I wouldn't be surprised if they pivot, but the new glenn does look promising. Not as promising as starship, but starship's numbers are still Elon numbers, which aren't to be trusted
But until then Blue Origin has basically no actual revenue beyond a very small amount of BE-4 sales.
Are we expecting Bezos just to continue to drop billions of $ into Blue Origin for unlimited amount of time? Because non of the projects they have will ever make this company profitable.
To be fair, he's been shoveling money into this unproductive dumpster fire for more than 20 years already.
Then it got bigger and bigger, but only in the mid 2010s did the company seriously start to grow.
He was dropping 1 billion per year towards the end of 2010s but the company has been ramping up even more over the last 3-5 years.
By now the HR cost alone are probably going towards 2 billion $ a year, they are not so much smaller then SpaceX with no revenue.
Rocket delays are inevitable. But since you mentioned New Glenn's perpetual delays, let's also be fair and note that Starship's orbital test has been teased by Elon for quite awhile now [0]. I happen to think an April/May launch is possible, but we'll see. And also good to note that this is still very much a "pathfinder" vehicle, in SpaceX's style of iterative design & test. So not at all the same as whenever New Glenn's first launch will be.
Falcon Heavy beats New Glenn on most things, so New Glenn is more comparable to that generation rocket. New Glenn was sized up because Bezos wanted to have something bigger then Falcon 9.
Its always funny when people say that.
Musk has been the longest serving CEO in both the Space and the Automotive industry. With both companies having an almost absurdly good track record of execution.
And yet somehow it isn't trust worthy? Based on what? Comments on twitter?
Yes. Mostly his.
From the very first model 3, to full self drive, to cybertruck, to the boring company, to the starship itself. All of those were/are later than the dates that he gave, and cost more (for the ones that are for sale) than he said they'd cost. He was saying the orbital launch for starship was weeks away more than a year ago. It's still not happened.
Elon makes his own propaganda
If it succeeds, New Glenn is going to be superfluous and starting at a massive timing disadvantage.
Musk has consistently produced the wrong numbers. Some examples (and there are many, many more):
Number of teslas in 2018? Musk: 500k Actual: 35K
Tesla base price objective, 2016: Musk $35k Actual: Much more
Self Driving Cross Country Trip: Musk: in 2017 Actual: NaN
Financing Rounds: Musk (2011) "We will never need another financing round" Actual: there were many more
Supercharging cost: Musk (2013) "Always free" Actual: Definitely not free
Tesla Semis Production Line Date: Musk: "2019" Actual: Not yet happened
Gigafactory placement: Musk (2017) "Two to four more" Actual: Only one operational
Hyperloop NY-Phil-Balt-DC: Musk (2017) "I have verbal approval, 29 minutes NY-DC" Actual: This appears to be made up
Mars Missions: Musk: "Every launch window from 2024 onward" Actual: TBD, maybe 2029?
Neurallink: Musk: "Human trials in 2021" Actual: "Lots of dead monkeys"
Covid-19 Ventilators: Musk "Our factories will produce them" Actual: Musk sent 1,000 cpap machines
Updated Tesla Roadster: Musk: "It exists!" Actual: "It doesn't"
There are so, so so many more of these. There's nothing remotely close to an "absurdly good track record". SpaceX is doing well because of Shotwell, not Musk, and Tesla has been plagued with build quality and recall issues from day 1. (To say nothing of absurd repair costs and issues with FSD.)
And what, you created a brand new account just to post this nonsense again? I've seen this before.
Also, when it's something that literally no company has ever done before, being off by a lot is expected.
And many, many of Tesla's predictions aren't predictions. In 2014, Tesla promised full self driving on cars and took money for it. Those cars today will never have it (despite paying for it), and it's been nearly a decade with FSD still an indeterminate period away.
And yeah, new account. That's how I interact with HN -- create an account, keep it until it gets some amount of karma (usually 500-1000) decide it's too much of a drain to try and be grounded here, and delete the account. Inevitably, someone comes along and makes a breathy and incredible claim like "tesla is an absolute success" and I feel like I need to come in and provide just a little bit of "Hey, so, the facts don't exactly line up there..." To be clear, I don't create anti-tesla accounts, and this isn't an alt for another existing account, I just don't like having a long term account here.
Yes there's an occasional point that is correct, like this one, but you're mixing in outright incorrect statements, predictions that were missed on dates because they're hard to predict, and statements that have some accuracy, all together. And I don't want to bullet point by bullet point refute you as it's tiresome and there's thousands of breathless posts just like this one all over the internet.
If Musk had left the company in 2014, do you think Starship and Starlink would be what they are now? Because I think that is pretty unlikely.
One could have made the argument that Musk should have gone after the Falcon 9 was reusable as well.
Shotwell is certainty competent and would likely do a good job as you suggest. But the best thing is if they just continue to work together as they have, that seems to have worked the best and I wouldn't want to mess with it.
Maybe you could argue who's more in charge of strategic direction at SpaceX, but on the other hand SpaceX seems to be doing great in that division.
> Shotwell: The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.
This of course is slightly old because Shotwell has done another shift and has taken (at least temporary) control of Starship.
Generally if it's something interacting with the US government, Shotwell handles it.
Also maybe it's simply being a good corporate leader, but I've seen her stick her neck out and defend Elon many times against criticism. They obviously like each other and get along with each other. They're both needed.
There is lots of evidence that his micro-managing as you call, is actually really, really successful. And there is also a huge amount of evidence that Musk is actually not short-sighted, but in fact thinks far ahead of the competitors.
In 2014, the Gigafactory was considered crazy and a car company investing so much of its own capital in something that suppliers were supposed to do, was seen as idiotic. Now this model is literally copied by everybody. In the meantime, Tesla was a tiny car company in 2017, still seen as somewhat of a joke. But even then they were already starting to transition into a battery company and now Tesla makes it own batteries, based on its own chemistries in its own battery factory that is run with its in-house designed and manufacturing machines.
So while GM and its partner is still trying to get its first own Gigafactory online (and suffering serious delays), Tesla has moved past that and is literally building its own factories with its own chemistry.
We could go threw countless other examples. People love to pick out cases where things didn't work and ignore all the other cases where it did work.
It's entirely unclear to me whether or not Tesla's battery manufacturing is bearing any fruit in practice. Here's the most recent article I found, from September: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
The sources predict that Tesla will find it difficult to fully implement the new dry-coating manufacturing process before the end of this year, and perhaps not until 2023. Stan Whittingham, a co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries and a 2019 Nobel laureate, believes Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been overly optimistic on the time frame for commercializing the new technique.
[...]
Tesla acquired the know-how in 2019 when it paid over $200 million for Maxwell Technologies, a company in San Diego making ultracapacitors, which store energy for devices that need quick bursts of electricity, such as camera flashes.
[...]
"They can produce in small volume, but when they started big volume production, Tesla ended up with many rejects, too many," one of the sources with ties to Tesla told Reuters. Production yields were so low that all the anticipated cost savings from the new process were lost, the source said.
This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire a company and then take credit for their inventions in order to paint himself as a visionary, 2) overpromise and underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process, and 3) base all profitability on the availability of government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for US-sourced batteries.
Tesla has issues manufacturing its own cells with its own chemistries and its own production equipment. At the same time its competitors all have issues with manufacturing even while depending on battery partners that take most of the profits (look at GM if you want an up to date example).
And the article even suggest that they will solve this and that there are very real serious saving that Tesla can achieve. Even the most negative talking point only suggest that the potential savings are lost, well ok, so in the worst case they are still as well of as their competitors.
Quite basically every other car company would kill to be in Tesla position. Its as simple as that.
> This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire a company and then take credit for their inventions in order to paint himself as a visionary,
First of all, Musk or Tesla never took credit for inventing dry-coating manufacturing, this is just something you made up because it seems you have some personal issues with Musk. Dry coating is a good idea has been known for a while, making it practical for real large scale production has always been the issue. Musk even talked about Maxwell in some of the presentation on the topic.
And if you actually start to look into this whole topic, its quite clear that for Maxwell they initially developed some small prove of concept, then engaged partners to work with them to get this technology to a scale where its viability could be assets, Tesla was their major partner in this. At that point the promise of the technology was so large that Tesla decided to simply acquire the company rather then to continue as a partnership.
When Tesla bought Maxwell the technology was nowhere near ready for prime time. Tesla had to still do a huge amount of work, with many, many more iterations on the technology and major effort at scaling. Tesla is building its own coating huge scale machine to achieve this.
Its a complete misunderstanding of how large scale battery manufacturing works to claim that they simple bought a company and that's why they don't actually didn't do anything or don't deserve any credit.
Dry coating is just one of many things Tesla had to do to become a battery manufacturer. There are many, many other things that I don't have time for in this comment. Tesla bought a number of companies other then Maxwell as well, Hiber is another example. There are more.
There are very few new companies that turn into battery manufacturing companies. And most of them are just that, manufacturing companies. They license most of their technology and buy standard construction equipment. Tesla of course does some of these things to, but they also did a huge amount of the technology on both the cell and the manufacturing equipment.
But Tesla turning itself into a battery company is clearly a major achievement and was incredibly forward looking when they started and is still way ahead of everybody. Tesla was literally doing advanced research in battery manufacturing while the Ford CEO was still walking around talking about how 'batteries are not an issue and can easily be bought on the open market'.
Of course that CEO was fired and now Ford is doing what Tesla did in 2014.
> 2) overpromise and underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process, and
Ok, this is another one of these Anti-Musk truism that sound smart but are actually stupid.
If you underdeliver on making your company into a the a large battery manufacturer, that is still a huge success that literally every other car company would kill to have.
He under-delivered vis-a-vis his own predictions. His own predictions aren't relevant. Many of the actual stock analysts actually assumed there would be delay. And the major institutions who actually buy most Tesla stock knew that. The idea that Tesla stock is only owned by some legion of brain-dead individual investors is just false.
And as you can see from their delivery numbers, issues with their own production has not crashed the company, because guess what, Tesla planned ahead because they knew that scaling a totally new battery manufacturing was incredibly difficult.
And anyway, Tesla hasn't even raised any cash during most of that time. You seem to be stuck in pre-2018 way of thinking with regards to Tesla.
They have not raised money for years and the last couple times they did raise money they didn't actually spend it. The have retired some debt but mostly their cash balance has been growing. So any claim that Tesla has been doing stuff to manipulate the stock price only so they could raise more money to fuel their sinking company is just blatantly false. Its not actually a defensible position, Tesla is public, go look at the financials.
The anti-musk conspiracy theory logic that literally anything he does is some 6D galaxy brain move to convince people in the short term to boost stock value is just not real, it doesn't even make sense as a strategy. Tesla has been working on cell chemistry and cell manufacturing for well over 10 years and has been serious about become a sell manufacture for at least 7 years. They have early on made strategic choice that battery manufacturing is a major core competency and have pursued it. During that time stock has gone up and down and up and down, legislation regarding to EV and batteries have been changing all over the world in many way. But the strategy from Tesla has been consistent.
So the idea that this is about short term stock manipulation is just so bad that I can't even wrap my had around how somebody could believe it. The only reason I can think of that somebody would actually believe such an insane argument is if they just have deep personal hate for Musk that overwrites any logical thinking skills and any anti-Musk argument has to be true. Musk is easy to hate, but really it shouldn't overwrite basic logical reasoning.
3) base all profitability on the availability of government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for US-sourced batteries.
First of all, please give an actual links to the exact intensives you are talking about. As far as I know before the Biden IRA no such thing existed and I have not heard of details of what was introduced.
Second, this claim is mostly nonsense in general. Tesla profited from general mechanism, mainly EV credits and ZEV credits, both system were available to all car companies. So why are other car companies not as successful profitable. Clearly you suggest this is easy, just take handouts make profits, and yet, seem to only work for Tesla. During the time frame you 'analyze' Tesla has gone from making little money to more money then Ford and GM combined. Yet Ford and GM combined had 2x as much access to those same intensives.
And anyway, Tesla was already building batteries in the US in Nevada since 2015 and that what matters for any intensives in regards to battery manufacturing. They located in the US long before battery manufacturing was considered strategic. And the actual resources for these cells, will not come from the US whether Tesla or Panasonic builds the cells.
So really non of your points hold up.
> after which Musk was then fired for incompetence
The other founders wanted to sell the company, Musk wanted to turn it into an internet bank.
Looking back Musk strategy was actually what Paypal should have gone with, rather then shackling itself to ebay.
> But he sure is great at taking credit for the work of others
Yeah because what really mattered for Tesla is what happened before 2008, every after that doesn't matter.
Like seriously dude, I understand you dislike Musk on a personal level. But how can you be so blinded by hate as to suggest being CEO of a car company for literally 15 years (longest in the car industry) and that car company going from basically bankrupt to having the highest profit in the industry (outside of maybe Toyota) is not 'good management'?
> including the work of Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, who is, by all accounts, the real person in charge.
'By all accounts' and by that you mean by all accounts that Anti-Musk Twitter has made up to fuel their rage boner?
Because its not the case based on Shotwells own account. Its not the case based on the account by literally anybody who actually worked there. Its not the case by the account by journalists and other observes who know the company very well. So really its not the case by any serious account.
Shotwell was head of business development until well into the Falcon 9 development, did she do everything then too?
"But he got fired once" is hilarious.
In any other company, Elon would have had "founder status" as part of the negotiations when he bankrolled the company basically from day 1. The company wouldn't have existed at all without him. This isn't abnormal for people who provide initial startup capital, are the chairman of the board, and are directly involved with company operations, being considered as founder.
I really don't like this repeated attempts to try to discredit Elon's involvement in Tesla.
And no, there's no evidence of him being "fired for incompetence" from Paypal.
> But he sure is great at taking credit for the work of others,
On the contrary, whenever people in interviews try to credit him with things he immediately returns credit to whichever company is being talked about. I've seen this dozens of times. He's not once tried to take public credit for the work of Tesla or SpaceX workers.