Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

> which aren't to be trusted

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?

View on HN

> With both companies having an almost absurdly good track record of execution.

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.)

Every headline here is missing the nuance and misdescribing the comments out of context. Or removing the caveats that he himself put on the comment. When people preface things with "I think", or "probably" or "possibly" or "good chance" you can't just suddenly turn it around and say they were predicting the future with a crystal ball. This happens so much with Elon's comments it's frankly extremely tiring.

And what, you created a brand new account just to post this nonsense again? I've seen this before.

Quite a few of these happened in the context of earnings calls or other communications to investors. If the guy in charge of these companies keeps making statements about their future performance and then they repeatedly miss the mark, that's a valid thing to criticize and an "I think" prefix doesn't absolve him.

Earnings calls are forward looking statements and often turn out to be incorrect predictions, and no, most of these were not in earnings calls because only Tesla has earnings calls. They're also written in bad context, for example the first line about 500k in 2018, wasn't made in 2018.

Also, when it's something that literally no company has ever done before, being off by a lot is expected.

It's one thing to be off by, say, 5%. It's another thing to be years or two orders of magnitude off. I'm not expecting Musk to be perfect, I'm expecting him to be reasonably close with his predictions.

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.

> 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.

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.

Before you pull out the pitchforks, look at what I said. I said his numbers weren't to be trusted. Elon has a well documented track record of saying X will be ready by Y date and cost Z amount, and all those numbers be wrong.

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

Sure, you're not wrong on general principle but Starship is literally going to attempt an orbital launch in a couple weeks (they just did a full test fire), and we don't need to take anyone's promises to check the numbers.

If it succeeds, New Glenn is going to be superfluous and starting at a massive timing disadvantage.

I understood your comment more as Starship wont happen rather then it will be late.

> Comments on twitter?

Yes. Mostly his.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com