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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

I assume that the relevance is that Tesla's claims don't count for much until they actually deliver. Elon Musk has a long history of misleading people about Tesla. Whether it's embellishment, overestimation of what they can accomplish, or outright lies is up for debate, but the fact remains that they habitually over-promise and under-deliver. I consider him and his companies to be completely untrustworthy. He could be selling water in the desert and I still would never buy another thing from him.

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Do you mean habitually under-deliver with things like making the crazy claim that they will grow at 50% CAGR?

https://twitter.com/ICannot_Enough/status/161837414087616512...

> Elon Musk has a long history of misleading people about Tesla. Whether it's embellishment, overestimation of what they can accomplish, or outright lies is up for debate, but the fact remains that they habitually over-promise and under-deliver.

I think that everyone should look on his "forward looking statements" with a higher than normal degree of skepticism. He does seem to pull off a lot of outlandish stuff, though, so it doesn't pay to be too skeptical.

> I consider him and his companies to be completely untrustworthy. He could be selling water in the desert and I still would never buy another thing from him.

I don't think that that same level of skepticism is warranted towards his statements about what is true today. But then again, I haven't been following him very closely, so maybe his pant are constantly on fire.

Reading the original post, I assumed all of the things listed (except for one) are things that has been done already and not just promised by Elon. Buy maybe I’m wrong.

The majority of Teslas being sold right now use lithium iron phosphate batteries already. This isn't just some future plan, it's already largely implemented.

He's literally already delivered motors without rare earth elements (for other purposes) in production Teslas for nearly a decade now. He's already done what he's said he's going to do, he's just going to do it more.

This is about as silly as people who think he’s the messiah. He’s clearly over promised on many things, but he’s also delivered on a lot.

And spacex motto is turning the impossible into late, so he’s being pretty honest about his goals being off. What’s the issue? Why do you hate him so much?

Some people call that fraud

If missing a forecast was illegal then literally every executive in the world would be in jail. Elon isn't especially bad at forecasting, in fact he may be much better than average, but it's hyper focused on every time. Every time Larry Ellison at Oracle misses a forecast it doesn't become a talking point that's repeated literally a billion times every time someone mentions a computer.

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