Like Cybertruck?
Tesla Semi?
Full self driving in 2017?
Robotic snake to automatically plug into your car and charge it?
Dojo?
Hyperloop?
Solar roofs?
Battery Swap?
Dogecoin?
Tesla Roadster?
Twitter?
Here are some counter-examples:
* A new car company making a new kind of vehicle. The first time I heard he wanted to build a new car company that would sell EVs, I dismissed it as crazy. Tesla now sells close to 2M vehicles a year, roughly comparable to BMW.
* A new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
* A new rocket company. The first time I heard about SpaceX's early days I dismissed it as crazy. SpaceX now sends 10x more cargo to orbit than everyone else, public and private, combined.
* A new satellite-Internet service. Prior to Starlink, every previous attempt to offer cheap and reliable Internet service via satellite had gone bankrupt.
* A new brain-machine interface. The first time I heard about Neuralink I dismissed it as "way too early." The company just showed a disabled man using a computer with his thoughts.
* The latest beta version of the self-driving software (FSD Beta >= 12.3.6). I've tested it and I am... impressed. Even though it happened much later than Musk predicted. Here's what it's like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOs1Gum2M
* Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Some things you mention failed, and the jury is still out on Cybertruck, Roadster, Solar Roof, and X (Twitter).
But the track record is there.
But I think your benefit of the doubt in his judgement is similarly misguided.
What I think is that he has been very adept in having a bold vision, using his showmanship to get the funding, talent, and visibility to get it off the ground, and then leveraging that into a feedback loop that bolsters his credibility for the next bold vision. I think it's very admirable that he has executed that playbook so well for so long! (And I think it's good for society that Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and Neuralink exist, and I certainly appreciate his role in that.)
But I think his track record for things that aren't part of that playbook is pretty bad. Buying Twitter was not a bold vision, it was dumb very-online pettiness. And there's now a history of specific business decisions that seem to come directly from him, which I think have just been bad. Not bold visionary risks that didn't work out, just foreseeable bad outcomes from bad, impulsive, ego-driven decisions.
So sure, next time he's spinning up something visionary in AI or biotech or energy or who-knows-what, I'll pay attention and suspend my disbelief. But on the boring day to day executive decision making that every company has to do, I think he has earned less credibility than most (maybe all) leaders of businesses of similar scale.
But I also think that it is mostly in the last few years (after your example) that his judgement has become especially questionable. There are examples from earlier on that I think can now be seen as a through line to where he's ended up today, but I think it is only in the last few years - basically, as his social media involvement has increasingly become a distraction - that he seems (to me) to have lost the plot with respect to managing his companies day to day. And I'm also not saying that every decision he makes is bad, but to me I think the recent track record is bad enough that these kinds of decisions deserve to be evaluated on their own, rather than given the benefit of the doubt.
Hmm... That's a reasonable conclusion. You could be right.
I'll be a bit more humble and admit that there's a lot I don't know, so for me, the jury is out.
Things may implode at Tesla, or maybe the company will grow 10x. I wouldn't be surprised either way!
Sorry if this turned out to just be a semantic point about word choice. I originally thought that maybe it wasn't, that maybe there's something real here about what it means to have a humble view, but now I think maybe you just did mean something more like "deferential", in which case this was a pointless comment and I apologize :).
That phrase has a precise meaning:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20jury%20is%2...
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> But... I'm going to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, because ...
I think we're both agreeing that "the jury is out", but disagreeing about which side of the question that jury is deciding should be the one with the "presumption of innocence" :)
And because I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. That's all "benefit of the doubt" means. "I don't know one way or the other, but this guy has a pretty good track record, so until I know more I won't assume anything bad."
Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel came up with that idea. Elon Musk's contribution was suing them so that he can be called a founder.
> Like a new network of EV charging stations. The first time I heard about it I thought the company would never recoup the capital cost.
You're literally commenting on an article where the ENTIRE supercharging team was just fired, presumably to save money at Tesla.
> Like Dojo, which is now online. There's a picture of it on the last quarterly deck: https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/... -- though I don't know if it will be able to keep up with Nvidia's offerings, which are always improving.
Dojo is a 7nm design while NVidia's is a 3nm design. It won't keep up at all, despite costing Tesla likely a $Billion+ to produce (between $100M mask costs, large software teams working for multiple years, etc. etc. it wouldn't surprise me to see Dojo's total cost be well in excess of a $Billion).
Oh I'm in shock about that. As I wrote above, "WTF?"
Whatever it is Musk is trying to do at Tesla, I don't get it.
But given his track record, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Apparently there was an increased credit available for EVs that could be fully charged in under x-time and by claiming that they could battery swap tesla got a bunch of extra money.
It was when he tried to pass that one off with a straight face that drove the final nail into the coffin containing any delusions I may have entertained about Elon's competence.
SpaceX and Tesla are very likely his biggest successes, by all measures of the word. The amount of success these obtained easily tower over the failures by several orders of magnitude.
From a trend perspective, he's disrupting continuities that don't seem rational to disrupt and shouldn't prevent him from moonshot-ing separately.
Tesla and SpaceX are very admirable businesses that Musk deserves a lot of credit for, I'm totally with you there. But that someone made good decisions at one point in time does not imply that decisions made later are also good.
Businesses change, people change, the world changes.
He’s actively sinking Tesla and that’s his cash cow.
I listed off the big stuff I can remember above. I'll go add "Alien Dreadnaught" and full automation of the Model 3 as another failure. Turns out that humans are way better than machines for the assembly line still, even today.
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So far, the best thing for Tesla so far has been Elon Musk losing focus and thinking about Twitter for a few years instead of sending Tesla down another $inkhole to lose another $billion on an insane, underdeveloped idea.
Well, aside from Optimus I guess.
They didn't commercialize it because no one else was capable of making one and it was too much work for one person to mass produce