Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

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>>Personally, I think if we had better laws Musk would be looking at charges of criminal negligence for encouraging people to think they have things like actual "autopilot" and "full self driving". But as it is, he lied his way to the top of the world's richest list. So Tesla's problems here are just the consequences of his actions.

Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.

Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.

Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.

SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

I see laws that prevent the emergence and flourishing of Tesla and SpaceX as far worse than current laws.

Your line of reasoning depends on a strawman: that Tesla could not have achieved this much if Musk had called it Cruise control and lane assist.

Not quite - GP cites the spectre of Tesla nearly going bust to imply that Musk helped achieve the opposite (extremely healthy company) via dubious, ideally criminal means. It's not entirely based on that, but the implication is there.

Put simply, if Musk only made one controversial call, this comment thread wouldn't exist. The many controversial calls cannot be easily disentangled.

Do really healthy companies often have their stock price fall by half?

Personally, I think that Tesla is not particularly healthy, and that its future is grim as mainstream car manufacturers get in on the EV action. Tesla is not particularly well regarded by Consumer Reports. Of the 16 EV cars with current rankings, Tesla's models are at spots 4, 10, 11, and 16, with low reliability scores. [1]

Tesla does have a big slice of the US EV market, but that's only 3% of the total market. It's perfectly plausible that Tesla's lead among tech enthusiasts, always a small fraction of a market [2], won't translate into mainstream acceptance, and that Tesla will enter a death spiral where their relatively low volumes mean they won't be able to keep up with the major car manufacturers. Their eventual fate could be what happened to so many promising early manufacturers of internal combustion cars: they become brands owned by bigger car companies. [3]

So personally, I think Musk lies did create a window of opportunity for him, but that as with so many liars, he sowed the seeds of Tesla's destruction with the same lies that enabled initial success.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/types/new/hybrids-evs/r...

[2] see the first graph here: https://thinkinsights.net/strategy/crossing-the-chasm/

[3] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

Apple are down 26% ytd. It wouldn’t be unheard of in this market. What should hopefully be clear is that stocks such as Tesla are not particularly correlated to the fundamentals of the company, there are whole-economy effects driving price rises and drops.

What I see in Tesla: - extremely profitable car manufacturing. industry beating profits per car driven by cheaper BOM than legacy manufacturers, in large part due to innovation. margin of 30.5%. - Manufacturing limited - huge wait list despite accelerating production (Q1 2022 best quarter ever, 68% increase yoy). - huge investments in manufacturing across the supply chain starting to pay off. - for the first time, manufacturing investments that can rival premium legacies. With the factories in Berlin and Texas coming online, it’s believable that Tesla has capacity to produce in excess of a manufacturer like BMW. - very high purchaser satisfaction (the product is good). - large overall profit - already beating most in the industry.

I'm no finance expert, but Tesla being down twice as much as Apple is not what I'd call a positive sign.

We'll see how Telsa's finances go once competition heats up. A major source of profit for them is selling emissions credits to other companies. Which a) undercuts Tesla's claims to eco-goodness, and b) will surely decline as others EV sales pick up. We'll also see how much that profit is affected by recalls and lawsuits.

In many cases, high customer satisfaction is indicative of a good future, but I'm not sure that's the case here. One, their satisfaction is in the same range as a lot of car companies, including BMW and Honda [1], so it's not a competitive advantage. And two, their current user base is a technophile, early-adopter niche. It's not clear that Tesla can cross Moore's Chasm and serve a mass audience that doesn't care who Musk is.

I look forward to seeing how it turns out. But given the way Musk is flaming out in his attempts to buy Twitter, his success is clearly not guaranteed. And that's before we account for him being distracted by trying to run 3 big companies at once.

[1] https://www.theacsi.org/news-and-resources/press-releases/20...

> Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.

Elon is not the only one that needs to be held accountable -> big oil has literally prosecuted and killed people, just look at what they've done to Steven Donziger.

If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.

> Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars

Laws don't work this way - If I save someone's life today that does not give me a voucher to murder someone tomorrow.

>>If we actually enforced these laws, maybe we would have electric cars even earlier, and indeed, there maybe wouldn't be Tesla.

This is just utopianism.

>>Laws don't work this way

I wasn't saying they do. I was explaining the consequences of those "better laws" existing. In truth, the laws being sought by the OP would further undermine the very foundations of a liberal society, with contract liberty, to replace it with social control by an officialdom made up of unionized government bureaucrats with next to zero accountability, micromanaging the actions of others based on an elitist "government knows best" philosophy.

> replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars

What does the power method to the wheels have to do with self-driving? Tesla fan bois.

Are you saying that bold lying and criminal negligence were also necessary for SpaceX to succeed? I wasn't aware of that, but I'm happy to take your word for it.

Economy less based on lies and more based on truth would be win for everyone. The competitive market would be much better.

> Your idea of better laws would mean no Tesla and no SpaceX.

Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk are not cool/impressive any more.

And with every tweet, Elon becomes less respected by the public.

It’s telling when you see this sentiment on Tesla Motors Club, r/SpaceX and r/TeslaMotors.

Elon was on a roll. But he royally fucked up the past 2 years.

It’s fascinating how quickly people will suddenly decide apolitical things you are associated with are “not cool/impressive” when you start expressing political opinions they disagree with.

You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party? People have been plenty critical about Musk well before that, and about most of the same points.

Honestly, I think the causal arrow goes the other way. Musk has beclowned himself with the way he handled the Twitter deal, and Tesla's stock price has dropped accordingly. So a lot of the noise he has made since then can be seen as attempts to distract people with politics so they don't notice how his impressiveness is declining. This article makes a good case for that: https://twitter.com/BITech/status/1534939630809800706

>>You're talking about Musk becoming open about his backing for an authoritarian, cult-of-personality party?

Musk doesn't have any good alternatives, unfortunately. He's supposed to back the Democratic Party, that relies on a long-tradition of union-backed left-wing violence to intimidate the opposition? [1] The party that fanned the flames of 500+ riots in the summer of 2020, leading to dozens being killed and billions of dollars worth of people's livelihoods going up in flames?

The party that is aggressively moving toward authoritarianism, and trying to silence/cancel any one who speaks out about it, like Glenn Greenwald? [2]

The party of lawyers [3], who early on pushed aggressively for CCP-style lockdowns and vaccine mandates [4]?

The party fully backed by elite anti-Free-Speech movements? [5]

Even when the GOP were under Trump, the Democrats weren't clearly the more moral choice.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1450487818766143492

[3] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/industries

[4] https://twitter.com/NYSBA/status/1326149426063224832

[5] https://youtu.be/54zIUalrCyA

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