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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

Because the arrogance of modern Silicon Valley thinking is that "We are better, in every possible way, than older engineers, because we know code." And Elon Musk seems very, very prone to this sort of thinking (or, at least, his companies do, and I think it comes from him).

One example of many is the weird conversations he was having about sonic velocity robots and "lights out dreadnaught" sort of auto factories, which just about every other automaker has been trying on and off since the 80s, and has worked out that it doesn't work. So Tesla's modern lines, after quite a bit of fooling around with that sort of rubbish, look just like everyone else's lines, because as soon as you have humans in the loop for the things robots can't do well, you may as well run the line at human speeds.

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I don’t personally agree with a lot of what Musk says or does, but I do commend him for his propensity towards (literal and figurative) moonshots in the name of innovation. This is a refreshing take when most startups have a goal to exit in X number of years and the previously agile, lean, and innovative company becomes beholden to showing quarterly returns the moment they have the capital available to them to drive something truly innovative.

Musk succeeded where his companies tried to disrupt extremely moribund or set in their ways industries.

SpaceX disrupted the space launch industry, which had not advanced at all since the 1970s. SpaceX really just picked up and ran with the idea of vertical landing reusable rockets, which was not new. Werner von Braun was exploring it for Saturn V back in the 60s, and Lockheed finally did it at prototype scale with the DC-X in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o (You can see at the end that the DC-X even does the same "hover slam" maneuver as Falcon 9 to land with maximum propellant efficiency.)

Tesla was similar. Auto manufacture itself isn't moribund, but old school auto makers always hated EVs and resisted doing anything serious with them. Tesla's rise was a classic exploitation of the innovators' dilemma by calling them on this and forcing their hand. Now that some are embracing EVs, Tesla is facing increasingly stiff competition but has at least carved out a brand.

Musk has not been particularly successful competing in less moribund industries. The Boring Company is kind of a flop. Neuralink seems questionable so far, to say the least. The Hyperloop, even if it worked, wouldn't be competitive at all with high speed rail on cost. It'd be faster and in theory more energy efficient but nowhere near enough to compensate for the added capital cost or complexity.

Now if Musk had created, say, a rail transport division of Tesla he could have absolutely disrupted rail transport which is another fairly sluggish moribund industry. Imagine modern unmanned trains (FSD on rails is WAY easier than on roads) with batteries to allow them to span un-powered sections of track and recharge on sections with third rail or overhead catenary wires. But that would have been a threat to the car market. Innovators' dilemma anyone?

My point is that Musk isn't superman... he just picked industries that were ripe for disruption and built teams that executed well enough to succeed.

Of his companies SpaceX is by far the most impressive in its own right. What Tesla did could have been done much much better by a "legacy" car maker if they'd been willing to disrupt their ICE business. Nissan actually beat Tesla to market with an affordable mass market electric (the Leaf) but didn't put as much heart into it. The result was okay but not nearly as cool as what Tesla did, especially in Tesla's glory days. (I own a Leaf and have no complaints, but it's not sexy.)

Full self driving trains have been in servics for 20 years. nothing to innovate there

There are advantages to not trusting the prevailing industry wisdom and trying things out on your own.

like with Tesla they're ahead of other companies in multiple ways, but still behind in some aspects as well.

They've got a somewhat unreliable EV platform (the battery and drivetrain are fine, the rest of the car is fiddly at best), and have been instrumental in driving the auto industry away from "interfaces that work while driving" to "interfaces that assume self driving will happen any year now" in the past decade (I cannot stand touch screens while driving - they're an awful, awful interface for anything involving cars or airplanes).

And it's fine to not trust prevailing wisdom, but when you don't even bother trying to learn from them because "they're dumb dinosaur companies that don't even know code" (which has utterly nothing to do with reality), re-learning the same lessons yourself isn't some amazing foresight. It's simply a stupid waste of resources.

Yeah, and because of that, today we have mainstream electric cars, an Earth blanketed with Internet from space, and the cheapest spacelift cost ever achieved.

Any one of these would have cemented him as a premier industrialist.

In the end, there's legions of Internet commenters who complain about Elon Musk in between complaining about their bosses or complain about Google and Facebook or what have you. And then there's this guy doing things successfully.

The Silicon Valley attitude that I love is that when someone tells you "that's not going to work", you just go ahead and do it if you have conviction. After all, you're only sacrificing your own self.

Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs. He was on the early wave of it, yes, but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before, and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time. It would have happened one way or another.

Yes, we've ruined astronomy with a ton of LEO satellites, but we've got some internet in exchange (I'm rural, I have it, I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay, and how inconsistent it is - on some days, it's quite good, on other days it's more or less dialup grade).

And we'll see how that lift capacity works. Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!

I've done computer security a bit too long, I think.

other companies had EVs out at the same time

Who? And how did they mainstream EVs more than Tesla? Fisker was in the market early, but didn’t mainstream EVs. GM was in way early, but probably held the market back.

Honestly, Musk’s innovation with Tesla has nothing to do with the damn cars. He made sure they build a supercharging network to answer the main complaint. That worked.

That was important, maybe the most important. But bringing down the price was also key to mainstreaming, also making attractive cars. Eco cars tended be in the ugly for a cause style, like the Prius.

> but other companies had EVs out at the same time or before

Making EV mainstream is about more then a big company throwing a few batteries into an existing car platform. It was about shifting perceptions, starting a public conversation and making people actual demand EVs. And making EV profitable.

> and the price drop in lithium was obvious to everyone who was paying attention at the time.

Ah that's why Tesla is such a small an insignificant company now, because everybody else knew everything. Brilliant logic.

> It would have happened one way or another.

That is literally what Musk has said for 20 years. Its gone happen anyway, Tesla is about making it happen faster. And his building of the Roaster, Model S were clearly huge steps. Building the Gigafactory Nevada was a huge signal, and lead to a huge amount of investment all threw the supply chains, and lots of companies thinking bigger. The biggest European battery maker is people who helped build Giga Nevada and then went and started a new battery company in Europe.

The Model 3 reaching profitability was a absolutely huge signal in the automotive industry. Tesla building it with 20%+ margin was a literal bomb in the industry. Until that point it was almost universally believed that high volume EV were just not gone be possible. After that pretty much all car companies accelerated their EV strategies.

> Yes, we've ruined astronomy

How this nonsense claim gets repeated over and over again is just beyond me. Anybody who still argues this is just willfully ignorant at this point.

> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers

And more then 2 million people disagree with you and that number is growing.

> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome

The inherent permission in your worldview is just sad and depressing. Everything bad must happen even when most experts agree it wont happen.

> It would have happened one way or another.

This is exactly why the stated goal of Tesla is to accelerate the advent of electric cars - in other words, make it happen a lot sooner than it otherwise would have.

I personally think making internet available to people who don't have it is far more important than people who do have home internet complaining about their view of the stars during their camping trip.

China and others have done far, far more to contribute to space junk than SpaceX has.

> Musk was not instrumental in mainstream EVs.

Tesla absolutely was and still is. They dominate the market.

> on other days it's more or less dialup grade

You’ve either got bad hardware or you’ve never used dialup. Even in congestion on the RV product (lower priority than residential) I’ve only seen down to 20mbps. That’s 400x dialup.

> I'm quite honestly not impressed with what it delivers for how much I pay

Please cancel! I could use the capacity when I’m out in the boondocks.

> Everyone will continue insisting that Kessler Syndrome Won't Possibly Happen until about a year after it's happened, at which point, welp. It was fun while it lasted!

LEO natural decay means a royal fuckup locks out <10 years.

If you have any actual meaningful analysis to add on why these constellations are Kessler risks, please notify the space force! Everyone involved seems to think it’s not a problem so you should probably correct them.

What you call arrogance I call enthusiasm, industrialism and hope for a better future. Your attitude, quite frankly, sucks.

I mean, I'll admit I've watched the tech industry promise the moon and deliver a user-surveilling mud pie a few too many times to particularly care for their hype anymore.

It's 2023. I'd like to buy a car, TV, phone, or computer that isn't, by default, "slurping as much behavioral data as it thinks it can possibly get away with, routed out whatever connection it can find, to be sold to others who want to influence my thinking." It's hard to find.

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