When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Is | Hacker News Reader

When I First Saw Elon Musk for Who He Is

slate.com

24 pointsIdEntities13 comments

The whole Musk charade seems to be starting to crumble. Personally when I see folks driving teslas I can't divorce it from my image of him, and I end up having a negative opinion of that tesla driver I don't even know (why would they follow / prop up this guy?). I suspect tesla may go the way of facebook... One generation loved it, but for young people they run the other way.

Sad part is that tesla has some of the smartest, most hardworking engineers in the industry... absolutely top-notch. But, the reason they chose that job was due to a belief in the mission, of doing good in this world. I can't help but think those people are having second thoughts about working at tesla now that people are starting to recognize Musk actually is a bad smell.

Musk only appeals to people who are looking for hope.

If your life is going great or you can find source of hope in either music, your sports team, your future projects, religion, your love life etc. then he has nothing on you.

The degree of cult that he managed to ammass is telling that people are desperate for hope and can't find it in the usual sources, so they resort to techo-utopian politics

The fact that Musk doesn't promote or even allow non-Tesla owners to charge electric vehicles at Supercharging stations demonstrates his tendency for monopolization, at the expense of mass electric vehicle adoption rates. Musk would sooner see his employees living and dying on Mars than fix carbon emissions on Earth.

> Musk doesn't promote or even allow non-Tesla owners to charge electric vehicles at Supercharging stations

That's changing slowly:

https://electrek.co/2022/05/18/tesla-expands-supercharger-pi...

But it has been hypocritical for Tesla to claim that its mission is to "accelerate the advent of sustainable transport" while also blocking other EVs from its chargers.

The next thing Tesla has to do is put CCS plugs on its North American chargers (the European ones already have CCS type 2 combo plugs):

https://insideevs.com/news/585238/elon-musk-ccs1-plugs-comin...

And then Tesla might as well put CCS inlets on its North American cars. The European Teslas can use any charger on any charging network with no need for an adapter (Model 3 and Y anyway, S and X are still stuck with the old modified type 2 inlet and use an adapter).

Given that a 5minute charger might/will kill people if misused, battery swapping might be the only option that satisfies long haul driving. It’s possible material science will deliver an 8hr freeway battery, but that might require room temp superconductors or some other to-discover technology.

Drive up, swap, drive away while the battery is then charged in the 30-60 min super charger. Might also reduce the problem of all those chargers and power infrastructure yet to build out.

IIRC that’s exactly the approach China is taking. It seems very sensible. The only immediate downside that I can see is that it eliminates the “skateboard deck” advantages of a stiffer, but lighter, design. The immediate upside, otoh, is that a failing battery pack no longer requires a big servicing job; indeed, no battery pack should ever reach a failure point while in the car, because it’ll be detected during a recharge cycle.

Tesla doesn't spend money on marketing because Elon/his Twitter/his antics are the marketing. Not sure why you'd trust him at face value to begin with. He's not your friend, he's a door-to-door electric vacuum salesman trying to sell his wares.

He's also doesn't really know how to stay in his lane.

All the right people are condemning Musk; makes me like him more.

He is essentially Trump, except DJT had the guts to stand to China, alebit in a chaotic and messy way.

Musk wants to be a wrestling star with a toxic fanbase in the US, while being submissive to CCP and Xi over there.

He acts submissive, but he's also apparently scaring them badly, because along the way it turns out SpaceX and especially its platform Starlink have great military utility, and have been a big factor in Ukraine continuing to exist instead of collapsing in the first two weeks of the war. Please read this: [0] for more information.

Since this happened, everyone in the media has been suddenly busy explaining how Elon Musk is Too Mean For the Peoples And Must Be Stopped.

[0]: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088

The only reason DJT "stood in the way" of China was that China wasn't buying him off. Trump's first impeachment was because his attempt at getting personal gain from Ukraine for US foreign aid became public. If Chinese companies had figured out a way to grease Trump's palm, he'd have loved them.

While Musk is a controversial character it should be noted that Slate is owned by Bezos (and formerly by Gates) and may not be the most reliable source on this on this topic since Musk and Bezos battle each other in several realms and are not friends.

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