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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?

I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.

Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.

After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.

He hasn't had a business failure yet.

Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?

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The Boring Company is a failure. He's had many other failures within companies: automated driving, Tesla solar panels

Though he's the CEO of SpaceX, it's really run by Gwynne Shotwell.

You look at his wikipedia, and there's like 10 different things he's currently involved with, so yes, he looks like a guy that gets bored and moves on the other things.

I don't think it makes sense to compare a giant, multibillionaire organization like Twitter to something like the Boring Company, which was never really intended to be a main venture.

Why would the boring company be a failure?

I expect creating tunnels 20 years from now as important as right now.

Traffic jams are not going away magically, but automation can bring the cost of creating tunnels down, which can increase the total market significantly.

Time is helping the company (just like other projects Elon has started), so there's no rush to scale up and turn profit.

How are tunnels solving traffic jams?

Not solving but alleviating, by rerouting transiting traffic through bypass routes underground. For example, in Washington DC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_and_12th_Street_Expressway...

But does rerouting traffic through other bypasses actually alleviate traffic?

> Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Do look at the "Studies" section of the same article, too.[1] It is far from established that induced demand outweighs the capacity increase from road construction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Studies

Mayors of big towns are clearing city centers from cars and making them walkable again anyways (at least in Europe, I don’t know how it is being done in other places). If tunnels are the shortest path to get from one part of the city to another (like in Zurich), cars will use them.

A traffic network's purpose is to move people from point A to point B. If you double the lanes and they fill up, you've doubled the throughput. If traffic doesn't move any faster, it's because the old traffic jams were a bigger problem than was visible. You've still alleviated the issue by allowing twice as many people to reach their destination in the same amount of time.

There's an argument that assumes that building more lanes does not increase the number of people who travel, only the number of people who choose to do so by car. Then with fewer lanes, the same number of people still get from A to B but on bicycles or using public transport instead of cars.

These photos illustrate it well:

https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/04/03/streets-are-ever...

Less cars on the road solves traffic jams. Not more roads. Traffic jams are insane, we see a single person sitting alone in a 3+ ton box idling his time and instead of seeing how absurd it is, we want to make bigger roads for more almost empty boxes. Nuts. The solution to traffic jams is excellent public transportation and last mile mobility. Not more roads and definitely not tunnels.

Tunnels don't really solve the problem well - they cost too much for what they do, and don't even do it well. Public transport (specifically expanding trains + e-bikes) is a much better, easier and already available solution.

The Boring Company takes machines made by other companies, and digs tunnels that anyone with those machines can dig to provide a solution that is largely impractical.

Pretty easy to get rid of traffic jams actually, you just get rid of the cars. Never been stuck in traffic in places where there aren't cars.

So throw the baby out with the bath water? Great plan.

In cities? Yes. You start preferencing more space efficient modes of transport, and traffic jams go away, while transport time decreases. If you’re going to put a tunnel with fixed access points under a city, it makes a lot more sense to run trains than private cars.

If you’re going to have a 4 lane road reserve two of the lanes for super high capacity vehicles (busses).

Traffic jams are a byproduct of the limits of physics. Once you reach a certain density it is simply impossible to provide enough private car parking and lane capacity.

The Boring Company is not a failure. It's actually a major success, for Tesla. It successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation, that Elon Musk will solve all our infrastructure needs. It's a modern day GM Streetcar.

> successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation

What makes you believe this? And that Musk was responsible for it?

It's not far fetched when he brought back the hyperloop in fashion to kill USA high speed rail.

https://i.redd.it/n76d16xg94h91.jpg

California high speed rail (the only real attempt at high speed rail in the US) didn’t need Musk to kill it, it killed itself due to incompetence in building quickly and affordably. This is a shame, because an actually affordable, working high speed rail system in America would be amazing, but won’t happen until we learn how to build again quickly and affordably in America. And who knows how to do that? Elon Musk!

I would wait for the first product to launch before pronouncing a company dead, which should be fairly soon: https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/traffic/officials-aim-to...

They already launched a "Loop" in Vegas, and it's a small tunnel with manned taxis running in it, operated by the city. And it took longer from project start to inauguration, per mile, than the Channel tunnel linking the UK and France.

That’s false.

The LVCC Loop started boring in 15 November 2020 and opened to the public on 15 April 2021 - so 5 months, for the 2.7km. The Channel tunnel began construction in June of 1988 and opened for freight trains in June of 1994, so 72 months for the 50.4km.

So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.

Which part is false?

Isn’t it expected that a longer tunnel would take less time to build per mile than a shorter one? That just seems obvious. Just like how a 2000 square foot house isn’t going to take twice as long to build as a 1000 square foot house.

Not really - especially when that longer tunnel is an international project and is being drilled under the sea, not a straight line in a desert.

Now calculate km per month per dollar.

I didn't say anything about cost in my initial post. Still, you're right that the cost difference is hugely in favor of the LVCC tunnel if we only look at length.

However, if we look at freight+people crossing the tunnels, the Channel tunnel surely wins again - it may be roughly 10 times more expensive per km, but it carries orders of magnitudes more, by rail + by car.

> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from

The same guy who tweeted "Funding secured". His tweets about starting boring company, and buying twitter. His email exchanges that are now public. He is VERY impulsive and erratic (maybe not hotheaded).

All his tweets on Bitcoin:

https://www.rockwelltrading.com/articles/coffee-with-markus/...

> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from

His behavior like… every day and the fact that he apparently accidentally just bought a $44B company doesn’t at least let you see where people are coming from?

These musk heads are insane. The projection is ridiculous, portraying the characterization of musk as impulsive as a "meme" when they are so deeply steeped in reality denial... drives me insane. They need a serious correction, crypto style.

I wish my impulsive decisions led me to become the richest person in the world over the courese of decades.

Being born rich helps the odds somewhat

> The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?

For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?

It does seem to me he will need another Shotwell for either Tesla or Twitter, though. You can be CEO of as many companies as you want, but if the CEO is also doing the Operations part of the work, then you're constrained to pretty much one company at a time. I wonder if we'll see Jack come back to Twitter.

For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?

No.

So no he doesn't give "input"? Shotwell is definitely in charge.

Is that so?

So the best argument you have here is that Musk is good at hiring competent people? Sounds to me like this makes him an excellent CEO.

Those companies are solving problems with logistics and engineering.

Twitter is fundamentally trying to solve a people problem, which is much fuzzier. Every impression I've had from "public Elon" is that he is absolutely wretched at people-problems-at-scale. I'm also not sure there is any human ever who has been able to solve people problems at Twitter's scale.

John Maynard Keynes

Could you elaborate? He wrote a book that many considered important, but how specifically did he solve people problems? To me it sounds like he understood emergent behaviors in economics, but didn’t those economicists also believe in the rational actor? That is not an accurate assumption about humanity.

Keynes’ solutions to human problems on a macro scale lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty in the post-war era

keynesianism eventually failed because corporations and large capital holders will not act rationally towards the whole when they have interests that benefit themselves. so I suppose you’re right. but that doesn’t change the fact that for a good 30 years his ideas and solutions made life better for a huge number of people

> He hasn't had a business failure yet.

I don't know why people say this when stuff goes wrong for him all the time. He literally just failed to get out of this Twitter deal.

there are people worshipping him like he is Jesus, something is really wrong here, how do people say he has not had a business fail? seriously SpaceX was a failure without the government stepping in at the last moment even he admits it.. look how he scammed the US government to keep Tesla going... i guess these are not "real" failures but from his own words government shouldn't be subsidizing business .... never mind all the failures he has had.

Musk of today does not feel like the one of even 5 years ago.

He called that diver "pedo guy" 4 years ago.

I don't feel like Musk has really changed, he's always been a bit nuts. He just has a bigger reach now.

Autonomous Tesla's were also ready by the end of the year 5+ years ago. He's always been the way he is, the difference is the number of people who have caught on to his schtick by now.

Falcon Heavy was delayed for 8 years. Launching another one and simultaneously landing 3 rockets there after.

Hard stuff takes time. People with no patience and perseverance never gets big stuff done. Musk is not the same.

That remains a turning point for me.

Did we ever find out if was right about the diver?

how about i unfoundedly call you a nonce and we can let the people around you debate whether it's true for the rest of your life?

Musk admitted in court that the term ‘pedo guy’ was not meant to be taken as a literal accusation of pedophilia.

Basically Musk said that he was just insulting him in a general sense and that the man was not a pedophile

Sounds like bs to me.

People have Dorsey a lot of shit for being part time CEO of Twitter and Square. Not sure how an even more split CEO is supposed to make things better

Twitter has always been a failed business, which he bought, so...?

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