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Comment by 7e | Hacker News Reader

But Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove it into the ground—-saved only by government subsidies, cheap money, and fortuitous timing. SpaceX has raised $10B and is currently looking to raise more. Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.

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I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time - "Tesla can never manufacture a mass production car", "Elon cannot run a hardware company", "Electric cars can only sell when subsidized". The truth is Tesla and Elon pushed an entire market forward. Tesla paid back their loans while other car manufacturers didn't.

SpaceX was not the first in the launch business - they were in fact the only one who attempted to break into a monopolized market that no one dared to touch. It's remarkable that they not only fight their way in, but also did it so well that they became the largest launch provider in the country, and in some cases the only one in the United States - SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.

You don't have to either hate or love a guy - Elon fucked up multiple times, often talks shit, but give the man credit where credit is due.

I can contribute one more data point: Space X invented a new alloy steel to drive down the cost of the surface material of Space X rockets to $4/kg. That's some serious science and engineering. And this improvement is probably a very small one compared with thousands of innovations made by Space X.

Do you know what prices per kg looked like before this new alloy?

Aluminum lithium alloy was about $40/kg, and carbon fibers about $130/kg, without considering the cost of insulation tile.

Cool, that’s a significant improvement. I’m not sure how often magnitude-scale improvements occur in material sciences, but my instinct is that it’s rare.

Citation needed.

Falcon 9 uses a carbon fiber skin over an aluminium honeycomb.

And Wikipedia claims that Starship originally used bog-standard 301 Stainless Steal, and later switched to also bog-standard 304L Stainless Steal.

The only alloys that I'm aware of SpaceX developing are inconel alloys for hot, oxygen rich parts of their engines.

Also PICA-X is a SpaceX variant of a NASA heatshield.

It's typical for SpaceX to use the off-the-shelf material initially, then do R&D to customize it for a material that better suits their needs.

IIRC, Musk explained it in a SSB-BPA joint meeting last year. They considered carbon-fiber, aluminum lithium alloy, and 301 steel. It was a fascinating discussion. The materials were great under low temperature, but had other issues as well as degraded performance under high temperature. For instance, carbon-fibers can leak gas (or react with the percolated fuel?). Starship eventually used 30X, a steel alloy.

So Starship doesn't use 30X stainless steel?

We went through all this with the haters about Steve Jobs

> I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time

Which ones? The ones where cars would self-deliver five years ago? That Mars colonisation would have begun this year? That Cybertruck would deliver three years ago?

The goalposts are Elons.

Every big tech company misses their targets the same way, because they’re way too ambitious. Look at Waymo and Prime Air.

> The truth is Tesla and Elon pushed an entire market forward

Arguably EU regulations did just as much to make EVs viable.

My own personal take as someone who actually commuted on 85 with my wife and saw more and more Teslas on the left lane as the years went on, is that electric cars being allowed on the carpool lane provided a huge initial boost to Tesla sales. All the rich folks buying Model S so they could avoid traffic.

But I am bitter. I was actually commuting with 2 people on the car while rich folks bought their way there (totally on purpose, so the electric cars become more popular, I know)

The Palo Alto Prius!

https://www.engadget.com/2008-06-30-tesla-motors-elon-musk-p...

This goalpost hasn't moved for 14-yrs.

I mean it's well known that Tesla has a insane profit margin (in the car manufacturing market) when compared to other players. The could sell a car around 30,000$ (adjusted for inflation) if they want to - they in fact came pretty close to that a while ago.

The question is, why would they? Why would they reduce their price if they can actively sell all the cars the manufacture? They in fact had months of wait time until recently. Why would they sell a cheaper car when there is no serious competition cutting their market share? It's no different than apple not reducing the cost of their iphone - they have no incentive to do so as long as they are making money and have no serious competition under-cutting them.

Tesla's pitch is partly 'electric car good for climate' yes, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.

> at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.

The Tesla master plan was from the beginning to reinvest these profits into manufacturing a cheaper car. They did this with the Model 3, but now it kind of looks like they've given up.

If you take $30,000 in May 2008 and adjust for inflation [1] to February 2019, the equivalent price would be $35,005.

In February 2019, Tesla announced [2] a Model 3 for $35,000.

So if you're looking at the numbers by relative buying power, they weren't doing too bad up until car prices went insane the last two years.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/35000-tesla-model-3-available-now

I thought they sold a very small number at 35k, and certainly the implication is that price point (at least adjusted for inflation) would be maintained. What's the cheapest Tesla you can buy now.

From what appears to be a change in sentiment, with younger people, over the past 10 years or so, we appear to be heading into a slump of extreme risk aversion.

> SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.

Do the tax payers really need anything launched?

Yea they do. Science experiments, future commerce, national defense, etc.

> future commerce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge

> national defense

Yeah yeah, I've been hearing that ever since Ronnie Ray-gun 40 years ago.

Weather monitoring. Got anything against that too?

Not per se, but it does seem like the volume of stuff launched into space vastly exceeds the need for it. And the environmental effects on the upper atmosphere of the increasing number of rocket launches is worrisome.

I’m excited for the Methane leak scanning project. There’s probably a lot of little projects like that that wouldn’t have been possible before the current launch market.

I don't entirely understand why people are debating this point. The taxpayer doesn't pay for what he needs, he pays for what the government does. There are endless benefits to space for the consumer, but even if there weren't he's still paying for them.

Don't like endless wars? Thanks for your feedback, now give me 30% of everything you earn so I can pay for them.

Tax payers seem to enjoy their Uber / Uber Eats type services which depend on GPS.

This tax payer doesn't.

If you don't think GPS as it's own thing is a net good, value adding part of the world, the problem might be you, not things in space.

I was talking about Uber / Uber Eats.

Oh thank goodness. Enthusiastic agreement.

As much as I've come to dislike the guy in recent times, these points are still valid. He did that. And it's something.

No, HE didn't do that. Teams like three levels under him did that based on a vague goal he set and some people under him refined. Why should "let's do something hard" lifted up as some kind of magical ability? Where were all the people praising Kennedy as the smartest man alive for telling NASA to go to the moon?

The Boring Company didn't fail. The boring company was a scam to delay and distract the california high-speed rail project. and it continues to delay and distract other public transit projects around the country to this day. it's been a resounding success.

https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...

Minor note: The Boring Company is a completely separate idea from the hyperloop. They instead proposed what's essentially a Personal Rapid Transit concept ("The Loop"), which has been shopped around a couple of times, but has seen no takers other than the Las Vegas Convention Center. The only public transit project it seriously competed for was one iteration of the O'Hare/Loop express transit system, but that was a zombie project that had already died a decade earlier.

The main arguments being used to militate against urban rapid transit (i.e., metro systems, regional rail; not inter-city HSR) these days tend to be "automated taxis will make all of this imminently obsolete," although that may have died down in the past several years given that a decade has passed since it was first trotted out.

https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

That's just a student competition the company organized that one time and it had no followup. Relatively disconnected to their business.

Doesn't it get exhausting to jump through so many mental hoops to minimize someone's accomplishments?

I don't understand what people get out of this, is it really that painful to admit that some guy has done some pretty cool things with his life? All the effort it takes to research all the negative things about someone could've been spent doing something productive. Being willing to admit that someone did something awesome could've been exciting or inspiring.

And yet people work so hard to think around all the good things, and take the most negative view possible. Ugh, I don't like this part of human nature.

It is the opposite. It is exhausting to hold a nuanced, balanced view of things. It is much easier to think "I don't like this person, therefore everything about this person is bad". The brain does it for you.

I agree btw, I have watched people go from worshipping Elon to suddenly deciding he's a fraud and a talentless hack and every one of his accomplishments were some kind of fluke. It's so strange.

In light of new evidence, some people actually alter their beliefs.

Maybe the majority are flexible, but they don't post their opinions on the internet because they're not extreme enough to warrant posting?

If it was someone other than Elon, this entire community would be flagging this kind of stuff with a resounding unity.

Everytime, someone comes up with these arguments, I cannot help but to think "Wow, you must be really bent ideologically to come up with this".

We're in a massive ideological warfare and people who perpetuate hate like this needs to be condemned from all sides. It is making a rather normal forum like this into a vile, toxic and unwelcoming place.

I don't know what it is about certain topics here that brings the worst of people.

It makes sense if you decide that Elon is guilty of "wrongthink", at that point for this mob nuance and context out the window and they will burn anyone at the stack. Works the other way, if you are say the right things then your actions don't matter. Say the right incantations and get away with murder/robbery, no one cares.

> Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.

He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.

> Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.

Unfortunately we will never know how much Musk contributed to any of these companies.

It is in his best interest to act like he was vital but unless you were there, there isn’t any way to know.

If you want to get an idea, why not listen to some engineers that have worked with him? There are plenty of those around, for example, Andrej Karpathy talked a bit about working with Elon recently - https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0?t=5668

Unless it was off the record, I wouldn't. There are all kinds of potential conflicts of interests. These include ownership in companies where valuation is directly connected to Musk'a perceived competence and his ability to help/hinder their career.

Andrej doesn't work at Tesla anymore, but it sounded like he would want to leave the option to return open, so presumably he wouldn't want to burn bridges. I think most people prefer not to criticize people they know well publicly, anyhow.

Why not ask the people who were there?

For one thing, there are two groups, those who went there and eventually left, and those who are still there. I bet they give very different answers.

He also started both Tesla and SpaceX with a "fortune" of about $300 million. $300 million is of course a lot of money. The reason I put fortune in quotes is because he was looking to get into aerospace. An industry where NASA, and their near century of experience, ended up paying an aggregated cost of more than $1.6 billion per flight, over 134 flights.

A guy with a vision and a few hundred million, in this context, has what many would have said would be a 0% chance of success. Many people somehow seem to have this view that if you just have enough money you can solve any problem in existence. It's probably just the consumerist mindset taken to its [not so] logical extremes - where literally anything is for sale, even that which doesn't exist.

He didn't start Tesla at all. He bought a majority stake for $6.5 million and then drove the founders out.

Tesla at the time Musk took over was literally three guys, a cool name, and some big ideas. He then took over on design, direction, and development - as well as starting to bleed money trying to make it all happen. And ultimately the others would be out of the company before their first product hit production. They deserve a footnote, but their ultimate role in the company was effectively zero.

So why didn't Elon just start a new company - sorry story doesn't add up.

He effectively did start a new company. Their entire series A funding round was $7.5 million in total, of which $6.5 was Elon. So he became the near exclusive owner of a new company with a few like-minded guys of a similar background.

I don't think he had some nefarious plan to kick them out from the get go. Sometimes personalities and ideas just clash, as theirs obviously did.

It could even be a fucking pet monkey, he still didn't start it.

And that is the fucking problem. More and more shit if coming up about him (latests I saw today was an 'expose' about his degree and maybe even being illegally in the country, which I don't know if it is true or not) but people seem to believe whatever shit comes out of his mouth over facts. Was he pard of the success in Tesla, yes. Was he a founder/started it? Absolutely fucking not. Was Tesla be able to succeed without the government tax credits/investments, absolutely fucking not. But now that it is in a good path, he even moved state to avoid that 'government' issues. He is a fucking liar and a psychopath, but because he has money, people keep gargling his balls like they taste like candy mixed with wild truffles.

(no clue for SpaceX as I truly don't know).

Since those failures he's aged, become more entrenched in his ways, no longer as scrappy or nimble as he once was, surrounded himself by yes-men and blasted off on an ego-trip from his success at Tesla and his shoehorning himself into every global drama. He's gotten addicted to the attention and now his primary pastime and way to blow off steam is trolling the media. No longer focused on the daily grind of building a business.

That may be true. But the guy also landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again. The implications of having easy access to space to our civilization really cannot be overstated. SpaceX is the real deal, and will probably be worth more than Tesla eventually.

Musk clearly isn’t successful in everything he does, but he’s not a failure either.

Just like Jobs built the iphone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew6fv9UUlQ8

> The implications of having easy access to space to our civilization really cannot be overstated.

I think that counts.

> the guy also landed rockets from orbit

We all know that he didn’t do that though, right?

At best his skill set includes hiring smart people, raising money, and being a good manager. Which is exactly what you want from a good CEO and nothing to sneeze at.

But people give him way too much credit for Tesla and spacex imo

People act like this asshole out there wrenching on Raptor engines or something.

No. He sits at the top and commands, like a king. And yet he is apparently solely responsible for engineering achievements? The guy who gave "cold gas jet thrusters" on a tesla a legitimate idea for more speed, or using rockets for fast travel on earth, or "humans drive with just two eyes (and a millennia of evolution and experience) so we will replicate that with just two shitty off the shelf CCDs that don't even compare to eyeballs, and oh btw we are removing ultrasonic sensors and I promise it's not because we are cheapskates trying to balloon profit margins to meet our absurd overhyped valuation". Has he ever said anything of actual engineering value?

Like come on. He doesn't even technically run things at SpaceX, they literally had to hire someone whose job is to stand between Elon and any semblance of control of the company.

It would be like if you went to mcdonalds, got a burger, and thanked the statue of Ronald Mcdonald on the way out. That's not how the world works, ronald didn't make your burger.

> But the guy also landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again

But the guy also had money to hire talented people who landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again*

If you think the CEO of Tesla and Founder, CEO, Chief Engineer of SpaceX is a failure, I'm dying to know: What have you accomplished?

Based on what we've seen with Twitter, Musk is one of the worst CEOs around.

And you don't need to be an accomplished CEO in order to see that.

You're ignoring 20 years of Tesla and SpaceX?

And the only thing that we've seen with Twitter is that it's at an all time high DAU at a fraction of the cost. So far so good.

All of the doomsayers are just making predictions that haven't happened.

I am saying that perhaps those companies succeeded in spite of him.

And what we have seen is >75% of the staff leave including NOC, SREs etc.

That attrition rate is really unprecedented and completely unsustainable.

Update: Payroll and Tax teams have resigned. Cue the lawsuits.

> I am saying that perhaps those companies succeeded in spite of him.

Wow really? You would really prefer to entertain speculative realities instead of just give credit where it's due?

That's impressive.

Based on how incompetent Twitter is being run right now it's not an unreasonable proposition.

As the saying goes: “I don’t know how to captain a giant cargo ship, but seeing one stuck in the Sues Canal, I can tell something is not going as planed”.

Just like we didn't need to be devs at twitter to know 7000 devs were probably too much, we don't have to be the CEO of twitter to look at it's burning body and call for the bucket brigade.

Why shouldn't we assign that success to the actual engineers instead of the rich kid with enough money to buy the labor of smarter better men?

Because the engineers wouldn't have come anywhere close to achieving their dreams without a rich kid who made money from Paypal and was open to spending it all on hard engineering problems instead of living a good retirement life.

Tom Mueller, arguably one of the key engineers behind the success of SpaceX and designer of the Merlin engines, was working at TRW in a role not related to rocket engines before he was at SpaceX. He was building the rockets out of his garage for fun, until Musk convinced him to join him in what was considered a crazy idea back then.

Lars Blackmore, the engineer who was key in developing the the control algorithms needed for landing Falcon vertically was working at NASA, where his work was in theory going to be applied on a future space mission of much smaller scope compared to Falcon. He was able to apply his research (http://larsblackmore.com/iee_tcst13.pdf) on a revolutionary reusable system that changed the launch industry only because a rich kid was willing to spend his money on testing what seemed like always failing rockets, instead of buying a new Yacht.

This comment says more about capitalism than it does about Musk, if everything depends so much on the whims of rich kids, and everyone else lives or dies by those whims, including the engineers who are forced to sell their dreams and their labor to said rich kids.

> Tom Mueller, arguably one of the key engineers behind the success of SpaceX and designer of the Merlin engines, was working at TRW in a role not related to rocket engines before he was at SpaceX.

This is what Wikipedia says about Tom Mueller at TRW

>For 15 years, Mueller worked for TRW Inc., a conglomerate corporation involved in aerospace, automotive, credit reporting, and electronics. He managed the propulsion and combustion products department where he was responsible for liquid rocket engine development.[1] He worked as a lead engineer during the development of the TR-106, a 650,000 lbf (2,900 kN) thrust, throttled, cost-contained hydrogen engine designed in 2000.

What a bizarre statement. By that logic, someone can't say Trump is a failed president unless they've become president themselves.

Film critics, music critics, food critics all need to be directors, artists and chefs?

This is HN, if this is failure, people here aspire to fail upwards like this.

Who wouldn't?

Most of us here hang out for listening to fellow hackers who have failed upwards.

There are different kinds of people here. Some of us believe that you need to be a sociopath to make it as a CEO of a large corporation. So, no, I wouldn't want to be one.

I have not had a joke backfire that caused me to buy a company at several times its value. I have not fired people, cutting off their healthcare, during a recession. I have not made my family hate me. I have not lied repeatedly and without punishment in public. I have not been sued by the SEC, Twitter, and countless other parties.

It takes talent to fail in many of those ways, notably, it's mostly papered over by the success of Tesla and Space X, which will probably be just fine on thew whole.

His antics were 'sufferable' in the context of Tesla/Space X, but for a variety of reasons, not at all with Twitter whereupon he's essentially going to be perceived a toxic entity - rightly or wrongly.

He needs to find an excuse to get out of there, find someone he can get along with to take over. Put some nice terms in there, probably including that he has to 'not talk about Twitter publicly' and get back to his more tolerable shenanigans.

If Twitter was his only gig, I can see him digging himself out of this hole over the long run, but with other things to do I think it's going melt him.

He's doing 'Operation Market Garden' for no reason; time for an 'orderly withdrawal'.

Man, the top comment is about Waterloo and now we have Operation Market Garden this thread is a history nerd's feast of Vitellius.

Some people suggested selling to Automattic like Tumblr did and with an implied price of 1M.

I don't think Matt would be a bad choice for a ceo.

one could pickle cucumbers in your post

> He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late

No, stop it, that's ridiculous. Tesla is an immensely successful company. It just is.

Multiple things can be true: Musk can be a chaos bully driving Twitter into the ground and the CEO of the most successful heavy industry startup since the end of the second world war. I'm no doubt as horrified as you are at what is happening at the bird site, but I still know my car is great.

> He failed at Full Self Driving

His time plan might have failed, but that doesn’t mean that full self driving has failed. That’s like if I said: “I’m going to make 10 million dollars by the end of next week”, and then people would call me a failure for only making 5 million in a week.

Or do you mean that full self driving actually has failed, not taking into account any time plans? I think the full self driving capabilities of Teslas are downright incredible. Not fully ready for robotaxi territory, but extremely impressing.

That's not really a comparable analogy. More like "Here is this cool feature I'm going to make by the end of the year, pay me $5,000 for it now." and you never actually get it. It's fraud.

I think it's closer to saying you'll build a bridge in a week but you build a bridge where the roadway ends part of the way across. You can still get to the other side using the steel girders but it's really not useful. FSD sort of works but fails in unexpected ways and at random times so you have to pay just as much attention as if you were driving.

Tesla was a dream before he came in. It’s now the biggest car company in the world by market cap. Give the man credit where it’s due

The price of Tesla is artificially inflated due to easy money. That BWM I7 looks like a work of art compared to a Tesla.

Failure is never an issue. Don't shame people for failing, especially when they fail royally. Because we ALL benefit from it in the long run. Don't shame people for failing.

> then invested in Tesla and almost drove it into the ground—-saved only by government subsidies, cheap money, and fortuitous timing

Tesla and Chrysler both!

I think this comment is fueling me to go work at Twitter and give a helping hand to some of the work that needs to happen there.

Let us know how it goes!

Maybe he'll give you a horse

“Failed at self driving” how about give some credit as well?

I’ll give Musk credit for the two decapitations caused by his involvement in self driving technologies. We developed technology and research protocols on how to make self driving safe all the way back in 2007, and Musk thinking he knows better has predictably lead to deaths. That’s on him.

>He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink.

How?

Neuralink hasn’t failed. FSD is pretty solid outside of major cities and it keeps improving. Honestly it will probably get there in less than 5 years.

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