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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

> Twitter is nothing compared to that.

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

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