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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

It's possible to be successful in business and still be an insufferable douche. Elon regularly punches down, not up. It's hard to really respect a man like that.

And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.

Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.

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> Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company.

The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.

> whether he's just been lucky

Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.

Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.

Being successful in three unrelated industries: paypal, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.

> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business

Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.

> Twitter is nothing compared to that.

It's a good thing the natural laws of Newtonian physics also covers content moderation. /s

> The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.

I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.

But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.

Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.

> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.

It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.

> With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem

Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.

Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.

SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.

Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.

> But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.

Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.

More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.

I agree with your argument about repeated business success, and am happy to credit Jobs with repeated business success (like Musk). But I'm not seeing the repeated business success you credit to Gates. Gates was half lucky, half nastily ruthless in getting his initial success with Microsoft (along with another half perhaps of having parents with influence, unlike Musk & Jobs). But his later 'successes' built on that early monopoly (Windows & Internet Explorer). They weren't independent successes like Pixar and Spacex were.

> Elon regularly punches down, not up. It's hard to really respect a man like that.

He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.

But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.

I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.

  > Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company.

I own a Tesla, and I was a technician at a Ford dealership decades ago. Despite what you read on the internet, Tesla had better service and comparable quality to almost any vehicle on the road today. It's not Lexus, but Tesla's quality easily surpasses and other American brand. There are tons of issues, sure, but that is no different than any other car company. You just don't hear about the others.

It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.

>Tesla had better service and comparable quality to almost any vehicle on the road today.

Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.

One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/cars/tesla-consumer-reports-d...

Eh, I've had a number of cars. A lot, you might say, given that I buy a new one at least every 18 months. I've also owned a Tesla. My Camaro was built better ;-). Not joking, either. I got a pretty good Model 3, to be honest, but it still had weird inconsistent problems I don't routinely see on other mainstream makes.

In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.

> Elon regularly punches down, not up.

How regularly? Examples aside from "pedo guy"? Which I think all, including himself, would agree was a punch down.

Who can he punch up to? Overthrow governments? Bezos?

For example, Musk gives AI predictions, and there are some quite knowledgeable ML scientists. E.g. Andrej Karpathy?

> Elon regularly punches down, not up.

I mean, is there any direction besides down that it is possible for Elon to punch?

Yes, of course. He has many peers that he could throw punches at. He's only top of the hill at times when we measure strictly on paper wealth. There are plenty of successful businesspeople in this world. And he's not the leader of the free world, so he can always swing that direction.

> Elon regularly punches down, not up.

Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.

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