physical to the digital. For the last 25 years or so there have been massive innovations in software. A lot of things that were once largely locked to the physical world (banking, diverse entertainment, catching up with old friends and acquaintances) have now been digitized and implemented at a massive scale. It's great and all, but it's not the same as something you can reach out and touch. Even considering something like Neuralink, the hardware to sense brain signals needs to be there before the software can do anything. Innovation in the physical world is what makes things feel like we're living in the future.

There was an article about this that I read years ago that goes into much more depth about this, but I'm having a hard time finding it. If I remember correctly it discussed the job opportunities of people in post world war 2 era, and that many of the (feelings of) innovations were a result of the booming material sciences in response to the cold war, though I'm likely mis-remembering some details.

Elon is willing to go wildly unprofitable, which allows him to be a few years ahead of everyone else on the natural tech. curve. That’s literally all there is to it.

I strongly disagree, if you look at either SpaceX or Tesla, what they've accomplished is far more than a simple willingness to lose money for a number of years while developing the business. Also, that's not how you use the word literally.

Second definition from MW: literally: used to emphasize the truth and accuracy of a statement or description

This so incredibly wrong and un-informed its mind blowing.

SpaceX has been profitable from pretty early on in its history and were until they need massive cash for the Starlink project.

Tesla is a attempting to get into a very, very capital intensive industry and during the early growth and again in 2017 they had to be less un-profitable. But the companies consistently showed that if it stopped growing it could be profitable.

The idea that it literally all there is to it is insane. Pretty much every startup is willing to make loses for growth, it happens literally all the time.

This is simply empirically wrong.

Musk’s companies continuously raise funds, even SpaceX. Spending money in order to grow is easy, and not necessary given sufficient profitability. Look at Apple, Amazon etc. for examples of successful transitions to profitable hypergrowth.

Startups who spend money to grow eventually make it, or die. Musk’s self-promotion, combined with a low interest rate environment, has allowed him to continuously raise enough money to stay in a zombie state, neither dead, nor profitable: only spending.

SpaceX: 39 total funding rounds (missed a few): 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 (4x), 2020 (x2), 2021

Tesla: 35 total funding rounds (missed a few): 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 (3x), 2014, 2015, 2016 (2x), 2017 (4x), 2019, 2020 (2x)

Both companies are profitable. This is simply a lack of understanding of business and accounting. Both companies are re-investing all of their profit in massive capital expenditures to support business growth - that's not a money losing endeavour, that's the same strategy that made Amazon into the behemoth it is today. It's also the logical strategy if you have a long time horizon for investment - which is arguably much better than companies which have short-time horizons.

You are crazy if you think Tesla margins are different than other automakers.

They do the exact same thing, and building cars is the worst business there is.

Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.

> You are crazy if you think Tesla margins are different than other automakers.

Tesla's margin's are about triple Ford's margins over the last decade. That can't last, but it's far from the worst business there is.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/profi...

> Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.

Tesla stock is wildly over-valued in my opinion. Even if everything goes fantastically for the company it may not grow into its own stock price. I would like like to short the stock, among others, to hedge my long positions.

I still believe the company will be a success though - just not as quickly as the market seems to think.

Point being. Will all Musk bootlickers be around when Tesla "succeeds" but is a paltry 87 billion dollar automaker company and Musk goes way down in the Forbes list?

My guess is no. People want to talk about success and success is measured with marketcap and net worth. 99% of people who know Musk name have really no business knowing his name and care very little about electric vehicles.

My guess he also can't handle going back to 2014 levels of social relevancy and will try and run for governor or some other thing like that.

Musk is fundamentally an attention whore, he pumped the marketcap before the company was mature, it's not like Tesla marketcap grew spontaneusly.

This is you: http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

Entrepreneurs aren't rockstars or popstars

Nobody loves/hates Sergey Brin, Lawrance Page, Jim Simons, John Overdeck, Clifford Assness, Andrew Beal etc...

If you worked in the promotional industry you'd know that rockstars/popstars have to be dragged kicking and screaming , away from drugs and parties, to do interviews and media appearences.

Entrepreneurs who want to be famous such as Musk and Trump...nobody is dragging them, they are the ones who want to do it.

As per the article, master promoters, because they know their business is not capable of making it on their own merits.

I remind you that Microsoft never ever took VC money, just organic growth and re-investing revenues. People who do it the proper way don't need the flashes, quite the contrary they are busy hiding their margins to avoid other people getting in the space.

They continuously raise funds not because the product they sell are losing money because they are making money and they want to make more of them.

How is this hard to understand I don't understand.

Go and compare Amazon and Tesla in terms of time since IPO if you want to claim Amazon of example of a good company.

Also, much of the money Tesla raised in the last couple of years is not actually spend, but rather is part of the cash balance of the company.

Also the argument that 'his companies are not as successful as the two most successful companies in the world today' is complaining on a pretty absurd level.

When was the last time you got lost and couldn’t navigate your way to safety?

For all of human history “getting lost” was one of the most prominent plot devices in all of art and we literally solved that within what, the past 10 years?

I think the true problem is that innovations went from solving sensory discomfort (I can’t see in the dark, this chamber pot smells bad) to preventing problems we don’t have yet.

"incredibly hard real engineering challenges" like building a battery powered car?

A random list of real world innovations I can think of which are imo more impressive:

- Large Hadron Collider

- Multicompter. Had you expected 40 years ago the posibilities and commonness of camera drones or having hundreds of multicompter doing light shows?

- you mention dubious inovations in software world but why dismiss the hardware development. Chips smaller than what people 40 years ago thought is physically possible, stacking chips onto each other, quantum computer, filling hard drives with helium to make them more dense (something many people where skeptial about when it first came up), using heat to make hard drives store even more data, e-ink displays

- jetpacks

- improvements in robotics (most popular Boston Dynamics)

- nuclear fusion

- most recently: flying a helicopter on another planet

- maglev trains (but that kind of strech the 40 years range)

- mRNA-vaccins

- or e-bikes. Electic cars are revolutionary why not electric bicycles or planes. They are far from finished but solar powered planes exist. Is such a plane and the people working on it so much less impressive?

You are vastly underestimating how hard it is to build an electric car that people want to buy. Tesla very likely accelerated the adoption of electric cars by at least a decade.

There are, but you need to remove personal cult from the filter. Musk did not design the rockets or come up with the idea of electric car - he cleverly positions himself as the technology guru running whole factories with his own hands but in fact it's a massive effort to hide the names of people who created his products and avoid giving them any credit.

> he cleverly positions himself as the technology guru running whole factories with his own hands but in fact it's a massive effort to hide the names of people who created his products and avoid giving them any credit.

Musk is quick to give credit to his employees if you've actually heard him talk. Also I in no way men to imply that he did anything single handed.

>Musk is quick to give credit to his employees

to whom, for example? And it's true i dont listen to his talks, maybe i missed important details.

Why are so quick to judge someone you don't know anything about?

I don't judge, just state the fact that he will not let any of his employees take even smallest piece of the show. Everything is about Elon Musk and only him, no one else is allowed to speak or show any achievement - anonymous bunch of idiots who can't even run factory without Musk showing everyone how to do their job. And they would apparently be nothing without the self proclaimed genius. Sorry I thought it only happens in North Korea but I was wrong.

> it's true i dont listen to his talks

So you admit you don't know what you're taking about. Then you say the don't judge and then proceed to do exactly that.

This is you: http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

We have some uninformed judgment here, don't you think? Btw I have heard enough of Musk talk to know what's on the show. Don't need to listen to it anymore.

Apparently not, because you don't know that he gives credit to his employees. You also say he calls himself a genius, but I've never heard him say that - although technically he may well be. Certainly he's well above average intelligence to teach himself rocket science.

You have this opinion of him in your head and you're just trying to say that's the real Elon Musk. But it's not, and you haven't actually seen enough of him to know that. It's a strong opinion held in ignorance - which is something the world could use less of.

That's true i haven't seen him give credit to anyone but himself. We can agree here that he's a master of self promotion.

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