Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

If a CEO lies all the time, and investors make investments because of it, will that not turn out to become a problem for the CEO?

View on HN

Well lets take Tesla, FSD and Elon as an example were a judge just ruled[0] that it's normal corporate puffery and not lies.

[0] https://norcalrecord.com/stories/664710402-judge-tosses-clas...

Elons lies are way different. He mostly is just optimistic about time frames. Since Sam Altman and ChatGPT became mainstream the narrative is about the literal end of the world and OpenAI, and their influencer army, has made doomerism their entire marketing strategy.

When you're taking in money it's not blind optimism. They sold gullible people a feature that was promised to be delivered in the near future. Ten years later it's clearly all a fraud.

> He mostly is just optimistic about time frames

Perhaps if you have a selective memory. There's plenty of collections of straight-up set-in-stone falsehoods on the internet to find, if you're interested.

The 5th circuit's loose attitude about deception is why all Elon's Xs live in Texas, or will soon.

It's not trivial. "Mere puffery" has netted Tesla about $1B in FSD revenue.

It seems that continuously promising something is X weeks/months/years away is seen as optimism and belief, not blatant disregard for facts.

I'm sure the defence is always, "but if we just had a bit more money, we would've got it done"

Elizabeth Holmes would like a referral to lawyer who could make that case.

I think her end product was too clearly defined for anything she was doing to be passed as progress. I don't think you could make the case for her.

You can make a case that partial self driving is a route to FSD, the ISS is en route to Mars and (you can make a potentially slightly less compelling case) LLMs are on the way to AGI.

No one can make a case that lady was en route to the tech she promised

I think she thought it was going to work for a while. The problem was when she got to the point of realizing it wouldn't and had the chance to stop there, she doubled down. That's why she's in prison today.

Elizabeth Holmes screwed up by telling the wrong lies and also having the wrong chromosomes. She should've called some cave rescuers pedophiles, then maybe people would've respected her.

There is a line. Forging documents is one of them.

Holmes, Balwani and co lied about their current technology, which is a step beyond making overly optimistic future projections. They claimed to have their own technology when they were actually using their competitor’s machines with diluted blood samples.

That’s not what happened to Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes

Well I didn't say everyone could pull it off successfully

I think the more abstract and less defined the end goal is, the easier it is to make everything look like progress.

The blood testing lady was a pass/fail really. FSD/AGI are things where you can make anything look like a milestone. Same with SpaceX going to Mars.

They made medical claims. That's a very bad idea if you aren't 100% sure

Forget that. Pasting logos of big-named companies on forged documents. I mean, seriously?

Well i think this conversation chain has played out multiple times all the way spanning back to at least Ben Edison. Often times nothing is certain in a business where you need to take a chance trying to bring an imagined idea into fruition with millions of investor money.

Ceos are more often come from marketing backgrounds than other disciplines for the very reason they have to sell stakeholders, employees, investors on the possibilities. If a ceos myth making turns out to be a lie 50 to 80 percent of the time then hes still a success as with Edison, Musk, Jobs, and now Altman.

But i think AI ceos seem to be imagining and peddling wilder fancier myths than the average. If AI technology pans out then i dont feel theyre unwarranted. I think theres enough justification but im biased and have been doing AI for 10 years.

To ur question, If a ceos lies dont accidently turn true eventually as with the case of Holmes then yes its a big problem.

Come now, it's only lying when poor people do it, don'tcha know.

depends which investors lose money

This is the Tesla Autopilot playbook, which seems to continue to work decently for that particular CEO

The difference between Tesla and Nikola is that some false claims matter more than others: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/14/1129248846/nikola-founder-ele...

Given Altman seems to be extremely vague about exact timelines and mainly gives vibes, he's probably doing fine. Especially as half the stuff he says is, essentially, to lower expectations rather than to raise them.

I'm not sure about the decency of it.

I remember all the articles praising the facade of a super-genius. It's a stark contrast to today.

People write about his trouble or his latest outburst like they would a neighborh's troubled kid. There's very little decency in watching people sink like that.

What's left after reality reassesserts itself, after the distortion field is gone? Mostly slow decline. Never to reach that high again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com