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Comment by ninetyninenine | Hacker News Reader

I mean he just caught a giant rocket with chopsticks so let him go all in.

SpaceX is doing ridiculously well, but that doesn't mean all of Musk's bets are equally smart. So far he seems to be terribly wrong on self-driving.

musk's track record of bets is 4 out of 6[0] - a pretty good one.

[0]: the successful bets: paypal, tesla, spacex, starlink. Failures: twitter, self-driving. To be determined: ai.

paypal was not his success. he didn't start it, he just got pulled into a merger, and he had to be forced out of the company before it could succeed.

He started X and the merged company was called Paypal / X for a time.

and then he launched a bunch of dumbass initiatives, and Peter Thiel power-played him out, and ditched "X".

his real victory was surviving long enough to make money from the merger and not get totally fleeced on the way out.

and given the number of Russians using Starlink, I suspect it's a matter of time before his clearance is revoked and the US FedGov backs away further from SpaceX. wouldn't be surprised if there are ITAR violations there, too...

People can and will get their hands on technology and just as before Musk will continue to turn it off when they’re revealed.

Are you alleging that Musk is conspiring to assist the Russians?

> So far he seems to be terribly wrong on self-driving.

Don't forget the colonisation of Mars. He's even more wrong on that one.

If he wants to make his 2026 Mars promise, he needs to be ready to go in the next month or so. I'm a bit sceptical.

On the other hand, if we shortly discover an asteroid on course to meet Earth within a concerning time frame or some other predictable disaster coming down the pike, they'll be a mass effort to take giant steps to ensure he and others are not wrong.

> some other predictable disaster coming down the pike

I mean, we have one of those right now (that we've known about since at least the 1980s) and ...

> they'll be a mass effort to take giant steps

That isn't happening. And climate change is an easy thing to deal with compared with the colonisation of Mars.

They’re doing well in spite of Musk, not because of him. Shotwell is running that company not him.

>CEO of Rocket Company named Gwynne Shotwell

That's an entry on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

if I've ever seen one

Lol everyone is thinking she's CEO when she's COO:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807408

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230320 also confuses the name/gender, Glenn vs. Gwynne

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39614912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38863528

Yeah, that's true for the incredible innovation in Neuralink and Paypal and OpenAI and Tesla, too. It's a total coincidence that Jeff Bezos and other billionaires fail.

Do you have any actual evidence of that, or is it something you like the idea of because it's difficult to accept that Musk is a real arsehole and total idiot about some things (e.g. steering wheels, divers), yet also a very successful engineer (yes) at other things (rockets, electric car platforms).

This tweet directly contradicts you:

https://x.com/lrocket/status/1845486565591798164

There's a simple rule, if Musk founded the company and it does well then it doesn't matter that he founded the company. (SpaceX)

However if Musk didn't found the company and it does well, then that's a very important thing. (Tesla)

Why would it matter whether he technically founded Tesla? He basically built it from scratch regardless.

Also What does that have to do with him (supposedly) being a talented engineer? He’s a brilliant strategist/visionary/CEO obviously but Cybertruck was a product of his engineering decisions then.. yeah.. probably he isn’t.

Cybertruck is outselling every EV sold by Ford, seems fine

Right, consumers are often stupid beyond belief and will buy an objectively worse product purely for prestige and signaling to other humans. It's that social part of the brain going off.

That doesn't change the fact the Cyber Truck is an inferior truck to just about any other truck in just about any metric. It's a testament to the sheer arrogance of Man and the failure of modern American education.

Faster than an F150-Lightning

Tighter turning than everyone

Faster charging than Rivian or F150, 94 miles gained in 15 mins vs 83 and 68

Best API obviously

Best suspension

Best ADAS

Lighter than both

Longer bed, larger cargo volume, higher payload and towing capacity than either

Looks like it’s designed by a not particularly talented three year old?

of course not everyone is bothered by that. All the water/environment related issues (I guess you can get the “optional” coating) and the absurd repair costs seem like a bigger issue.

> Tighter turning than everyone

Doesn’t the Hummer EV have a 25% smaller turning radius? Also a removable roof.

Not 25%, but yes, 11.34 vs 12.5, so 9% smaller

There are water/environment issues?

> very successful engineer

Do you have any evidence of him ever being one? I mean he’s an extremely successful CEO and decision maker which is almost infinitely more important than just being an engineer.

I mean was Jobs ever considered an “engineer”? And I’d bet he was significantly more involved in the design of Apple’s most successful products than Musk was in SpaceX (and possibly even Tesla if Cybertruck was the result of him going of the reins).

He gets down in the weeds to the engineering level… there’s plenty of evidence for this.

Nope. Not at all.

Go and watch the videos of him touring SpaceX. He's clearly involved in the engineering.

You just don't want to believe that because it complicates your view of him as a purely worthless arsehole. You can't accept that he's an arsehole and a skilled engineer (or project manager if you want to gatekeep "engineering").

> videos of him touring SpaceX

The marketing videos that he had made?

Imagine him coming up with the spaceship equivalent of the CyberTruck at SpaceX. Even Boeing would seem like being great at what they do at that point…

Nah. Everyday Astronaut youtube channel.

You read any biography of him any testimonials from people who've been with him. It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds. THATS why his companies are successful.

This is a fair and balanced view of him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=WYQxG4KEzvo

The video goes into criticism as much as it goes into praise. It's a very accurate portrayal of elon with journalistic integrity.

> It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds. THATS why his companies are successful.

What about the PayPal stories? Or those are all supposedly “not fair and balanced”?

> It's well known and obvious he gets into the weeds

That’s why the Cybetruck looks like it was draw by a 3 year old?

> THATS why his companies are successful.

Why? You don’t have to pretend you are an engineer to build an extremely successful company as CEO while having significant impact on the products it designs. Just look at Apple.

>What about the PayPal stories? Or those are all supposedly “not fair and balanced”?

What stories?

>That’s why the Cybetruck looks like it was draw by a 3 year old?

So? This doesn't serve to disprove my point. Elon gets into the weeds. Your opinion of it doesn't change the success of the company and the technology.

>Why? You don’t have to pretend you are an engineer to build an extremely successful company as CEO while having significant impact on the products it designs. Just look at Apple.

I never said anything about apple. I said that's why HIS companies are successful. There's plenty of reasons why other companies are successful.

It's a well known fact Elon Gets into the weeds of engineering and tech. Just watch the video.

> So far he seems to be terribly wrong on self-driving.

Like all breakthroughs, he will be terribly wrong right up to the point he isn’t (see the fail compilation video of failed Falcon9 landings)

You only fail when you give up.

Nothing that happens in the future can negate the fact that he promised autonomous driving would available in Telsas by now (actually long before now), and it isn't.

Tesla can never be the first to large-scale autonomous driving since Waymo is already delivering it. Sure, Tesla will probably deliver it eventually. Whether they can overtake Waymo's rollout is the open question.

Waymo is hardly large scale.

100,000 trips a week meets some reasonable definition of "large scale".

> Nothing that happens in the future can negate the fact that he promised autonomous driving would available in Telsas by now (actually long before now), and it isn't.

Absolutely, he is well known for setting extremely optimistic stretch goal timelines, and is almost always late. In virtually every case he is still years or decades before the competition, with autonomous driving being the biggest miss to date.

He certainly does deliver though.

Given that Tesla are currently making 2 million cars per year and have 5 million on the road, I think it extremely likely they will have by far the biggest autonomous fleet.

You're out of touch with reality. I'm not a fan of everything musk says but you're not clear about how ludicrous it is to catch a rocket with chopsticks. You're only going off your gut feeling from social media and popular opinion.

This is the reality. Musk made bets that have a lower chance of success then winning the lottery. If even one of the bets succeeds it means he's smarter than normal. That being said, Musk has succeeded in way more than one bet.

Right, and I'm not understanding how this means FSD doesn't currently suck. Because it does.

I'm sure Musk is smart, or at least ambitious, but that doesn't mean your Tesla is gonna be able to drive itself.

I never said that. I said "let him go all in."

No one's stopping him. We're just pointing out that some of the bets are clearly stupid.

and I'm pointing out that this guy made stupid bets and succeeded on an inordinate amount of those stupid bets.

> You're out of touch with reality. I'm not a fan of everything musk says but you're not clear about how ludicrous it is to catch a rocket with chopsticks. You're only going off your gut feeling from social media and popular opinion.

Not sure what you're getting at here. I just praised SpaceX, but you're acting like I downplayed its success.

Not without help.

https://i.redd.it/2reoopbklkud1.jpeg

Musk inspired and hired a lot of great engineers that made this all possible. His vision, passion and capital are crucial in this, but he dis not catch these himself, nor did he engineer any of the control systems to the detail needed to make this work, I'm sure.

I wonder how the mood is at SpaceX. I mean, those engineers see how he unsafe the production workers at Telsa have to work, they see how shit he's treating everyone at Twitter and basically sinking it, how long before someone the mood turns sour and we see an outflow to the competition?

It's right around the corner. The evidence that Musk is actually really dumb is riiiiight around the corner. And will continue to be, for a very long time.

Yeah, he's a very stable genius. Just like his very stable genius buddy...

The problem I see here is: what competition? There doesn't exactly seem to be any in the rocketry space. There's Boeing, but that place is a disaster right now. I guess ULA is still around, but they're not doing anything groundbreaking at all AFAICT, just using old rocket designs to launch some satellites. Where else can these people go?

Twitter people can go lots of places, both competing social networks, and also various other internet-related or software places. Tesla people can go to lots of different competing automakers. But I don't see anyplace nice for SpaceX people to go.

> what competition?

The list is actually pretty long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...

And that's not counting nation states.

Pencil pushing for pennies at Airbus/ArianeSpace is probably not that appealing.

Going to work for the Chinese or Russians? Well.. as long as you’re not planning to ever go back home.

There aren’t that many options for people who want to be a part of a team that actually accomplishes something significant.

You say that, but at least half a dozen of these companies in the linked wikipedia list, all western, launched rockets last year. And several more are on track to launch within the next. Rocketlab is a serious competitor with multiple spaceports, a rapid launch cadence, and reusability and next-generation launcher projects in the works. Blue Origin is supplying engines to ULA and seems almost ready to test New Glen. Firefly had a successful launch. Stoke is working on a resuability concept that's even more exciting than starship, and advancing steadily through testing flight capable hardware. The list goes on.

Rocketlab and others even have products which standardize the bus part of the sattellite or probe, so you just attach your science experiment or sensor.

I'm guessing the talent at SpaceX will leave and make their own company.

Plenty of of want-to-be competitors, but not so far with the amount of capital behind Musk. And space remains capital intensive, if not for hardware, then for people.

> what competition?

Shockley probably thought the same in early '57...

People at twitter seem to be very happy, major features like community notes are being shipped and having a huge impact on the platform and the company is much healthier after he removed the employees that weren’t doing anything.

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

Outflow to where? Boeing? Russia?

There's some new competitors, like Stoke, Relativity, Blue Origin, bunch more I'm forgetting. This sort of diaspora of talent with experience is good to have, if there is capital

LOL, Blue Origin is not new btw. But new to launching orbital rockets

Not to mention his politics. I see space exploration as progress, which doesn't really mesh with conservative, backward politics.

He pushed for it and is instrumental in the design. Musk is not just a ceo.

His track record for being behind all these mindblowing innovations is off the record, but we don't like his face, so he doesn't deserve any credit for it!

For any comment making fun of elon’s face, I’ll find you twenty criticizing more substantive traits.

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